Hansard

I will say something about that later. We will be piloting a lot of the work so that it can be fully tested before it is rolled out across the system. As I will indicate, I hope that we can do that in an orderly fashion, so that we do not simply dump pupils out of the school system into the college system—the work must be planned so that colleges can cope with the changes and create the capacity that they require to allow the change to happen.

Some schools might be able to provide the skills-for-work courses, but many courses will be delivered in partnership with colleges. We recognise that the success of the courses will depend on the quality of the progression routes that they present to pupils, on the extent to which the qualifications are respected in the labour market and the learning community, and on how they improve job prospects and career development.

Just as pupils who study geography or history at standard grade are not necessarily expected to go on to become geographers or historians, pupils who are undertake the new skills-for-work courses will have open choices to make about their future occupations. The availability of the qualifications will provide a wider range of activities that make up a balanced education. The courses will be valuable regardless of whether pupils wish to pursue a career in that subject area in later life. At their heart will be those core people skills that are relevant to all, such as communication and team working.

The courses will also seek to enable pupils to develop those skills and attitudes that are demanded by employers, such as an understanding of the workplace and the employee's responsibilities, self-evaluation skills, flexible approaches to problem solving, and confidence to set goals and to reflect and learn from experience. The courses will help to give pupils who want to progress in their chosen field a solid educational pathway to further learning, training or employment.

The SQA will develop the courses, with quality experiences at their core. To pick up Fiona Hyslop's question, I should say that the courses will be piloted during the academic years 2005-06 and 2006-07, in order to evaluate them with a view to rolling them out nationally in August 2007. The subjects for the first year of the pilot are early education and child care, construction craft skills, financial services, and sport and recreation.

I am delighted to say that the expressions of interest that the SQA has received from local authorities, schools and colleges that want to participate in the first pilots have well exceeded our expectations. We will ensure that the participating centres and candidates receive appropriate support in order to maximise the potential for a successful pilot. That means that the overall scale of the pilot has to be manageable and feasible.

Pupils of all abilities in S3 and above will be able to be considered for college learning opportunities. Those opportunities should be regarded as a positive choice to access specialist provision in colleges, not as an alternative provision for pupils with additional support needs or disaffected or disengaged pupils. We will not dump difficult pupils out of school and into college. Decisions on going to college must be in the interests of the individual child, not wholesale transfers from one setting to another.

Options will be made available to pupils on the basis of available capacity, as they are with all other students in further and higher education. Given that there is an inevitable limit on capacity, and to maintain colleges' central ethos, due regard will be paid to those pupils who will benefit most from activities that enhance their life chances.

Schools and colleges already have in place robust internal quality procedures to measure progress on quality issues. To further ensure high-quality experiences for pupils, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education will carry out evaluations of school and college contributions to the partnership activity within its inspection and review programmes. The SQA will develop the new vocational courses in close partnership with the education and training community. We will develop a new professional development award within the teaching qualification in further education professional development for the teaching of pupils under 16 years of age.

By the summer, HMIE will publish a self-evaluation guide in its "How good is our school?" series on school and college partnerships. Also, by October of this year, we will establish a working group to consider matters concerning the qualifications of non-schoolteachers who teach pupils.

I recognise and commend the innovative activities that colleges have undertaken in recent years to satisfy local demand from schools. We need to build on the good practice that currently exists. Partnership with schools is an essential and significant part of colleges' work, but it is—and will remain—a minority activity for colleges. Colleges are predominantly for adult students, as their delivery of learning reflects. The distinctive contribution that colleges make to pupils' education arises from their role as centres of voluntary learning for adults. It is therefore essential to the success of partnership working that that ethos is not altered by the changes that we are making. Colleges' partnership work with schools is a priority for the further education sector that sits alongside its other priorities.

We recognise that school-college activity is supplementary to the education that is delivered by schools. It will therefore be financed separately from existing funding for schools. We will continue to fund the Scottish Further Education Funding Council and its successor body as the primary source of funding for college courses for school pupils. We are investing substantial resources to increase and enhance school-college activities and we will make available more than £41.5 million in the financial years 2005-06 and 2007-08 to implement our strategy. That is in addition to the resources—about £19 million in 2003-04—that colleges already devote to pupils' learning. Among other things, the funding will support more pupils benefiting from college learning; stable funding arrangements that do not disadvantage colleges in providing courses to pupils; training for college staff; college activity to implement the Education (Additional Support for Learning) (Scotland) Act 2004; and enhanced careers advice to inform pupils of school-college options.

Presiding Officer, I am conscious that time is moving on, so I will move to my conclusion. The purpose of the initiative is to increase and enhance opportunities for young people across Scotland, to give them clear and new choices, to tailor learning to suit individual students, to offer more choice to pupils and to ease pupils' transitions into further learning, training or employment. I commend the strategy to the Parliament. We intend to accept the Conservatives' amendment—much to their surprise, I suspect.

I move,

That the Parliament welcomes Lifelong Partners, the Scottish Executive's strategy for school and college partnership to increase and enhance further vocational and other specialist opportunities for S3 pupils and above to access high quality educational experiences and gain full recognition for their learning with colleges; acknowledges that further education colleges, as principally centres of voluntary learning for adults, play an important role in helping schools realise the potential of young people; supports the growth in college learning opportunities for pupils outlined in the Executive's strategy, and recognises that colleges' partnership work with schools is a priority for the further education sector.