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Chamber and committees

Official Report: search what was said in Parliament

The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.  

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Dates of parliamentary sessions
  1. Session 1: 12 May 1999 to 31 March 2003
  2. Session 2: 7 May 2003 to 2 April 2007
  3. Session 3: 9 May 2007 to 22 March 2011
  4. Session 4: 11 May 2011 to 23 March 2016
  5. Session 5: 12 May 2016 to 5 May 2021
  6. Current session: 12 May 2021 to 18 June 2025
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Displaying 1366 contributions

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Education, Children and Young People Committee

“Higher History Review 2024”

Meeting date: 22 January 2025

Miles Briggs

In your experience, has this happened in other representative volunteer organisations for other subjects? Are you the canary in the mine, and is it the collapse in the results that have identified the issue and created this conversation? An adversarial culture has been allowed to develop.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

“Higher History Review 2024”

Meeting date: 22 January 2025

Miles Briggs

Publication of the survey might present more evidence on the issue, if it was part of the questioning that you took up with your fellow teachers.

What you have said today is quite depressing. This episode has been depressing. I cannot imagine what it is doing to motivation, apart from making people not want to be markers or have a positive relationship with the SQA. I hope that the Education (Scotland) Bill’s direction of travel can rebuild that confidence.

Have the Scottish Government and SQA listened to your concerns? From what you have outlined, it does not feel like that; it feels more like they want to move on and want the issue to go away. I do not think that that is good enough. From the conversations that you have had and communications that you are having with SQA and Scottish Government, where do you think things now stand? I asked the cabinet secretary whether she would look at doing a wider investigation if other teachers came forward with issues, and she did not rule that out, but we have not seen any progress on that to date.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Scottish Youth Parliament

Meeting date: 22 January 2025

Miles Briggs

Maybe you could share those resources with us once they have been updated so that we can see for ourselves what is being provided.

I want to return to the questions that the convener and Willie Rennie asked. For all of us committee members, there is real cross-party concern about school environments in general and the violence that is often reported to us. What surveying has been done since the pandemic about where young people are at? How are you feeding into that?

I have had several meetings with different organisations that have described that there is a very challenging situation for many young people now—young people who are picking how long they want to stay at school and sometimes just wandering school corridors. Obviously, they are disaffected with their learning environment following the pandemic. How is your organisation capturing young people’s solutions for some of that problem that could feed into the work that we are doing and the plans that local authorities have been tasked with putting together?

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Scottish Youth Parliament

Meeting date: 22 January 2025

Miles Briggs

Has your organisation been involved in the development of the bill? It is likely to be presented to łÉČËżěĘÖ ahead of the summer recess.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

Scottish Youth Parliament

Meeting date: 22 January 2025

Miles Briggs

Most mental health charities are outlining that we need to try to get people off phones and social media. Given the Australian Government’s recent decision, has the SYP taken any view on that matter and the message of getting off devices? How do we facilitate that in Scotland?

Education, Children and Young People Committee

The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing

Meeting date: 15 January 2025

Miles Briggs

I will move on to projects that are working within a crisis intervention setting, and I want to ask specifically about informal kinship care settings and relationships. Like most members, I have dealt with cases in which police have brought a child to the child’s grandparent’s house—sometimes in the middle of the night—given the child to the grandparents and said, “This is your situation”, and those grandparents have found that they are not able to access services. Foster families have also told me that they often do not know what is going on at school, as it is the social worker is given that information. There is a lot of opportunity to improve not only information sharing but the support that is available.

What would you like to be done for kinship care families to improve the opportunity not just for information sharing but for access to support? That is the preventative model, as it ensures that the child is supported better. From your experience, what would that look like in the current setting? Linda Richards, I will bring you in, because you talked about family group decision making, which I thought was quite interesting.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing

Meeting date: 15 January 2025

Miles Briggs

You have touched on what I was leading the question towards, which was the support that is available and who can access it.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing

Meeting date: 15 January 2025

Miles Briggs

A number of us who sit on this committee took part in a Social Justice and Social Security Committee inquiry that involved a similar round-table discussion with kinship carers. I remember from that session interesting evidence on the stigma issue, suspicion of social work and concern that if carers did reach out for help, they would be judged and children would be taken off parents.

To what extent has that changed and what needs to change around that? Sometimes it is a difficult conversation, because a parent might be in receipt of the welfare support, and a kinship carer or grandparent, who will be thinking about the child, might not want to see that money taken from them. Is there a passporting issue when support follows the child specifically? What does that look like in your experience? I will bring Liz Nolan back in and then hand back to the convener.

Education, Children and Young People Committee

The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing

Meeting date: 15 January 2025

Miles Briggs

Thanks for joining us today, everybody. I want to follow on from some of those lines of questioning about preventative spend and preventative changes. Linda Richards touched on the no-wrong-door principle, but Fiona Bradford mentioned mums reaching out for help and that not being available—in other words, there was no door. Why have we not seen more change in that regard? Also, Claire McGuigan touched upon young people being able to self-refer to her service. I thought that that was quite an interesting point, too. Fiona Bradford, can you talk about when that door has not been there, meaning that there was no potential for preventive work to happen?

Education, Children and Young People Committee

The Promise: Whole Family Wellbeing

Meeting date: 15 January 2025

Miles Briggs

That is a good point, especially with regard to what has happened around carers and breaks.

Thank you, convener.