I am busy racking my brains on the 2011 inquiry. I have been to the Parliament a few times. It was three years ago and we have moved forward since then. As Ms Shaw and Mr Rowley say, the evidence to support preventative spend is long term and there is still a lack—I do not think that Glasgow is different from anywhere else on this—of a coherent set of indicators that would allow us to be able to ask whether we are making a difference. Our work is very much focused on third sector, families and nurseries. We work very closely with our health colleagues, so there is shared learning there, because NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde goes across the council boundaries. That is how I know that East Renfrewshire is working along the same lines as us in terms of looking at family centres and the support that councils provide there.
In Glasgow, because of the scale of the challenge that we face, we work very much with the third sector, looking to see where we can maximise the support from the third sector, because it is much better placed than the statutory services to make an impact in local communities. It is more than just what happens inside the nursery—the work goes beyond the nursery doors. The nursery can be a catalyst and can pull partners together, but if we are going to achieve systemic long-term change, we need to look at how our communities function, how families are working and how we can support those families.
Although there is no coherent agreement, in the past three years we have undertaken a significant amount of research in partnership with the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, to look at longitudinal evidence of the differences that our interventions are making. As long ago as 2011, we started stretching the age range from the early years collaborative, which when it started was very focused on under-fives; we said from the outset in Glasgow that we needed to keep the age range as zero to eight, because our children continue to experience difficulties and families take time to build their capacity.
In terms of policy making, one of the challenges that Glasgow city faces—with our college partners—is that we build families’ resilience and confidence, help them with their literacy levels and signpost them on to employment and further training, but we are unable to get them to access college places because the funding focuses on 18 to 24-year-olds and some of our vulnerable parents are 25-plus. That has been particularly challenging. I sit on the Regional Board for Glasgow Colleges and that is an issue that we are looking at to see how we can assist.
I will go on to the business partnerships that Mr Rowley mentioned. Vocational education is a critical area for us. We have been making slow, steady progress in terms of positive destinations. The gains have been hard fought: we are taking little steps every year to improve and to close the gap on the national picture. In particular we have focused on raising expectations and aspirations and so our biggest gains have been around higher education, delivered in both colleges and universities: in 2013 we increased that by 2.5 per cent, when nationally it dropped by 0.6 per cent. That is significant for Glasgow and I was particularly proud of that.
We recognise that our business partnerships are absolutely critical. As an education service, we have spent a lot of time getting young people ready for businesses—looking at employability skills and so on. What we have not done well is get businesses ready for young people. In particular, we need to work with small and medium-sized enterprises—the majority of employers in Scotland—because it is a big decision for a small business to take on a young person and to understand and respond to that young person’s needs. This year’s challenge is to work in partnership with the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce to look at how we can work better with our small and medium-sized businesses as well as at the senior phase programmes to see whether we can build better pathways. That might be done not through traditional attainment measures such as highers, but through national certificate and higher national certificate pathways that would be delivered between schools, colleges and businesses so that young people start to get business experience—perhaps a day a week and moving forward—from a younger age.
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