I have a couple of points to make, the first of which is about the broad general education. It is important to say that my local authority has significant staffing issues. That has an impact on the broad general education, because, when a school does not have enough staff, it is inevitable that the staff that it has will be diverted to the national 4 and 5 classes—the senior phase classes.
My second point relates to some preparation that I did for today’s meeting. I did a bit of analysis on subject uptake and the numbers and percentages involved. Aberdeenshire Council has seen no downturn in the take-up of the subjects that Liz Smith mentioned. The philosophy of the broad general education is for 10 or 12 subjects to be delivered to the S3 stage, where the youngster can potentially bank the information that they have learned and the progression that they have made, with a view to picking up those subjects at a later stage, rather than as a direct follow-on at S4.
Liz Smith made the argument that the reduction in the number of subjects that are available in S4 would have a direct impact on the output in terms of qualifications that are achieved. We have looked at the number of entries for qualifications in subjects such as French and art and design, where the point that Liz Smith made could be argued.
Between 2014 and 2018, the number of youngsters in Aberdeenshire who chose to do a national 5 in French went down to 408, but the numbers of young people who took higher French and advanced higher French went up. In higher French, the number of entries increased from 189 to 248, although the number of entries in German and Spanish went down. The figure for art and design increased from 212 to 239, which is an increase of 113 per cent on 2014.
What those figures tell me about my local authority is that, although there is the issue that Liz Smith described—that youngsters may be discouraged from taking those subjects in the initial part of the senior phase—when the curriculum is embraced in its totality, it appears that youngsters are not being disadvantaged. There is no apparent decrease in the opportunity for youngsters to take the subjects that they are looking to take.
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