I’ve spent the last day-and-a-half at this year’s Scottish Learning Festival at the Scottish Conference and Exhibition Centre in Glasgow. The event was, as always, well organised with lots of interesting talks and workshops. I attended the Minister for Education’s keynote yesterday morning.

A recurring theme in her talk was the importance of raising attainment for all pupils, and closing the attainment gap between the well-off and the poor. She pointed out that she has raised the targets for universities to recruit students with deprived backgrounds. She emphasised her determination to “not let poverty hold kids back”.

I also attended a number of workshops. There was a particularly interesting one looking at improving attainment in Science by comparing Scotland with Finland and Estonia (both countries outperform Scotland in PISA). The speaker pointed out that the curriculum and pedagogy were similar in all of the countries but the school day was different (in Finland and Estonia each class lasted 1¼ hours with 15 minute breaks between classes), less formality (no school uniforms and everyone was referred to by their first names), more specialist teachers (of Science) from an early age, and better links between schools and universities.

Another interesting workshop related to Insight, the Scottish Government’s new benchmarking tool for schools.

Insight is a tool to measure school attainment. It measures attainment in a wider range of areas than previously — including vocational qualifications such as NPAs. That’s an important change. Previous measures only included successes in traditional school subjects but now NPAs, NCs and school-college link courses are included in a school’s attainment statistics.

My final workshop was about Cyber Badges, which have been piloted by Kyle Academy.

The presentation pointed out the links between the Badge, the new National Unit in Cyber Fundamentals, and the NPAs in this area. The speaker mentioned the co-operation between his school (Kyle Academy), Education Scotland, Police Scotland and SQA to create this new, important curriculum for schools.