RSS Press releases

The Education and Learning Committee of Dumfries & Galloway Council met on 14 September, and agreed a report on the Education Annual Report and Improvement Plan.

The report highlights many positives of how the service has performed over the reporting period (2022/23). Some of those highlights include:

• Children and young people have good experiences in our schools and early years establishments and have good outcomes from their learning.
• Through ongoing reflection and self-evaluation at every level within the system, we know there are areas that can be improved within and across our settings. The improvement agenda is underpinned by an expectation that all establishments have a systematic approach to quality assurance and moderation, data analysis, evaluating and improving the quality of learning experiences and promoting stakeholder involvement as key strategies in improving learning, raising attainment, and narrowing the poverty related attainment gap.
• During this reporting period, Schools and Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) settings have worked to address, tackle, and find solutions for young learners who missed out on vital Early Years experiences during the pandemic, those who have and continue to face trauma and barriers to learning in their lives and children and young people who are impacted by poverty.

Within the school environment itself, many initiatives and projects have been established and continue to be successful for our children and young people, including:

• The Counselling in Schools project was set up by an implementation team from Educational Psychology and Youth Work and continues to be overseen by both services.
• Educational Psychology Service has offered a telephone consultation service for parents of children not already known to the service. 163 consultations have taken place since 2021, 84 of these in session 22/23.
• The number of places offered for Instrumental Music rose from 800 pupils in 2021/22 session to 1,774 in 2022/23.
• Group music making resumed this session with D&G Wind Band, Youth Orchestra, Youth Jazz Band, Regional Youth Choir, Open Mic sessions, Percussion Ensembles and many more groups and bands supported and led by IMS instructors in schools.

Members of the Education and Learning Committee were also given data as part of the report on HMIE inspection statistics, with 19 school and nursery inspections taking place, 17 of which have had the results published to date.

Chair of Education and Learning Committee, Cllr Richard Brodie welcomed the report.  He said:

“This is a very comprehensive report that has an abundance of positives contained within it. It provides a great summary of the sheer size of the directorate, and the number of services that the committee is responsible for overseeing. It’s an open and transparent report that provides information on not only on what has gone well, but also on streams that we need to, and will, improve in.”

Vice Chair of the Committee, Cllr Maureen Johnstone commented:

“The report and improvement plan gives us a real flavour of how the Covid-19 pandemic really affected our learners and staff. We continue to recover from this, both in terms of offers, opportunities and results. I’d like to thank the staff within the entire directorate for their continuous work in doing the very best they can, to ensure our Council continues to achieve positive outcomes for our children and young people across D&G.”