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The final item on the agenda concerns a letter from the education and lifelong learning committee of the Scottish Youth Parliament, which wants to establish a relationship with this committee. I am open to suggestions, but I am inclined to suggest that the clerk and I, and possibly Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, the deputy convener, meet representatives of that committee and find out more precisely what it wants to do. We can then return to the committee with suggestions. Do members have any thoughts about the best approach?
I agree that it would be useful for you to meet representatives of the Youth Parliament. I am aware that the Executive and local authorities have been examining the whole area of how young people can engage in policy development, for example through youth forums or school councils. I would be interested to find out what the current thinking is on how young people are engaged in a broad sense so that, while recognising the importance of the Youth Parliament, we can examine the whole area of engagement with children and young people.
That is separate from the question of how we progress with the proposal before us.
I was making the point that I would not want us to engage only with the Youth Parliament. I think that the committee should be taking an interest in how young people are engaged with in a general sense. I am not suggesting that we hold an inquiry, but we might seek information from the Executive about what it thinks best practice is and the stage that things are at.
Some sort of toolkit was developed by the Executive, and it might be worth looking into that. We will return to that question in a few seconds.
I am pleased that the Youth Parliament has contacted us. I feel that, over the first four years of the Parliament, the Youth Parliament ran one way while the Scottish Parliament ran along beside it, with very little contact between the two. There did not seem to be much of an exchange of views.
One possibility might be to have an informal session with members of the Youth Parliament and with other people in the field. That might be on an issue of the Youth Parliament's choosing. We could explore a suitable format for that.
I agree with the suggestion that you and the deputy convener could meet representatives of the Youth Parliament. There are various things that we could suggest that would be beneficial to us. Once we have decided on our work programme—it is fairly well established at the moment—we should send a copy of it to the Youth Parliament's education and lifelong learning committee and ask it to make its views known on the subjects that we are dealing with. We would, of course, want it to work the other way, too. That committee's agenda will not necessarily be the same as ours, so it will be interesting to see what its priority issues are at the moment. It will be interesting to hear from members of that committee directly how they feel they can contribute and how they would like to liaise with us. I know that Sean Hanlon and many others were delegates to last week's Commonwealth education conference and spoke in the chamber.
Would it be fair to summarise the matter by saying that the committee is keen to have an effective interrelation with the Youth Parliament, and particularly with its education and lifelong learning committee? We will explore what is possible with them, taking on board Rhona Brankin's point about how wider engagement can be developed. Rhona, I think that you wanted us to write to the Executive about what it is doing on that at the moment.
Yes, but we need to think about more than just engaging with the Youth Parliament. We must consider ways of engaging with representatives of youth from right across Scotland. I am not saying that the Youth Parliament is not representative, but I know that there are other areas of youth engagement that we should not miss out.
Let us consider that with the clerks and bring the matter back to the committee in due course. There may be the possibility of an informal event of the kind that we have vaguely mooted, which might also answer some of our concerns.
I would like to ask a question about the timetable for stage 1 of the bill. Have we got a target date for a stage 1 debate?
Broadly, the objective is to complete our stage 1 report by January, with a view to having the parliamentary debate on stage 1 later in that month. The timetable that we are working to, with initial witnesses and then a revised list when we know who wants to give evidence and what their contributions are, should allow us to fit in reasonably well with that time scale. There will undoubtedly be the usual press towards the end, but that is the plan.
Will we get some feedback on potential witnesses at the next meeting?
I think that we have discussed that before, or at least circulated a draft programme, have we not?
Yes, and I think that the convener is suggesting that we have an item on the agenda for 19 November to discuss possible witnesses up to the end of the year.
That is right. We have agreed on the initial witnesses—the obvious people, if you like—from whom we are going to hear, but there may be other people whom we will want to add to that list once we have seen who submits written evidence and who approaches us about the matter. They may be representatives of smaller groups, or individuals, but we can make a final decision on those later witnesses once we know exactly what the story is. The meeting on 19 November is designed to come just after the end of the advertisement period for evidence on the bill.
Meeting closed at 12:18.
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