Chamber and committees

We will move on. We have supplementaries from Laura Moodie and Patricia Gibson, and then we will move on to Angela Ross’s questions.

Supporting our children and young people to thrive should not begin and end at the classroom. Whether it is through providing nutritious school meals, helping families to afford school uniforms or the bookbug programme, what is the cabinet secretary’s assessment of the wider support for increasing access to learning and improving outcomes?

To ask the Scottish Government how it will ensure that women and girls in rural and coastal communities who experience domestic abuse and gender-based violence have equal access to specialist support and protection, including through the criminal justice system. (S7O-00223)

The Parliament heard evidence that Grampian Women’s Aid workers had to make up to 60 calls to find one legal aid solicitor for a woman who was experiencing domestic abuse. For a woman who is already in crisis, that is another barrier and another delay to accessing justice. With the Government consulting on legal aid reforms, how will the cabinet secretary ensure that women who are experiencing domestic abuse can access timely legal advice and representation regardless of where they live?

I initially wanted to speak in this debate because, like many women, unfortunately, I have experienced male violence. However, over the past week, as I reflected on my contribution, my thoughts kept returning not to my experience but to my children—my daughter and five sons. I kept thinking, “Five boys—it’s a lot. It’s a big responsibility.” So I thought, “Why don’t I speak to them?”

Therefore, the following speech is inspired by the conversations that I had with my sons. I have watched them grow up in a world that has changed profoundly during my 35 years as a mother. My youngest son is now a teenager who is growing up in a completely different environment from the one that my daughter entered in 1991 when there was no TikTok, no algorithm deciding what a young person would see next, and no manosphere influencer who could speak directly to a device in the palm of my son’s hand. How do we exert our influence in a world where competing influence has become big business?

If we are serious about prevention, we cannot just give a boy a list of things that he must never do and hope that that list survives whatever the world throws at him next. We must go much deeper than that. We must nurture a moral instinct so that empathy, respect, equality and self-control become a part of who that young boy is and so that, whichever voices try to pull him in another direction, they cannot compete against the strength of his own integrated values.

We can be unequivocal that male violence against women is a male problem without telling every boy that he is a problem. That distinction matters. If what boys hear from society is simply, “You’re dangerous,” “You’re a suspect,” and “You need to be controlled,” I do not believe that that will build empathy or healthy masculinity. For a boy who is already angry, isolated or looking for somewhere to belong, it could actually drive them towards the online voices that we are trying to guide them away from.

We need to show them what good, healthy masculinity looks like. Strength is not controlling somebody else; it is being able to control yourself. Confidence is not entitlement; it is being secure enough in yourself to respect somebody else’s choices. Courage is not going along with your friends when they cross a line; it is being the one who challenges them. And being emotional or vulnerable is not weakness; it is being brave enough to be honest about how you feel.

I do not want us to approach boys as though somewhere inside every one of them there is a dangerous man waiting to emerge if we fail him. The deeper form of prevention is not a young man thinking, “I shouldn’t do that because I might get in trouble”; It is something in his core that says, “I couldn’t do that, because it would violate who I am.” That is where we should be aiming to be.

We need all men—fathers, brothers, youth workers, First Ministers, footballers, musicians, actors, men who have status in the eyes of our boys, and men whom boys admire—to make respect something aspirational. Men, know that, for better or worse, you are the examples.

There needs to be full accountability. A man who abuses, controls, assaults or terrorises a woman is responsible for what he does—full stop. Anger does not excuse it and no experience in a man’s life gives him the right to make a woman terrified for hers. If we are serious about prevention, our ambition cannot begin when a woman has already been assaulted or killed; there must be a social cost to misogyny long before there is a criminal justice cost.

For far too long, women have been expected to adapt ourselves around male violence. We think about how we get home, how we reject a man, whether we should answer back, whether we might make him angry, whether it is safe to leave and whether it is safe to stay. Women cannot simply be handed another safety strategy and told to manage the risk better. Society has to do the work further upstream. That is why I welcome the motion’s focus on prevention, challenging attitudes and collective leadership.

Men must carry much more of the responsibility for changing that culture, because men have enormous power to shape what boys learn about women, relationships and what it means to be a man. We have spent generations teaching girls how to navigate that danger; surely, now, our ambition must be to change what creates the danger in the first place.

Do not make boys afraid of what they might become; show them something that is worth becoming. Let us raise our girls to know that their safety, freedom and equality are theirs by right, and let us raise our boys with respect for women that is so deeply embedded in who they are that no influencer, algorithm or culture of misogyny can persuade them otherwise. Our daughters should not have to grow up learning how to survive male violence, and our sons can be a part of the generation that ends it.

16:04

Absolutely.

I apologise for interjecting, but I remind everyone that quite a few members wish to ask questions, so please can we have succinct questions and answers?

Thank you.

We still have Laura Moodie waiting to come in on that point. We have been looking forward, which is a good space for you to bring in your theme, Laura.

Good morning, and welcome to the third meeting in 2026 of the Education and Gaelic Committee.

This morning, we will take evidence for our pre-budget scrutiny in advance of the budget documents being published on 3 December. This year, we will focus our scrutiny on progress towards children’s care system reform and class contact time in school education. Today, we are taking evidence on the first of those themes.

I welcome Fraser McKinlay, chief executive, The Promise Scotland; Kay McKerrell, chief executive, Who Cares? Scotland; and Ben Farrugia, director, Social Work Scotland. Thank you for coming today.

We will go straight to questions, and I will kick us off before we open up to other members. A key role of the committee is scrutinising the role of delivery bodies in delivering legislation and policy that the Parliament has agreed. One of the challenges in doing so is the level of transparency on that delivery.

From the briefings that we received ahead of today’s evidence session, it was difficult to get a clear picture of what has been done and what still has to be done to ensure that the Promise commitment is met by 2030. What are your views on how we can improve transparency on delivery to ensure appropriate levels of accountability for delivery of the Promise? Kay, I will come to you first.