Chamber and committees

We have a situation where social workers are having to take children home. The system is creaking.

For me, this process began 10 years ago. The origins were in a care review in New Zealand. We saw that ambition to change the whole care system and we said, “Why does Scotland not have that ambition?” It was actually nine years and 11 months ago, on 15 October 2016, when Nicola Sturgeon stood up at the Scottish National Party conference and declared that she would rip up the care system if necessary.

I do not see which bits of the system have been ripped up. We do not have direction from a person, organisation or body saying, “Here’s how we go forward,” or saying that some things have to stop and some things have to start. I am hearing good evidence on the ground that only half the people who should be getting throughcare and aftercare support are getting it. Some care leavers cannot even get the council tax exemption, because local authorities do not have the paperwork in place. That is fairly basic stuff.

There has been success on further and higher education and the bursary, but the system looks very similar to how it looked 10 years ago, when we said that, from that day forward, it would change. That is an entire childhood, from the age of five to 15 years, and we have the crisis that you have talked about.

We have not even touched on residential care. I do not see how someone can form a lifelong loving relationship when there is a staff rota pattern that involves 20 people going through their house every week. We have children as young as three in residential care, and I know of five and eight-year-olds in there, too.

My question is: why are we stuck? There have been many different people sat round committee tables, scrutinising many people in similar roles who are accountable for the non-delivery that is happening. What is happening is tragic, but we are told, “We don’t know what’s working, but it’s great rhetoric—let’s sell that.”

What has to change? The Audit Scotland report is clear that there is, at best, a guddle in terms of who is driving this forward. We have the different Promise accountability mechanisms, with the strategic adviser, the Promise group and the Oversight Board. Then there are others such as the Centre for Excellence for Children’s Care and Protection and the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland that are associated with the work. Then there are local authorities saying that they do not have the resource to deliver—

I totally respect that, but who should be responsible for making sure that that happens? As you said earlier, the situation seems to be a bit of a mess. Who should be responsible for making sure that all the things that we have discussed actually happen?

I support the removal of mobile phones from classrooms, but will we commit to removing them from the school estate and monitor how they enter it? There is a whole issue regarding children’s social time—playtime, lunchtime and so on.

While you are consulting on mobile phones, will you please go further and review the proliferation of screens as a de facto learning aid? For example, Apple now has a long-term contract with Scottish Borders Council, whereby children in primary 4—which means those from the age of seven—are now given an iPad and are expected to take that home. I have concerns that that is enabling a reliance and building an addiction that will lead to disruptive behaviours, which is a point of concern right across Scotland. What are your views on that?

09:30

My point is that it appears that Scottish Borders Council has signed a long-term agreement with Apple that binds it to a contract for learning for pupils from primary 4 onwards. I understand that that might have been done with good intentions on the part of the council, particularly following on from the Covid period. However, countries such as Sweden have gone in completely the other direction, with pupils doing computing only in information and communications technology suites, and only when they require to do those subjects, particularly in the primary years. As a parent of young kids, I have a concern that we are now using those devices as a crutch to manage classroom behaviours rather than to ensure that core skills are learned. I would appreciate hearing your comments in that regard.

We have been reviewing and transforming the care system for 10 years—since the care review started. That is as long as a childhood, if we take that as being from the age of about five to 15 years. We have only three and a half years left until we are meant to have achieved success. To summarise last October’s Audit Scotland report, we have a lot of intent but not enough action. We still lack a clear implementation plan for our areas and key indicators of success, and we do not even know how much it will cost to guide local authorities on what they should specifically start and stop doing. I am interested in when we will get that detail.

I am conscious of time, but I will follow up on that, as Laura Moodie did with her questions. Given the major governance and implementation review that is under way in Scotland, which includes questions about the structure of national health service boards, social care and local authorities, is now the time to answer the question of who should be responsible for—and who should deliver—care? From what I can see, that has never been answered in any of the reviews. We still have financial directors at local authorities who are responsible for flower beds as well as our care budgets.

While an argument could be made that you should be responsible for specialist provision at a national level, the same questions apply at a regional level for peripatetic social workers, and at an ultra-local level, in order to ensure that families get support and children get love. Will all that structure be questioned?

I am sorry—there was rather a lot in that question.

I have a small follow-up question. What worries me about the levels of funding that we give to whole family support—this comes back to my earlier question about targeting breakfast clubs, which I assumed were in place to assist those who could not afford to feed their children—is that Nicola Sturgeon committed £500 million to the whole family wellbeing fund in a previous budget, but only £200 million was spent. This year, the Government is giving only £20 million to the equivalent fund, which is a real-terms cut. We have to focus on that money.

I do not know why we are not looking at family support centres. A recent review of the sure start initiative set out its longer-term benefit, which was to reduce school absences by 15 per cent among the cohorts that went through it. I encourage you to look at investing our spend in the areas in which we most need it.

Good morning, cabinet secretary. Thank you for coming along. I will go back to the issue of decreasing child poverty. All of us agree with the ambition to eradicate child poverty but, given that money is increasingly tight and that the Scottish Government’s budget will be constricted during this session of Parliament, why are you rolling out universal service offers rather than targeted offers? For example, last week, the First Minister opened a breakfast club at East Linton primary school. That town is almost exclusively middle class, and parents are openly using the provision as a way of alleviating pressure on their commute, so it is not being used to eradicate or address child poverty. Why are we not targeting resources in the areas that really need them?

This links to what Angela Ross said, and it might fall under other committees’ mandates. I worked a lot with young people who were considered to be in positive destinations. I am quite honest about this. Post-16, if someone is in education or employment, that is a positive destination. If someone is on a course lasting 10 or 12 weeks, that can also be classified as a positive destination, but it is not really, because what matters is what comes next. Is that course leading something that will give someone the prospect of sustained, progressive, positive activity, which ultimately results in them being economically active? Quite a lot of them are not.

If we look at the report of the Milburn review in England, we can see that the position is fairly similar up here—we are kidding ourselves if we think that it is not. There is an impending crisis in how our labour market will change, and our education system and support for young people need to respond to that.

It would be good for us to be inquisitive, in a different way, about what the solutions might be. I used to run schemes where I employed young people and then taught them how to work. That was because, if there was a training scheme but no job at the end of it, they did not always have the motivation to follow it through. What mattered was whether someone was at home, kicking them out of bed in the morning to ensure that they got on with it and embedded that learning.

All that we do must respond to a fast-moving economic and employment climate. Our responsibility is to ensure that we do not end up with much of this generation being economically inactive. When someone gets beyond 23—to 25 at the latest—it becomes very hard to get them into work if they have not worked previously.

There is one issue that has not come up. I should have declared that I have a masters in community, youth work and non-formal education.

There has been quite severe degradation of youth work provision across Scotland, particularly in terms of the formal activities that are delivered by local authorities. Many charities deliver provision locally, but they are always scrabbling for funding. Given the issues that we are aware of around additional support needs and the fact that a formal classroom setting is not the best place for some people to learn, youth work is a key resource. The skills that people learn through that can set them up for life, if they are not the most academically minded. We ought to be inquisitive about what is happening in that sector, so that we can ensure that provision exists across the board, and not just in certain pockets.

I will raise similar issues to those that have been covered. On additional support needs, why has there been such a big increase and what can we do about that? I think that, now, more than 50 per cent of children are presenting with different levels of need. There has been a huge increase, and I am really interested to know why that has happened and what our solutions are. Just putting in a class teacher puts other pressures elsewhere.

Linked to that is the question of why we have dropped down international standards in certain basics of education, including maths and English, and where Scotland is sitting within that across the board. How do we respond to the changing dynamics of educating people to the fullest extent so that they are ready not just for the world of work but for the world?

That links to what we are doing on the live issue of university funding, as well as the viability of that whole sector, which then might cross over to speaking to employers about their needs and to creating apprenticeships, practical college courses or university degrees that marry up with their needs so that the system is as responsive as possible.

There is an issue with teachers, because we potentially have too many in arts-based subjects and not enough in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects. We should consider how we can have a more responsive education system that ensures that we have the qualified people within it.

It will be no surprise to members that I am interested in where we have got to on the actions that we are taking to improve outcomes for people with care experience, including children. There has been a lot of noise around the Promise and what the nation’s intent should be, but there has been a lack of clarity on the actions that should be taken. That area would benefit from coherent scrutiny by the committee.