Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is investing £185 million this year to support high-quality apprenticeships, aiming to strengthen the skills system and ensure efficient use of public funds. Our approach to proactive contract management allows flexibility to respond to emerging demand, aligned with Government priorities. Skills Development Scotland supports providers to maximise opportunities throughout the year. We remain committed to working with employers and industry leaders to reform the skills system. Improving skills planning is key to ensuring that supply is better aligned with the demands of Scotland’s economy.

Thank you, Presiding Officer, for the opportunity to open the debate, which will focus on proposed changes to United Kingdom legislation that have the potential to increase and improve opportunities for Scottish children and young people, and to put their best interests at the heart of decisions that affect them.

In December, the UK Government contacted the Scottish Government about extending to Scotland the provisions in its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill that relate to child employment and community-based and secure accommodation. More detail was sought from the UK Government to allow there to be consultation with stakeholders and to provide advice to Scottish ministers. Although our engagement has been constructive, a delay in securing the necessary detail to inform our approach has impacted our ability to engage as we would have wished with the Scottish Parliament. However, the positive feedback from children and young people and from other stakeholders enables me to recommend that the Parliament consents to the legislative changes.

Currently, children from the age of 14 up to the leaving age for compulsory schooling can work for up to two hours on a Sunday. The bill proposes to amend those restrictions so that children can work the same number of hours on Sundays as they can on Saturdays. Children will also be able to work up to an hour before school and until 8 pm on any day. Currently, they cannot work before a school day and can work only until 7 pm.

Schools and local authorities need to do all that they can to ensure that children and young people are included, engaged and involved in their education.

More than £60 million has been provided to local authorities through the care-experienced children and young people fund as part of the Scottish attainment challenge. We are working with Education Scotland and local government to improve the educational outcomes of care-experienced children and young people. The Government also continues to provide £100,000 of annual funding to CELCIS to support the facilitation of the virtual school headteachers and care-experienced teams network, which is playing a key role in reducing exclusions.

Our national policy on exclusion has a strong focus on approaches that can be used to prevent the need for exclusion. Exclusion should be the last resort and, when used, it should be a proportionate response where there is no appropriate alternative.

I hope that the member recognises that that is not my particular area of responsibility, so I will ask the relevant minister to write back to her.

I am quite pleased to hear that she is concerned about exclusions, because we regularly hear from the Conservative benches a demand for a greater number of exclusions. There seems to be a slight disconnect in the Conservatives’ positioning on that. However, she makes a fair point, and I will ask the minister to write to her.

NESCol is an excellent example of a college adapting to the net zero transition. It collaborates closely with regional and national employers to meet the needs of the energy transition.

To support the sector at large to tailor its courses, the Scottish Funding Council has established a curriculum transformation framework that allows colleges to use their funding more flexibly to respond to local needs and demands. The college tripartite alignment group heard this morning that there has been a fair degree of interest from institutions in taking that opportunity. I hope that an enlightened and forward-looking college such as NESCol would be among those.

On the point about priorities, I have had extensive conversations with colleges, including this morning. It is clear that a large number of colleges are seeking to change their offering and to align it to the changing needs of their local economy. We will do everything that we can to support them to achieve that.

As we have had an exchange on this before, Douglas Ross will know that I have been encouraging the reform work that the UHI has been doing, which is being driven from the bottom up. There is a need to ensure that the UHI, as a concept, has a sustainable long-term future, notwithstanding the financial and other challenges that it has. I am aware of the exchange on that very subject that Douglas Ross had with the principal of the UHI at the committee meeting. I expect that, as part of the on-going work—which has taken an extended period of time to get right—the UHI will look at how it can make best use of the financial resources that are provided to it, because I recognise the criticism that is made in that regard.

I will deal first with the legitimate points that members have raised.

I absolutely take on board Douglas Ross’s point about the workload of the Education, Children and Young People Committee and its having had insufficient time to deal with the issue. He noted the date of 14 May. I should explain, in case it has not been clear, that there continued to be to-ing and fro-ing between the two Governments. As I understand it, that was in part because of a clause in the bill and the fact that we were completing the work on reimagining secure care ahead of making it public. For our part in that to-ing and fro-ing, I apologise.

As I said earlier, as a former Minister for Parliamentary Business, I could not agree more about the need for the Parliament to have an appropriate amount of time to do its work. As I explained, there would have been a legislative compatibility issue had we allowed consideration to run beyond the timeframe that we have.

As I understand it, Roz McCall was talking about the proposed community-based secure accommodation in England. She is no doubt aware that no such accommodation is currently available. The bill provides for such facilities to be developed. If the bill is agreed and receives royal assent, the UK Government will consult on the provision of and the requirements for the facilities. In effect, we are future proofing our approach by referencing the existence of such accommodation. I give her the reassurance that this is not in any way a change in our approach. As I said to Martin Whitfield, this is about getting the wording of the legislation right, and the bill does not make cross-border placements more likely.

The point about family farms was a very good one for Roz McCall to raise. I do not have the answer for her today, but the bill provides a power for ministers to create a single bylaw—that is probably not the correct term—that would apply across the whole of Scotland. There will be consultation on that. I will ask officials to take on board the very fair point that she made to ensure that whatever is brought forward captures that issue that she has rightly raised. The Parliament will have a role in that regard.

I thank all members for their constructive and thoughtful contributions. No Government or Parliament on these islands has done more to progress the rights of children and young people. We are rightly proud of what we have achieved together in this Parliament in that regard.

We are also rightly fierce in protecting the best interests of children and engaging with them to get their views on decisions that affect them. The provisions on employment should give children more choice and opportunity to make decisions about when they work to gain income and independence. They modernise our approach to children’s employment and will make protections and opportunities more consistent across the country. I will quote a young person who was engaged with the proposed changes:

“I think that it will make young people happier and able to work and gain more experience.”

Although it would have been our preference to legislate on this devolved matter here at Holyrood, it would have been wrong to pass up the opportunity to update what is an outmoded statutory framework. A system of 32 local byelaws on child employment lends itself to inconsistency across councils in relation to permitted and prohibited types of work. Some bylaws are out of date and are not reflective of modern-day employment opportunities. Most have not been updated since the early 2000s—indeed, one dates back to 1973. Some still refer to the prohibition regarding children working as chimney sweeps or on merchant ships or undertaking work in coal yards. Creating central regulations will provide consistency, reduce the administrative burden of updating byelaws and allow for engagement to ensure that updates reflect the needs and interests of children and young people, as well as local communities and economies.

The provisions on community-based accommodation will provide flexibility and choice in providing the most appropriate placement for a child, if deemed appropriate and in an exceptional circumstance, and if it fully meets their care needs. No significant issues were raised about either of those changes by stakeholders, and there was recognition of the value of them. However, it is recognised that further engagement will be undertaken with key stakeholders.

As I said earlier, I note the concerns of the DPLR Committee regarding timescales, and, once again, I apologise that the Parliament was not given more time to consider the changes. When working with UK bill measures, that is not always feasible, but I accept the importance of giving parliamentary committees more opportunity to scrutinise proposed legislative changes, especially changes as important as these. I hope that the Parliament will agree that the changes will help to protect and enhance the best interests of Scotland’s children and young people and will, accordingly, give consent.

Lorna Slater highlights a really important and long-standing issue, which continues to exercise all of us who have a locus and interest in ensuring that our young people are supported into rewarding and sustainable careers that allow them to best realise their potential.

The fact that Scotland’s apprentice of the year, Louise Collins, is a female who is working in aerospace engineering will, I hope, help us to demonstrate to young women that engineering is for them. I also hope that our plans to weave the recommendation of the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board’s gender commission into our work in the reforms space, especially on careers, will be helpful. That is the critical element of how we address this issue. When I talk about our work on careers, I mean that it should involve reaching not just the young people but the biggest influence on the career decisions that those young people make, which is their parents and carers.

Progress has been made in breaking down the gender barriers, but much work remains to address the challenge of attracting more women into engineering and construction—the high-paying sectors that Lorna Slater has identified. We should also be alive to the fact that, in some instances, young men are not being attracted to other professions. That, too, has to be addressed.

Skills Development Scotland has operational responsibility for apprenticeships in Scotland. SDS acknowledges that regional variability in apprenticeship availability is influenced by the geographic distribution and recruitment activity of employers across key sectors of the economy. As apprenticeships are demand led and aligned with employer needs, the number and type of opportunities naturally differ across regions.

To manage this situation, SDS undertakes continuous labour market analysis and produces annual regional skills assessments. These assessments inform the strategic management of apprenticeship starts at both national and regional levels, which ensures alignment with industry priorities and local economic conditions.

There is no doubt that the problem that Kenny Gibson highlights exists. I have visited many schools where the culture is very much as we would want it to be when it comes to promoting the full range of career paths, but that is not always the case, as I have heard directly from young people.

The work that is under way in the careers space through the careers collaborative is designed to ensure that, in all our education settings—not only schools but colleges and universities as well—there is a full and complete offering to young people of opportunities to pursue careers.

We have an issue around construction, which Kenny Gibson mentioned. There is, for example, a disconnect between the number of young people who go to college to do construction-related courses and the number who then go into the construction sector. I offer Kenny Gibson the reassurance that we are very much alive to that issue.