Undoubtedly, more can be done, but the progress that Mr Macpherson has set out has been remarkable. We now have far more children and young people from poorer communities going on to university, because they think it is for them. We know that, in the past, they did not think that, and it is really important that those pathways are open.

I am also mindful of the fact that, post-pandemic, some of our progress in this respect has stalled in a way that it had not done previously, although I think that the most recent statistics were very welcome news. The UCAS data published on exam results day again showed progress on widening access, and that is to be welcomed.

My own view is that there is now a much more distinct link between what is happening in our schools and the pathways to college and university, partly because we now have a far broader range of qualifications. I am sure that we will talk about school education in due course, but, if we look at this year’s examination results, we will see that more than 100,000 technical and vocational qualifications are being delivered, with pathways being created that did not previously exist for young people.

We have seen a real sea change in the way that our education system is delivering for our children and young people. Universities have been in the driving seat of some of that culture shift, and they have recognised their responsibilities. I do not know whether Mr Macpherson wants to say more about that.

I will bring in Mr Macpherson to speak about the wider work, but two members have now referred to the University of Dundee and members need to be mindful of the fact that it was a unique institution in relation to some of its financial decisions. The uniqueness of what happened at the University of Dundee justified the Government’s use of the section 25 powers. It is important to note that.

Mr Briggs is quite right to say that there are pressures across the sector and that a range of external factors are at play. We have heard this morning about the impact on international students of immigration rules, employer national insurance contributions and the inflationary pressures that are making staff wages go up—it is quite right that they do so, but those pressures also mean that it is much more expensive to heat buildings, for example. Universities and colleges are having to contend with a lot of things that they did not have to contend with five years ago.

We should be mindful of the fact that the University of Dundee is a bit of an outlier in relation to some of the financial decisions that that institution made, which were all documented in the report by Pamela Gillies that was published before the end of the summer recess.

I ask Mr Macpherson to talk about the wider work in the sector.

I remember the 2014 tackling bureaucracy report, as I chaired a departmental meeting to look at it and what it meant for my department at that time.

When we talk about bureaucracy, it is important to note that it differs at local authority level and at school level. I am sure that others would contend that this is not the case, but I would argue that the Government has not asked for the majority of administrative and bureaucratic tasks that are asked of teachers, so we do not collect lots of educational data nationally. You all know that, because various parties have made freedom of information requests of local authorities. That is not necessarily particularly helpful, but it is the case that we have different policies for how things are recorded and the administrative tasks that are asked of teachers.

One of the announcements that I made, alongside how we might deliver on reducing class contact, was about our plans for independent work on how we can reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. In the summer, I commissioned work that will look at driving some of that, particularly given the possibility of using artificial intelligence to reduce the workload of teachers’ administrative tasks—

It is. You make a fair point, Mr Greer.

On the SNSAs, I remember sitting in this room, where Ms Dunbar is sitting now, and debating these exact issues with COSLA, because we have 32 different approaches to the monitoring of progress and assessment. As you will recall, local authorities were meant to use the SNSAs as a diagnostic tool, and they should not add to teachers’ workload. Beyond the SNSAs, the Government asked for very little in terms of teachers’ workload. As Mr Greer has alluded, much of it is driven by local authority practices.

On the 2014 report, our schools now exist in a different era. What is happening in our schools now is not what was happening when I was last in a classroom. If we consider poverty and the ways in which schools are meeting needs, a lot of the workload might be not necessarily administrative but about support for families and broader social support. It is quite difficult to quantify some of that.

Although I accept some of Mr Greer’s points in principle, we need to look at new ways of reducing teachers’ workload, and the work on AI reducing unnecessary bureaucracy is important. However, to my mind, reducing class contact will make the biggest difference. I am pleased that we have seen some real progress in recent weeks, and I hope that we will see further progress following tomorrow’s meeting. That work, accompanied by the work on reducing bureaucracy for teachers, will be the game changer.

I am mindful of the fact that much of the bureaucracy is related to the increase in additional support needs, which we might come on to talk about. We need to be mindful of the ASN review and what that means for teachers’ workload and administrative tasks.

I will give a crude example from my experience of teaching in Edinburgh. We had a pupil support assistant who would come to the department once every two weeks, and her job was to input pupils’ grades from their test results and so on. Having somebody in the department to undertake those administrative tasks meant that fulfilling our reporting requirements for year groups was far easier. It reduced the bureaucracy for teachers and the time that we had to spend on those tasks. That is a crude example of one local authority using additional budget to employ a pupil support assistant.

Mr Greer alluded to a wider challenge in Scottish education, which I have tasked John Wilson with, which is to look at how we deliver education in Scotland’s schools post-pandemic. Is it sustainable to have 32 different approaches to that? We need to ask ourselves such big, challenging questions at the current time. Budgets are challenging—we will come on to talk about that in January, I am sure—and there are perhaps more sustainable ways in which we could deliver an equitable education system for all our children and young people.

I also point to the significant increase in teacher salaries that we have seen since 2021. The significant increases—

I agree with Mr Rennie that local authorities and the Government have a responsibility, which is why the Government fully funds the probationer scheme. I think that the Scottish Government provides around £42 million of funding for that scheme. We need our local authorities to play a role in the employment of teachers, but the main issue is that we have been unable to get agreement on the use of time through the SNCT, which has prevented us from moving forward. Had we been able to secure that agreement before now, we would have been able to move forward regardless of the other points that Mr Rennie made about extra teachers because of the points that I made about independent modelling.

I hear that you were here. I was not here at that time either.

It is important that we look at the progress that has been made. In the chamber, I regularly hear all the critique from Mr Rennie and others around the table about our schools, and yet this year’s exam results show that the pass rate for national 5s and highers is up and the advance higher pass rate is up compared to last year. Grade A percentages in national 5, highers and advance highers are up. The deprivation gap has narrowed for national 5, highers and advance highers. The results also show increases in our technical and vocational qualifications. The data that I set out to Mr O’Kane also tells us a positive story of improvement.

I accept that there is more to do and I do not detract from that. We need to intensify progress. I set out some of that to Parliament last week, and Education Scotland and the inspectorate will need to take forward further work. I hope, however, that members can get behind some of the positive results that we are seeing in our schools. I do not detract from the challenges, much of which are in the funding space—I am interested in Mr Rennie’s views on that. However, these are real successes for children and young people, despite what they experienced through the global pandemic, and we should be proud of them.

I am sorry, but I do not recognise the position that Mr Rennie is taking on this issue. We need to be cognisant of the pandemic, which was a factor, but we also need to be cognisant of austerity.

In my constituency, which is just down the road from where Mr Rennie is, we see real challenges from poverty. I am mindful that the poverty that is being experienced in households, where bills are going up and mortgage payments and rents are going through the roof, means that things are tough at home, and that also impacts on educational outcomes. We cannot pretend that the attainment challenge has existed in a silo that has been divorced from the wider societal changes that have happened during that time.

When young people’s education was disrupted, it undoubtedly had an impact on progress. but that is not unique to the system in Scotland. We see challenges across the world in relation to attendance and attainment, with a generation of young people’s attainment behind where it would have been. I do not accept that Scotland is an outlier in that regard.

I hear the points that Mr Rennie makes about the recovery plan. Of course, there is more that we will need to consider, and I am all ears to hearing from Mr Rennie about where that targeted work and intervention should be. However, I am currently focused on working with local authorities. Officials will be meeting and working them tomorrow on how we can drive further intensification of support.

The national writing improvement programme, which I spoke to Mr O’Kane about, is a good example of that, as is the work that Andy Brown is leading on the improvement to numeracy. Those interventions will make the difference, and having that targeted support for local authorities is really important.

In response to your point, Mr O’Kane, I would say that we have actually had a very successful year in Scottish education with regard to the recovery in our schools and that we are turning a corner.

In my statement to Parliament last week, I highlighted improvements in attainment, a narrowing of the attainment gap, the smaller class sizes in our primary schools and the increases in teacher numbers, and I should say that we have also seen real improvement in this year’s examination results. If we go back to the 2019 figures, we will see that there have been real improvements, with the gap narrowing; of course, 2019 was the last time that we could make those judgments, given the pandemic, but we have seen attainment rise across the board. The generation who have worked through our schools have had support. Indeed, the Government provided some of that additional support during the pandemic, with the employment of extra teachers at the time—which was, I should say, prior to my time in this role.

I think that this year’s education results, particularly in our schools, tell us that recovery is happening. We need to reflect better on how we can support our schools, and part of that will involve reviewing how we fund the Scottish attainment challenge. My party and—I think—Mr O’Kane’s party have given a public commitment in our manifestos for next year’s election to continuing the Scottish attainment challenge. That is important, but what I think has shifted since the implementation of the challenge 10 years ago is the normalisation of poverty in our schools, the existence of food and clothing banks and schools now being stretched to meet societal needs in ways that they might not have been stretched previously.

Therefore, we need to look at and review the fund. It is part of the work that, as I alluded to in my response to Mr Greer, John Wilson, a former headteacher, is leading, but we need to be mindful of how we can bring additionality to our schools in the post-pandemic period to support the recovery work that I believe is happening and which I believe has been evidenced by last week’s statistics and this year’s exam results.

Of course they matter, but they have been living through a period of austerity. Do we really think that schools exist in isolation? We should be mindful of societal changes that mean that families—