Chamber and committees

Yesterday’s announcement from the University of Dundee was deeply concerning. The committee may be aware that Mr Dey and I wrote to the university yesterday. I am more than happy to share a copy of our correspondence with the committee. We also wrote to Universities Scotland to seek support for the university in order to respond to some of the challenges that Mr Rennie has set out.

Mr Rennie will recognise the challenges that ministers face around the additional investment of £15 million that the Government committed in the budget, in that we need to be very careful about the Office for National Statistics classification and the role of direct Government intervention.

Yesterday, Mr Dey and I met the chief executive of the Scottish Funding Council, and urgent advice is coming to ministers on what we might be able to do next. I am not currently able to share that with the committee because I do not have it, but I expect to receive it before the end of the week. Once I have received that advice, I will be more than happy to write to the committee more fulsomely to set out the Government’s next steps. I am aware that there have also been requests for ministerial statements on the issue. It may be that we will be able to share more detail about any action that the Government might be able to take once we are in receipt of the advice.

It is a deeply concerning and worrying time for the University of Dundee’s staff, given the extent of the proposed job losses. We have been very clear in our correspondence with the university that every effort will be made to protect jobs, given the quantum of the proposal, which is not palatable.

The decision making around that pre-dates my time in office, so I might ask my officials to speak to things that have not worked. In my experience, the move was welcomed. Some local authorities took the view that they were missing out—to be blunt, they were missing out on the funding, given that we had nine challenge authorities—and we had to respond to that ask. The move was welcomed at the time.

David Leng has already spoken about some of the issues with tapering and the additional support that we provided. If you look at the funding that is going to local authorities in the round, you will see that record levels of investment are coming from the Government. I spoke to the funding that has been protected for education in relation to teacher numbers and ASN, and it is important that we protect those budget lines, although there is probably a debate to be had on the extent of ring fencing of education spend.

The approach was broadly welcomed. I will bring in officials on the question of what did not work well, because it pre-dates my time in my role.

You are speaking about the draft order, and I reflect that there have been changes in leadership roles in recent times. That has been reflected in the evidence that the committee has heard. I also reflect on the fact that we have a new chair in the form of Shirley Rogers. Shirley Rogers has been leading some transformational—

I have accepted that the Government will, in a Parliament of minorities, always have to work on a cross-party basis.

I have to ask this in response. The committee backed the principles of the bill at stage 1. Is that a position that you do not now support?

I have accepted that, as I did in the chamber.

I have accepted that there are areas in which the Government will willingly work on a cross-party basis to strengthen some of the key provisions, but there is an on-going need to reform our qualifications body. As I said, standing still on the issue is not acceptable to Scotland’s teachers, our children and young people, or parents and carers.

It is vitally important that the legislation moves forward so that we can deliver on that ask from the country in relation to how we deliver qualifications, especially post-pandemic.

One of the interesting points of the budget agreement that the Government struck with local authorities was the establishment of an education assurance board that will allow us to hold the Government to account for things that we are responsible for, and will also hold local government to account. The partnership approach that has been spoken about today is really important. I am keen to take the issue that Mr Briggs raised about identification and support to the education assurance board, which should meet for the first time in the coming weeks.

Incidentally, convener, if there are any other hot topics or issues that the committee would like me to address at the first meeting, I am more than happy to do that.

We must get to a place of understanding that, without local government buy-in in education, we will not drive the improvements that we all want to see. We have a number of willing partners in local government. Dave Gregory spoke about the quads work that is being led by ADES, which is showing real tangible results. That is the headspace that we need to get to. I accept Mr Briggs’s point about care-experienced young people, and I will raise that at the first meeting of the education assurance board.

I will defer to Nico on that.

Earlier, we touched on initial leavers’ destinations. The gap between the proportion of school leavers from the most and least deprived areas of Scotland moving into positive destinations is 4.3 percentage points, which is an increase on the previous year. I gave a figure of 3.7 per cent in response to Mr Mason—