Chamber and committees

I, too, along with other members on the Conservative side of the chamber, welcome the fact that we have visitors back in the public gallery. It serves as an important reminder, in this debate in particular, of how important face-to-face and in-person contact is and of the role that discussing such issues in public can play in breaking down barriers and stigma and in bringing what are often very personal and lonely challenges out into the open.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak in tonight’s debate and play a small part in our collective effort in the Parliament to break down those barriers and raise awareness. Eating disorders are a complicated area, and the number of conditions and disorders—as Emma Harper set out—along with the range of symptoms highlights how complicated the issue is. It is sometimes easy to forget that.

I will come back to the substance of the debate in a moment, but first I thank Emma Harper for securing the debate and for the work that she does on the issue. That includes much work behind the scenes to highlight eating disorders at meetings of a number of cross-party groups at Holyrood, including the cross-party group on mental health, which we co-convene.

Does Siobhian Brown recognise that the Scottish Government has an important role to play in ensuring that there is best practice across all five medical schools?

To ask the Scottish Government what the reasons are for its decision not to publish the draft of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report, “Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence: Into the Future”, that it received in January 2021. (S6O-00776)

That is the stuff of fantasy. Has the cabinet secretary asked the OECD whether it would object to the release of the draft and, more importantly, the Scottish Government’s response to it, which is, as I understand it, the property of the Scottish Government?

Before we begin taking evidence, I wish to raise a point and seek your clarification, convener.

I suspect that I am not the only member of the committee who has been concerned by reports that, after more than a year, the Scottish Government is still withholding from publication the draft version of the report that it received from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last January and its response to that report.

Furthermore, I have heard that a parliamentary statement on the report by Professor Ken Muir is now planned, and it has been reported that senior leadership at the Scottish Qualifications Authority and other education bodies have already seen an advance draft of the report. I am not aware of that courtesy having been extended to this committee. This looks like a repeat of the situation with the OECD report, in which unaccountable organisations that are currently failing our young people are extended an opportunity to review and perhaps influence the findings of those reports without any checks and balances.

Having been a member of the committee for a number of years, I believe that it is insulting that such documents have not been made available to the committee and that the practice of excluding Parliament and denying us the fullest opportunity to exercise our scrutiny function diminishes the work that we do. I find that unacceptable. I believe that we should urgently request those documents.

I know that we will discuss our work programme in private today, but I am increasingly concerned that too much of our education policy is decided behind closed doors, not least because of the culture of secrecy and lack of transparency at the heart of the Scottish National Party’s approach. It is important that the public knows that the committee is alive to those issues and that we are taking our job of scrutiny seriously. Ideally, I would like to see a decision taken to move today’s discussion of our work programme into public to allow this urgent matter to be addressed. If that is not possible, convener, I would like your assurance that the matter will be put on the public agenda for next week’s meeting.

Will the minister take an intervention?

Before I move to my main line of questioning, I will come back to the topic of information technology devices, which has already been covered, although I do not want to return to the issue of touch typing, which we have covered at length. Before the election, John Swinney promised that every young person in Scotland would have a device that would be connected to the internet, and I am more concerned about whether that is the witnesses’ experience of what has happened. I am not clear that that has been the case in my constituency. Figures suggest that only one in five young people has access to a device.

Therefore, would it be fair to say that that is yet another example of the gap between the Scottish Government’s rhetoric and the complexity of the task that it asks local authorities to deliver on the ground?

However, you recognise that masks are a barrier to learning and you want them to be removed as soon as the advice says that it is—[Inaudible.]