Chamber and committees

I am interested in the issue of stranded assets but, given the time, there is one other area that I would like to touch on. Charlie Bean in particular has mentioned a few times the impact of upward pressure on wages. I am interested in the knock-on effect that that would have on the relative value of different sectors to the overall tax base. For example, if the hospitality and road haulage sectors recover from the pandemic as smaller but higher-wage sectors, that will have a differential impact on income tax versus corporation tax versus fuel duty, and so on. How soon do you expect to have a strong indication of the direction of travel in respect of sector-specific differences in recovery?

Thank you. I am conscious of the time, so I am happy to leave it there.

If I could be a bit cheeky, I will ask for both. That would be great. If you have an anecdote that you could offer us now, we would be interested in it, but a follow-up in writing would be great.

Absolutely. That was very useful. Thank you. I am conscious of the time but, Laura Caven, is there anything that you would like to add from COSLA’s perspective?

I turn now to Jennifer King, and then Laura Caven, on the same question of gathering data effectively so that we can make targeted and effective interventions. Are there examples of on-going or planned work in this area? Our committee is minded to recommend that further work be done here, but it would be useful for us to know whether COSLA and ADES have either on-going work or planned work in this area, to identify exactly what the impacts have been. We have had a lot of discussions about the disproportionate impact on children with additional support needs, but that is itself a vast category, because we are talking about more than one in every four young people. It is clear from the discussions that we have just had that there has been a very different impact on children with autism from the impact on those with visual or hearing impairments, for instance. It would be useful to know whether any work is already being done in that area, as that would provide us with the kind of information that we are looking for.

I will go back to the convener’s line of questioning about the children and families for whom lockdown provided an opportunity for engagement with education that was not happening before. The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland made that point to us a few weeks ago, and I am interested in Joan Tranent’s perspective on it. She talks rightly about the need for us to bear that engagement in mind and for social work teams to bear it in mind for their future strategies for schools. However, schools have been back to something approaching normal since August. In-person learning has been the default since that point.

From what Joan Tranent has seen and heard so far, for the children who re-engaged with education—perhaps for the first time in quite some time—through lockdown and remote learning, has learning at local authority or school level been preserved or are we already seeing instances of children who were disengaged pre-pandemic and engaged by the unique circumstances of remote learning starting to disengage again because the adaptations that were made for them have not been continued? Are there good examples of schools, local authorities or social work teams that have managed to continue the link with children for whom it was challenging before March last year?

That would be much appreciated. Turning to the broader question, for the past few weeks, the committee has been struggling with how to distinguish between the substantial amount of anecdotal evidence that we have now received and rigorous, verifiable data that is being collected on exactly how the pandemic has affected children, young people and their families—precisely because of the issues that we have just discussed. We know that the pandemic has had negative consequences across the board, although there are unique circumstances in which it has done the opposite. However, it has not inflicted the same level of harm on everyone for whom it has been harmful.

Mike Corbett, you mentioned the US and the Netherlands, where surveys, diagnostic work and so on were done before targeted funds were deployed. I am keen for you to expand a little bit on that. What would the NASUWT like to happen here in terms of further study and further evidence gathering before we deploy additional funds?

The difficulty in tracking PEF money has been a long-running source of frustration in Parliament.

Paragraph 11 of your submission mentions the need for “ongoing system-level evaluation” if we are to verify whether recovery is happening. However, I am conscious that that could easily be done in a way that simply increases the workloads of teachers and support staff in schools and at the local authority level. What would an effective system of on-going evaluation look like? I hesitate to use the phrase “a light-touch system” but you know what I mean by that—a system that will not unnecessarily increase the workload of those who are already overwhelmed.

I have a final question. Is there sufficient turnover on the boards of public bodies? I refer to people who have active experience on boards. I am aware that a number of individuals move from the board of one public body to the board of another and will be involved in corporate governance of public sector bodies over a continuous period. Is there high enough turnover in Scotland as a whole for us to bring in people who have direct experience of the sector in which the board works, or who have other relevant experience? Could we do with a little bit more scrutiny of an individual’s length of service across public sector governance, rather than just the individual board on which they might be serving at any given time?

I want to return to accountability. I am interested specifically in the Government’s position on the role of boards of public bodies and of non-departmental public bodies. It seems to me that the board of a public body could play a variety of roles. There is a bog-standard corporate governance role—whereby the board focuses on issues such as human resources practices—or it can look more at the operational policy decisions of the body for which it is responsible.

I will give an example that I used in a previous evidence session. The board of Creative Scotland is largely made up of professionals from the creative industries who understand that area of public policy. By contrast, the board of the Scottish Qualifications Authority, with which the cabinet secretary will be familiar, has a teacher on it, but it also has three management consultants. That would be entirely legitimate if the purpose of the board of a public body was to focus on corporate governance issues such as HR, but it seems to me that there is inconsistency in how the boards of public bodies in Scotland understand their functions and purpose. What is the Government’s position on the purpose of those boards?