Chamber and committees

That was the final question that I wanted to ask. Otherwise it has all been well covered.

My question is on that point, because a lot of the larger substantive issues that I was going to ask about have been well covered already.

It is not about the relative worth or otherwise of the policy, because I understand that that is not for the witnesses to comment on, but about the transparency and presentational issues around things such as the hospitality relief. As you point out, Graeme, a huge number of the businesses that would be eligible for that already receive substantive relief through SBBS, and many of them receive 100 per cent relief. Is there a presentational and transparency challenge here, given that reliefs are layered on top of each other and there is a fragmented NDR relief landscape?

If I could just cut in, I said that the course review explains what the issues are in relation to the answers that came back. The core question is this: why did those answers come back? If we accept your premise that the cause of the issue was underperformance by pupils compared with previous years, then yes—your job is to explain the SQA’s processes, procedures and quality assurance, and you have done that. Surely your job as chief examiner is also to look into why there is unusual underperformance. This subject was clearly an outlier. If it is not the chief examiner’s job to look into why pupils underperformed to such an extent this year, whose job is it?

I will rephrase that, because that was my first question. Do you think that it is your job to understand why pupils underperformed? We can set aside the process issues with the SQA as an organisation. Is it your job, as the chief examiner, to understand why there was underperformance, if this year was such an outlier?

Excellent—thank you.

This has been touched on quite a few times already, but I want to come back to the case load issues that social workers have. Stephen Smellie, you mentioned in your opening comments that the reality is that a lot of social workers do a huge amount of overtime, and many families do not get to see their social worker from week to week or, sometimes, for even longer periods of time.

I will ask this question in two parts. Would anybody like to expand on the comments that Stephen made at the start about the reality for social workers who have a case load beyond their capacity, and consider what the present system should be doing formally about that?

Given the reality, which is that caseworkers are working overtime and families are not getting to see them, what policies and processes are in place for when a case load is far beyond capacity? Is there nominally—at least on paper—a process for dealing with that? If so, is that process not working? Is there an assumption that case loads are always manageable?

I will follow up on that point. The financial context, especially over the past three years, has been one in which there have been significant in-year cuts to budgets. Money that has been allocated at the start of the financial year has not been distributed. Willie Rennie mentioned the whole family wellbeing fund. I imagine that the answer to this question is relatively obvious, but it is important to get it on the record. What impact is the current public finance situation having, in particular on our ability to deliver effective preventative spend?

To follow up on the issue of expectation, is it an issue that budgets are often set in the knowledge, almost from day 1, that the money that has been allocated is never going to be distributed? Let us say that a promise is made that £10 million will be provided for project X, but, realistically, only £6 million is ever going to be available. Would it be more helpful to say from the start that it is going to be £6 million, not £10 million, or is there something helpful in encouraging the system to be ambitious? What would you require to make the kind of change that is needed? What would you do with £10 million if you had it?

Part of my frustration with a lot of this is that it appears that a huge amount of time is wasted and morale is drained when people expect to be given resources to deliver something and they are either not given them at all or they are given something far less and they have to rewrite a plan that they have spent time developing.

I will turn to a different topic, with a question that is primarily for Fraser McKinley—it is about the progress framework. On the Plan 24-30 website, the last line on the relevant page says that the framework will be available

“by the end of 2024.”

Is that still the expected timescale? Will we see it in the next fortnight?

That is the core point. On that specific example, I do not have the depth of knowledge about that paper, but I accept that you cannot give marks for an answer to a question that was not asked.

Cabinet secretary, although I accept that the SQA’s report was externally quality assured by the Welsh equivalent body, the report is about quality assuring the SQA’s own processes. The SQA came to the conclusion that the issue was not the exam paper or the marking scheme, but unusual underperformance by pupils. If it is not the chief examiner’s role to look into why that was the case, in relation to questions about presentation and so on, where in the system does that responsibility lie? Whose responsibility is it to look into that further?