Seòmar agus comataidhean

In the spirit of the fact that we now have more admirals than ships in the Royal Navy, there is a question that I have been dying to ask from the beginning of the meeting. You are both called strategic director. Why are there two of you?

Performance? Sorry—I did not quite catch that.

But there is change and you are being scrapped. How can you welcome that? That seems strange to me. Change is endemic to all organisations or they do not survive, but the Muir report suggests that you are going to be done away with and replaced by a completely new organisation.

You are being done away with and replaced by something new—that is what the cabinet secretary says.

We will come on to that in due course.

Thank you.

So, you can completely refute the comment that was made by one of the headteachers who spoke to us, who said that Education Scotland placed little value on the support for learning role.

It is important that you have made that clear. I appreciate that.

Willie Rennie has a quick supplementary question.

I am sorry to interrupt, but are you agreeing with Graeme Dey’s question that it is important to establish a new baseline for the gap? You have just said that we do not know what the gap is, but we need to know what the gap is before we can follow through on the rest of your answer.

So we should get to a point at which we can quantify that.