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That pertains to a very small area.

So, do you expect them to pay for some of those services with PEF money, given the reduction—

Those are really useful examples. We have heard evidence from Dundee City Council that it does not know how it will cope with the cuts and that that will be extremely challenging.

This will be my last attempt in this area, convener. If Education Scotland did not raise concerns, were concerns raised by anybody else in the discussions that you mentioned?

That analysis covered one specific area of the curriculum, which is a core area for assessment. Could that be a robust measurement that could be translated across the whole of Scotland?

It sounds to me as though there are individual pieces of work to assess, many of which were done during the pandemic. However, I am interested in whether what we are doing, what is proposed and what we are evaluating will meet the scale of the challenge. I would like to see Education Scotland produce that information for us if you think that doing so is within your remit.

Sorry, convener.

We have seen the qualitative analysis, but has any quantitative analysis been done on the scale of the gap?

I am conscious that we have received some evidence—through the Ken Muir report on initial teacher education and discussions around it—that some forms were put in place almost a generation ago and have been replicated elsewhere, but we have not kept them up to date. I know that we have a full work programme for the next year at least, but, perhaps later in the session, after we have been through the legislative process, the subjects that are dealt with in the petition might be addressed in a future inquiry. That is not on the immediate horizon, but I am sure that it would come up if there was another discussion about initial teacher education. The committee might want to have that discussion at some point, and I certainly think that there would be grounds for doing so.

I want to pick up on the line of questioning that the convener started, about the change to the formula. Prior to the pandemic, we had what we were told was very limited progress against the Government’s targets on closing the attainment gap—those are Audit Scotland’s words.

We know that, following the pandemic, the gap in attainment between the richest and the poorest groups is the largest that it has ever been, and that it has grown significantly. We all recognise the impact of the pandemic on that gap, given its impact on our most deprived communities. Therefore, I find it a little bit surprising to hear our witness from Inverclyde Council talking about the council’s exit strategy. Surely the exit strategy should be to ensure that those kids have better attainment, rather than to ask ourselves how we stop spending money on it? I want to explore the rationale of that a little bit.

According to the committee’s papers, the reduction in Inverclyde is 47 per cent and the local authority area is consistently among the most deprived communities in Scotland. At the other end of the table is our witness from East Renfrewshire, which is consistently one of the most affluent local authority areas in Scotland, and its funding is up by 43 per cent.

We all recognise that what we might call hidden poverty exists in every community and that such figures mask numbers. By making this change, are we are moving away from using the rationale of severe multiple deprivation in communities and towards something more general? To me, that has been a founding principle of how we have dealt with poverty in Scotland over a generation—or, at the very least, how we have talked about poverty, as dealing with it is a different matter. Has that rationale changed? I ask Ruth Binks to start.

I am not sure that that answers my question about young people now—those who have left school.

I have one more specific question before I turn to Mark Ratter. Will you use PEF money to make up for cuts to SAC funding?

My question is at a slight tangent to the points about headship, but it is relevant to how the attainment challenge work is governed and run. We have talked about numbers, but data that was recently published in Tes magazine showed a significant decline in the number of deputes and others who actually want to become headteachers. You have talked about the work that is done with headteachers. Why are people less attracted to that job than they were previously?