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Please do, Ruth.

If I can come on to the issue of additionally—

My questioning follows in a slightly similar vein. If the new national education agency was put in place according to the vision that you have outlined, Professor Muir, could we get rid of the regional improvement collaboratives? Are they one thing that could be scrapped, along the lines of Fergus Ewing’s suggestion?

It will be three years before we get into a new settled pattern, and the young people who are going through the system at the moment will not get the benefit of those changes. If we reflect on what has happened in the past couple of weeks—the study guides that were produced by the SQA were memorably described to me by a geography teacher in Glasgow as the “Mariana Trench of uselessness”—we can see that the organisation is failing now. I absolutely agree with the need for strategic intent and with where you are pitching the long term strategy, but is there not also a need for short-term leadership?

That is really useful. Thank you.

That policy landscape is a very busy place. I asked the Scottish Parliament information centre to give me the total number of working groups that the Scottish Government had set up for education, and it was unable to do so. The answer was “loads”. There were so many, it was unable to count them or track them down. We can see that in the announcements in the chamber on the commission of your own work. In each statement that the cabinet secretary makes, another three or four crop up. All those bodies then produce the kind of policies that we end up talking about.

I have an issue with what you identify at section 13 in the report: the transition period between where we are now and where we have to get to. I worry about the pace of that transition. I understand what you identify in terms of the twin-track approach and the need to ensure that there is an agency that sits alongside the other one, but we have urgent problems in Scottish education. We have the biggest attainment gap that we have ever had and the lowest attainment among primary school pupils, and no assessment has been made of the impact of the pandemic on the rest of our education system. There has, so far, been a complete refusal by the Government to do that work, but international evidence suggests that it is a very difficult situation, and that is what we hear from teachers. Are we changing quickly enough to address the problems in the system?

I thank you both—in particular, Professor Muir, for your report. Your care for young people in Scotland and their future prospects and the long-term aspiration that you have for the country shine through on every page. Thank you for all that work.

I will focus on the short term, if that is okay. My colleagues have asked some questions about leadership. Your report and the commission to do the work were precipitated by a crisis of confidence in the SQA because of the disastrous handling of exams through the pandemic. That is why you are sitting here today, and it is why we have the report in front of us. We are now looking at that organisation staying in place for another three exam diets—the current one and another two. Should we have confidence in its leadership and their decisions if there is another crisis?

The regional improvement collaboratives have budgets and seconded staff, so they create their own bureaucracy. Mr Ewing’s questioning along that line was about that middle ground. They are intermediate organisations. Essentially, they are the rusting hulks of the failed reform agenda of the previous cabinet secretary. They are the left-over result of an attempt to remove the control of education policy from local councils.

Having spoken to teachers, I tend to agree that some of those collaboratives have had some value. Indeed, what you have described—being led by teachers, sharing, empowering teachers and giving them the information that they need—sounds a little like what has been got out of the regional improvement collaboratives that have worked. Are we not looking at another duplication?

Therefore, in essence, the legislation contains the powers to do the same things but in a slightly different form. One of the principal criticisms, and one of the reasons that the UK—England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland—has one of the worst records globally for its response to the pandemic, is that we based our response on plans for the previous pandemics. That is always a problem. Other countries have made similar mistakes, but ours have been particularly acute. At the start of the pandemic, we were thinking that we were in a flu situation, but we were not; it is a different form of virus. We put in place and used the plans and ideas that we had waiting, but we were wrong in that regard. You understand the critique and concern.

I understand that there is a balance to strike with regard to preparation and putting in place enabling legislation, powers or something from the shelf, as the convener suggested. However, if we do not really learn the lessons and analyse the situation that we are in, is that not the worst of all worlds?

We should consider the weight of the evidence. Last week, the Government presented an analysis of the responses to the consultation, in which it asked us to disregard 96 per cent of the responses because they were opposed to the bill. The remaining 4 per cent of responses came from those who had given evidence at committee, and none of them—nobody—thought that the legislation was a good idea.

You talk about building consensus. It seems that you have managed to build a consensus of opposition to what you are putting in place. Those who make up the 4 per cent are people who provide Government services, and they have issued caveats and made reasonable and reasoned objections. There is no support for the bill—nobody thinks that it is the right thing to do.

If you were endeavouring to seek consensus, you have achieved it, but it is a consensus of opposition. Have you got it wrong in the way that you are proceeding?