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I appreciate that. With regard to spending on ventilation, £10 million was recently allocated to recording the amount of CO₂ in classrooms so that teachers would know whether to open the windows. Has Audit Scotland or the Accounts Commission looked at the question of whether school buildings are now prepared for the pandemic that remains with us and how public spending is being used to adapt them in order to prevent infection?

Fergus Ewing’s line of questioning was useful. Across the United Kingdom, we have the Barnett formula, which delivers an additional £14 billion of spending to Scotland, specifically to provide services across our broader geographic area. I suggest to the Accounts Commission that it would be useful if the piece of work that it is doing looked at the school building programme that was provided by the Scottish Government via the Scottish Futures Trust to see what the match-up was between the aspirations of the policy and how it was delivered.

Kaukab Stewart made a point about private finance initiative building schemes and other such models. It would be useful to ensure that work on that includes non-profit-distribution models and all the various forms of private finance initiative that the Scottish National Party has used since it came to power in 2007—I know that Audit Scotland has previously identified those models as being forms of private finance initiative. It would be useful if the committee could see the full scale of those models.

I have to say that I am slightly worried by those answers. After all, we are talking about £1 billion of taxpayers’ money, but at times I have found how it has been allocated impenetrable. I have seen the Education Scotland reports, which are case studies of best practice that might be copied elsewhere, but the fact is that practice across Scotland is hugely variable. Moreover, going back to my learned colleagues’ earlier comments, I think that there is very little about how we tie all this up with the outcomes. As politicians and policy makers, we need greater granularity on such matters; we need to know an awful lot more about what the money is being spent on and how it is delivering change for some of the most vulnerable young people in our society. At the moment, it is pretty difficult to find that sort of thing out.

I have one last question to ask, if I may, convener.

I have a question for the Auditor General about his report on education that was produced prior to this year’s Scottish Parliament election. The report concluded that the equality gap in education remained far too wide and fell far short of the Scottish Government’s aims. We have been living through the pandemic since that work was done. As far as we can tell, there has been huge disruption, the impact of which has been very unequal and has affected some of the most deprived and least privileged groups in society.

Do you have a sense of whether any work is being done on the impact of the pandemic on the sorts of outcomes that you looked at in your report?

Are you aware of any work to quantify the general impact of lost learning across Scotland? I understand your description of how local and national education authorities reacted to deal with the immediate impact of the pandemic. Do you have a sense of whether any work has been done to assess the longer-term impact on children and young people?

That is fine. Thank you.

We will wait to see the correspondence—

The unholy mess at the SQA did not emerge overnight. Statutory measures are not the first action that the EHRC would take. The organisation would have had numerous chances to reform its practices over the period concerned. I have been told that the issue relates to 112 policies at the SQA, including awarding meetings for national courses, awarding body approval policy, equality of access to SQA qualifications, grading for national courses, the qualifications framework, Disclosure Scotland policy and the SQA skills framework. All of those, as overarching policies, pertain to the past two years. What analysis have your officials done of whether the situation opens the Scottish Government to any potential legal challenge from young people who feel that they have been let down?

You will respond further.

From the correspondence that I have received, it sounds as though I have had contact with staff more recently than you. On that basis, it would be good if you could follow that up with staff, to check that the process is as you have described and that they are satisfied with it. If we can clear that up, that would be great.