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Absolutely.

Excuse me, cabinet secretary. People in Charleston and Dundee are losing staff who work directly with their children. Can you address those concerns instead of giving numbers?

I think that I just found the money, cabinet secretary.

I was just reflecting on Mr Mundell’s questions about the design of the policy. When we put some questions to Education Scotland last week, I asked it whether it had raised any concerns about the impact on existing challenge authorities of the new formulation and how it was designed, and it said that it had not. I asked whether anyone else had raised any such concerns and it said, “Not particularly.” Do you recall whether those things were talked through around the methodology design? Did you raise those concerns?

Cabinet secretary, your failure to win arguments about your budget with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy is, to be frank, not just a concern that we have here. That is—

To be clear, I have had conversations with other directors of education who are perhaps less clear on that point, so I am just trying to get clarity for them.

I refer to a report that you will not have in front of you from Dundee City Council, which is dealing with a 79 per cent cut in its Scottish attainment challenge funding. That report of 24 January 2022 identifies 106 posts that will have to be cut as a result of the £5 million reduction in funding from the Government. Jim Thewliss, a former headteacher from Dundee, was in front of the committee a few weeks ago. He was trying to understand how Dundee would cope, and he did not think that it could on that basis. The report says that

“work will no longer be centrally funded from this funding as schools can now procure this service if required”.

I think that that backs up what you have said about using PEF to pay for SAC cuts. Is that fair?

To be fair, it was your policy, not my policy, to ignore those pupils. It is good that money is now available to local authorities. For example, under the new formula, Fife Council is up £2 million, but it has lost £290 million in the past decade through the cuts that you have made. It is understandable if Fife Council welcomes that £2 million, but that does not deal with the issue that I am focusing on. The challenge authorities were picked on the basis of multiple deprivation, deep poverty and huge barriers. We are talking about more than £6 million this year, and that figure will rise to £25 million over the course of this parliamentary session. Surely the Government can find it in its heart to put that money back in order to protect those 106 posts. Those people include speech and language therapists who work with the absolutely poorest kids. Those are the posts that are under threat.

Okay. I appreciate that.

With the greatest respect, I think that I did identify the underspend.

You referred to some of our evidence sessions. In evidence to us on 9 May, a headteacher in Inverclyde said that teachers are “raging” and that the single best thing that could be done to improve the system would be to reverse the biggest cut that you are making.

Andrea Bradley, from the Educational Institute of Scotland, said that she is

“absolutely appalled at the levels of funding cuts to ... the ... challenge authorities. It beggars belief. We do not understand why those cuts would be made at a time when we know that poverty levels are rising, when the pandemic has absolutely bludgeoned some communities and we know that individual families and the young people within those families are struggling as a result of Covid.”—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 20 April 2022; c 31.]

The NASUWT said:

“It is clearly not right to be making those swingeing cuts”.—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 20 April 2022; c 32.]

Jim Thewliss, from School Leaders Scotland, said that it is

“immoral to take away that funding.”—[Official Report, Education, Children and Young People Committee, 20 April 2022; c 34.]

Will you speak directly to those communities? Are you prepared to apologise for the impact of your decisions? If you are saying that you will not put the money back, will you apologise?

I already have done.