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This is quite a serious matter because the Government has outcomes that it wants to be delivered and there will clearly be an element in Government if they are not delivered. Therefore, we should surely focus on anything that helps to achieve them.

There is also an issue with who owns the NPF. It seems to be a whole-society approach. There does not seem to be a focused driver for it. Again, people feel that it is not being prioritised as much as it was initially. It has been around now for 14 or 15 years and there is a feeling that it should be re-energised a wee bit with a focus on who is driving it so that people are aware of exactly who that is.

It is important that the national performance framework is seen to underpin such documents. It is not always easy for people who read them to second guess the Government. That might be what the Government has in mind but, if it is not there in black and white, people will wonder whether the Government is really prioritising the NPF in the way that it should. That is what I am saying about the strategy, not that it diverges in any way from the NPF.

I recall that the Improvement Service was very messianic about best practice when the sadly departed Colin Mair was at the helm.

What about best practice?

I will open out the meeting to questions from colleagues.

To be fair, I did not really think that the career advisers were saying that about going to university, but that is the message that a lot of young people are picking up. I have raised the issue in a number of fora, because I think that it is certainly something that schools need to address more directly. I know that, when I have held employment fairs, some schools have been very snotty about sending kids along—even kids who are not even going forward for exams, never mind those who are likely to go to university. Therefore, I think that graduate apprenticeships are hugely positive.

I want to stay with the issue of demography for a wee bit longer. The figures are quite stark. They show that, by 2045, the number of people of a pensionable age in Scotland is expected to increase by 21 per cent, while the number of people in the workforce is expected to decline by 2 per cent and the number of children is expected to decline by 22 per cent. That shows what the long-term situation is going to be. With 192,000 fewer people in the working-age population, the economy is going to have to be a lot more productive if we are to cope with the people of pensionable age at that point—I include pretty much everyone in this room in that number, of course.

I want to ask about the migration figures specifically, because they are slightly ambiguous. Your submission says:

“Almost twice as many people left Scotland and moved overseas (31,300 out migration in 2019/2020 compared to 19,700 in 2018/2019)”.

When you say “overseas”, are you including England and that, or are you talking about countries beyond the United Kingdom? Last year, the birth rate in Scotland was 48,000. If we are losing 31,000 people in one year, that is pretty disconcerting at a time when the workforce is shrinking.

Do you know anything about the age, skills and educational profiles of the people who are leaving Scotland? As I have said in this committee before, many people come to Scotland to retire, but we are losing a lot of people in their 20s and 30s who are moving to the rest of the UK or beyond.

What are we doing to attract more people from the rest of the United Kingdom to live and work in Scotland?

I am sorry that there is a lot in there—there is so much to ask about, and I am trying not to ask everything.

We will open up the session.

Thank you very much.

I thank my colleagues around the table. I will touch on one area that committee members have not covered. You talked about delivery of priorities, and one of the focal points of the national performance framework is continuous improvement. Of course, it used to be more target driven. In response to Douglas Lumsden, you talked about the need to move at pace to eliminate child poverty.

You have said that you want the outcomes to be delivered in a less patchy form. However, if we have continuous improvement, what does that mean? Does that mean that the Government is satisfied with an improvement rate of 1 per cent a year, 5 per cent, 10 per cent or something else? If we are not going to return to having targets, would milestones be a more effective way of assessing where we are in reaching each outcome? Would that enable you to incentivise and encourage organisations that might not be doing as well as they could be?

I asked about part-time work not only because many people prefer it but because a lot of people do not feel that there is a full-time job in the area for which they are qualified or in which they are skilled. With regard to skills, I visited one of the major employers in my constituency during national apprentice week, and a number of apprentices to whom I talked all said the same thing to me. When they were thinking about a career post-school, they were told by their careers advisers, “If you don’t go to university, you’re a failure.” If one person says that to you, you take it as anecdotal, but if a whole wheen of people say the same thing, you have to think, “There’s an issue there.”

In your opening statement, you said that you have 800 careers advisers in Scottish schools. What kind of message is being given to younger people? We are trying to build more houses in Scotland, for example, but we need more roofers, plasterers, electricians, plumbers—you name it—as well as engineering skills blah blah blah. If everyone goes to university, there will be a shortage of people to go into apprenticeships, particularly as we do not have the same number of migrants coming into the country and the birth rate is at an historic low. Are we not facing a perfect storm in the years ahead?