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Thank you, cabinet secretary. There is a lot in that. Without seeing it written down, we, as a committee, cannot really analyse it. Will the Government be absolutely clear where the baseline is on which it will be judged in terms of maintaining and increasing teaching numbers and teaching support assistants? Will that be crystal clear when we get that information?

I am looking at teacher numbers. I can see in Glasgow City Council that—thankfully—from 2021 to 2022 more than 100 new teachers were appointed, so there is positive news in Glasgow. However, overall, there was a 0.2 per cent dip in teacher numbers across all schools in Scotland.

I am not quite sure what the baseline is for judging progress, though, so I refer you, cabinet secretary, to the non-recurring funds that were given to local authorities in July 2020, August 2020 and March 2021. They came to £140 million and were for more teachers and teaching assistants, at the height of Covid, to do all that we could to support schools and education. When we look at the recurring funds, we see that the total is roughly the same.

Do we have data on how many teachers and teaching assistants were employed following the non-recurring funding in those three periods? That would allow us to compare where we were before the recurring funds were given and how the non-recurring funds were spent for that particular funding year.

We look forward to getting those figures, which the committee will want to scrutinise.

In its early days, the committee had a discussion about schools and local authorities employing teachers and assistants on temporary contracts as quickly as they could to support education during Covid. It was recognised that they were not necessarily the right education facility, with the right skill set or where you would want them to be going forward. What monitoring does the Government do in relation to temporary contracts that were awarded at the height of Covid, and where we will be in that regard going forward?

You have made that point really well. This might be absolutely the right thing to do, but we do not want to give people rights in principle if the reality is that those rights can never be exercised without a substantial increase in resources when it is not clear where those would come from.

Rebecca Williams and Tracey Francis, do you share that concern?

Okay. Thank you.

Before I bring Dr Whelan in, can I nudge you a little bit more on that? If the bill is required, surely many more young people will be captured, including transitioning students who are off the radar just now or do not have the plans that are required. Do you agree that, if the bill works, the figure of 29 per cent will go up quite substantially, so there must be significant resource issues?

There was an interesting exchange near the start of the meeting when I asked Anne-Marie Sturrock whether the bill was required. Anne-Marie and Dr Whelan had mentioned that it will bring clarity and will more consistently identify young people with disabilities or additional support needs, irrespective of the current position with local authorities. What might the resource impact be on colleges and universities? If the expectation is that more young people will be identified more regularly and more consistently, will colleges and universities be able to support the planning process by taking part in meetings and ensuring that the agreed support is in place for students, who will come from multiple local authorities? I know that further education has more of a footprint in schools than higher education perhaps does, but are we anticipating additional workload? Has that been quantified? Is further and higher education in a position to deliver on the significant expectations in the legislation? Annie-Marie Sturrock, have you given any thought to that?

Okay. I have one final question to ask. Mike Corbett, I will come to you first and will give everyone the opportunity to respond if they wish.

We know that most young people will come through a local authority route or an education route, but not necessarily everyone will. Young people going to university may have left school, and there is that flux during the summer, so local authorities might not always be best placed to take the lead. There is an expectation, however, that local authorities would take the lead in transition cases. Should that always be the case, or is more flexibility required?

Thank you for adding that.

That is incredibly helpful; I just want to make sure that Colleges Scotland and the further education sector have thought about quantifying what additional resource might be required from their end. Has consideration been given to quantifying that additional resource?