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Does that mean that every young person will have a named person within social work?

I am relaxed about the term “named person”, but there we are.

Thank you. No interrogation is likely to be easy.

Convener, you will move me on if I am taking up too much time, as I have a lot of questions to ask—

I want to drill down into the numbers a bit more. Scott Richardson-Read, from the Association for Real Change Scotland, talked about what the number of young people in the school estate who require transition plans could be. In 2019, 128,000 young people were capable of leaving school between S4 and S6, and 47,500 did so. He estimated that about 20 per cent of young people leaving school are likely to have some form of additional support need and, therefore, potentially qualify for a transition plan. That 20 per cent would be known to education and other services, but up to 37 per cent could require a transition plan. Those figures are dramatically higher than those in the financial memorandum—there is significant disparity. Do you have any comments on that?

Perhaps I had better keep things moving.

I acknowledge that answer, and I will weigh that up when we look at the evidence.

I see in the financial memorandum that it is assumed that many of the costs associated with the work in school will not require any additional resources. I will read from the Scottish Parliament information centre’s briefing:

“while the child remains at school, the costs of the guidance teacher’s, or other member of the school’s pastoral care staff’s, time would fall within existing resources on the basis that the local authority officer will already have existing pastoral duties for, and responsibilities for, the child.”

I suspect that teachers and their colleagues think that they are pretty burdened with work already, without all that additional work. Do you have any reflections on those comments?

I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy for introducing the bill. I also thank Bill Scott for his support, and I acknowledge the work of Johann Lamont, who I see is following the proceedings.

Even when we are dealing with a good bill, we still have to scrutinise it pretty robustly. I ask Pam please to take the questions in that spirit.

Members have asked about the financial memorandum. It suggests that each transition planning meeting will take, on average, two hours and will require an hour for preparation and an hour for follow-up action. It is suggested that there would be between two and four meetings a year. Andy Miller, from the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities, disputed those numbers and said that they were unrealistic and did not take account of the complexities that could be involved. On reflection, do you think that the numbers are a bit ambitious?

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?

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.

I hope that it will be just one question, convener.

During the discussion—which has been fascinating—we have been talking about whether there is a mechanism to make sure that the young people who are already entitled to good-quality provision get the transitions to which they are entitled or whether, as Scott Richardson-Read suggested, the bill would open the door to a much broader range of young people who might not have that entitlement, and whether there is a tension between those who are not getting what they are already entitled to and those who would become entitled under the bill.

If the bill were to be passed, would clear guidance need to be given that local authorities and other bodies would have to prioritise based on the resources available? In other words, might the bill give people an entitlement on paper, but one that would never be realised in practice unless there is a substantial increase in resource?

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?