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Of course, I commented on Mr Rennie. [Laughter.]

I am pleased to be back at the committee to update on progress on education reform. I provided updates to Parliament in November and December last year, and the Minister for Higher and Further Education appeared before the committee last week.

The International Council of Education Advisers report that was published in November recommends that we do not change structures too much in the short to medium term and that we should focus on improving teaching professionals and their development, collaboration and innovation. That is at the forefront of my thinking. We cannot unleash the potential of reform without taking the teaching profession with us.

The consultation on the proposed education bill closed just before Christmas. It sought views on proposals for the new qualifications body and the approach to inspection. A series of events heard the views of almost 1,000 teachers and many others working in education, and my thanks go to all of them. We will continue to engage throughout the reform process, including, critically, with the voices of children and young people.

The role of leadership in the national bodies will be crucial in transforming practice and culture. In November, I appointed the new Scottish Qualifications Authority chair, Shirley Rogers, who is the first woman to hold the post, and I approved the appointment of an interim chief inspector of education, Janie McManus.

I also announced my intention to initiate a curriculum improvement cycle from this year. That will include curriculum content, the role of knowledge, transitions between primary and secondary, and alignment between the broad general education and senior phase.

My view is that maths education should be the initial focus for improvement. We will recruit a maths specialist who will lead on that while working alongside our national response for improving mathematics, and we will seek input from teachers later this year.

The reform bill will be laid before Parliament this year. It will progress the establishment of the centre of teaching excellence and decisions on the reviews that I received last year. I remain committed to debating the proposals for the independent review of qualifications and assessment early this year; it is crucial that those recommendations are examined thoroughly.

The current generation of young people had their formal education disrupted for almost two years by a global pandemic. Last year, on-going industrial action further hampered the continuity of schooling. Scottish Government figures that were published in December suggest that school attendance has fallen to a record low. All of that is compounded by changes in behaviour and relationships in our classrooms. Evidence from England and Wales that was published last week by the Centre for Social Justice spoke about the fraying disconnect between home and schooling post-pandemic.

Scotland’s challenges are not unique and reform cannot sit in a vacuum of expectation, informed by the cosy consensus that Walter Humes warned the committee of. It must try to deliver improved outcomes for our young people and, as the ICEA argued last year, a clear and beneficial impact on the learning experience of young people and their teachers should be the acid test of any proposal. Reform needs to improve outcomes for our young people, build on quality learning and teaching, support our teaching workforce and engage parents and carers.

I look forward to answering the committee’s questions and to hearing any suggestions that committee members might have.

The counter-argument is that, in the past, we compelled young people to take subjects that they absolutely hated.

Indeed—I have flashbacks to standard grade chemistry.

If you speak to secondary school teachers, they will tell you stories about teaching S4 classes that included pupils who hated the subject and did not want to be there. We need to be a bit careful, because some young people do not necessarily want to study physics and chemistry until the end of S4, but the way in which their timetable offer is constructed might funnel them in that direction.

Some schools are really good at building a timetable around pupil choice. Some schools ask their young people what they want to study and the timetable is then built according to pupil choice. That is a much more democratic way of building a timetable. Other schools use a more traditional method that involves creating a timetable according to how many staff and teachers they have.

The point about demand is important. When I was teaching, in 2015, two or three young people in my school wanted to study advanced higher modern studies. There is a question about whether a school should run a course with three people and one well-paid middle leader. Another school in the town in which I taught at the time delivered an advanced higher modern studies course, so the young people went to that school to study for that qualification. Demand has a role to play, and we should be mindful of that.

Ms Maguire’s other point related to discouraging young people from taking second subjects in which they might not do well. When I taught in Edinburgh, we had a whole-school policy that, if a pupil did not attain 33.33 per cent in their prelim, they could not sit the final exam. I remember that, in about 2011, headteachers came to an all-staff meeting to talk about moving away from that policy because the city had a policy, informed by Scottish Government policy, to close the attainment gap, which meant that young people should have the opportunity to sit a final exam. There was a need for a real culture shift among the staff in the school, including me, because we had thought that, if young people had not attained a certain percentage, they should not be allowed the opportunity to sit the exam. We have moved so far beyond that, and we are now presenting those young people for qualifications.

A counter-argument to that, Ms Maguire, is that some of those young people might not be ready for qualifications, but the answer to that is continuous assessment. Indeed, that is one of the recommendations flowing from Hayward. It is all about tracking, monitoring and supporting our young people throughout the year to ensure that they are ready for any final examinations.

We must also think about the percentages associated with the final examination. At the moment, for most qualifications, the final exam has a high weighting, which puts a lot of pressure on young people. I would argue that we need to look more generally at how we allocate marks throughout the year through continuous assessment, and we should be mindful of the opportunities that that would provide us with, too.

Some of the barriers that schools face go back to the challenge that arises with regard to prescription and flexibility. We have an extremely flexible curriculum—some say that it is too flexible—with only maths and English mandated until the end of S4 and everything else optional. I am keen to hear from the committee on this, but perhaps that is something that we should reconsider. It is not in one of the many reports on my desk at the current time, and I do not think there is a direct recommendation on prescription in the Hayward report. It would kind of fly in the face of CFE. However, the argument for flexibility also has to meet learners’ needs, and sometimes a challenge can arise in that respect.

I know from experience that the running of courses depends on the staff that a school has, and that does not necessarily meet the needs of learners. In that respect, we need to think through reform and how we deliver on the entitlements that Professor Hayward talked about, which might mean looking at some of the thorny issues around prescription. It will be challenging—indeed, I think again of that fourth-year class and having a number of young people in front of you who do not want to be there and do not want to study your subject—but there is something to be said for having a breadth of offer in our curriculum, and CFE gives, or is meant to give, such breadth until the end of S3. The question is about how we ensure that the same thing happens with qualifications.

I cannot get rid of electoral cycles—fortunately, because we do not have a dictatorship, which is a good thing. However, we need to be pragmatic, and that is a political challenge for all parties—not least my own, which is in government, but for the Government of the day in 10 years’ time, too. We all need to be mindful that the trajectory that a Scottish Government operates on means that we have to operate with a balanced budget. We need a forecast of the savings that need to be taken across Government.

The member makes specific points about education. The Deputy First Minister is going to set out more detail of that at stage 1 of the budget process, but I am more than happy to hear members’ suggestions in relation to how that should operate. As the cabinet secretary responsible for education, my personal view is that we need to protect the education budget as best we can. The budget settlement has done that, but we need to be mindful of the fact that investment in education is not just about my portfolio area. Throughout the budget process, every cabinet secretary is keen to make those points.

I believe that an investment in education is a preventative investment that can help to alleviate pressures in other portfolio areas. That needs to be better understood through the public service reform agenda, recognising that taking investment away from certain parts of my portfolio might have unintended consequences for other parts of Government.

The invest-to-save option, which the DFM is also pursuing, gives us an opportunity to do things radically differently in education. On the reform agenda—again, we will talk about this later—Mr Dey was at committee last week talking about some of his work. There is much more opportunity for us, in education, to take a holistic approach to reform that will help to drive efficiencies but also help to improve outcomes for our young people.

I do not think that, at this time in the financial year, in budgets of the past, we would usually have published our public sector pay policy. However, I recognise the need to work with those agencies and organisations. We did so last year and we have done so in previous years. This time last year, I would have been in front of the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee to talk about some of the challenges that we were facing in relation to ScotRail. We worked with ScotRail around the confines of public sector pay for that organisation in setting its approach to resolving a pay dispute at the time.

We will continue to work with the organisations that we support, but, to be blunt, there is significant financial pressure on this year’s budget—a financial pressure that I do not think the Government has ever faced—which has been compounded by inflationary pressures. We all—including our public bodies—need to be mindful of that with regard to what that will mean for the offers that they are able to make this year in relation to public sector pay. However, I do not want to say too much on public sector pay policy, because that is outwith my remit.

It is quite a general question. I gave the specific example of transport as an area that came to mind in which I played a role in Government in bringing about a resolution to a dispute. We worked with ScotRail at the time to bring about that result.

My view, as cabinet secretary, is very much that we will support those agencies in trying to square what I recognise will be a hugely challenging financial settlement for them. It is a hugely challenging settlement for Government, too, which has meant that I have had to make some pretty tough and not particularly nice choices in relation to the prioritisation of the budget. I am not sure that, in an ideal world, any cabinet secretary would want to make such choices, and I am sure that members around the table will sit in other committees and hear cabinet secretaries say something similar. However, I think that, through this budget, we have been able to best protect education.

I recognise the point that the member makes, and I will continue to work with those organisations in supporting them to bring about resolutions. We do not yet have a public sector pay position, and I do not want to prejudge the outcome of that. Nevertheless, any cabinet secretary would tell you—I will say the same, from my experience—that it is hugely important that we work with those organisations to bring about resolutions and to ensure that they can deliver reform, which we will talk about later. To some extent, that will give us an opportunity to make some of the efficiencies that public service reform requests that the Government deliver.

As I mentioned, I listened to Mr Dey’s contribution to the committee last week. I think that the trajectory in relation to skills reform is in a similar position to that of reform in our school space, which I will talk about later.

There are opportunities through reform for efficiencies, and we need to be mindful of that in the current challenging financial context. Mr Dey spoke with great passion last week about the opportunities that colleges see in that endeavour, and I think that the reform agenda lends itself to our working more closely together. Currently, responsibilities between portfolios—and, if I may say so to my officials, even between directorates—can often feel quite siloed. There is a need for close portfolio collaboration in relation to the budget, particularly given the challenge that we all face at present.

I am keen to support Mr Dey in his work in leading on the skills side of reform. As the committee will know—again, we will go on to talk about this—I have reformed some of the governance arrangements for skills reform, to bring skills into a space alongside schools so that we can take a cross-portfolio approach to delivering change across the system. However, that must be funded. I spoke earlier to Michelle Thomson’s point about school reform—there is a budget to support that through the school reform programme, and we will continue to work with the college sector on how we can best support colleges, too, in that endeavour.