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Is the issue the availability of subjects?

Would you like Mr Gregory to come in on that?

As I understand it, it is exactly the same. The purpose of that confirmation is to give reassurance. I do not know whether you have experienced this, but on my visits to schools, I have met headteachers who were anxious about that funding coming to an end. Therefore, I wanted to give them certainty.

As I said to Ms Duncan-Glancy, what that looks like will, quite rightly, be a decision for the next Government. However, in order to give headteachers that bridging support, it was important that we confirmed that extension beyond next financial year.

I have not been presented with clear-cut examples of the health service not meeting that need. On CAMHS in particular, data was published last week that showed that the Government has met the required timescale on CAMHS referral waiting times, which I think is 12 weeks. That is welcome news. Therefore, children and young people should not be waiting in excess of a year for that support. That improvement has been driven by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care with the aim of supporting some of our most vulnerable young people.

Of course, CAMHS is the extreme end of the system. From an educational perspective, we always want to try to help support health and wellbeing in schools. It is one of the curriculum areas in the curriculum for excellence, but we also provide funding that is separate to PEF of £15 million for school counsellors. Money from that goes to every secondary school in Scotland, so there should be that provision in every secondary school.

In the post-pandemic period, society has many challenges in relation to mental health. The issue is not limited to children and young people, and many parents are struggling. Some of the interventions that we see, such as the one that I gave the example of at the primary school in Kirkcaldy, are about supporting the mental health of mums. In supporting better mental health for the mums and the carers of young people, the initiatives support better educational outcomes.

More broadly, there are challenges with mental health. I have not been presented with examples of where the health service is not making that intervention and the need is being mopped up by education, but if Mr Briggs or others have such examples, I would be keen to look at them, because we want to ensure that there has not been an erosion of the PEF and that it is being used to support the people that it is intended to support.

Of course, PEF money may well be used to, for example, support nurture in schools. I have seen examples of that in a primary school in Glasgow, where the third sector was brought in to get primary 6 pupils to talk about their emotions. That is not something that, as a secondary teacher, I would have countenanced teaching my young people to do, but teachers are now having to instil in their young people things such as the ability to cope with emotions and talk about their feelings, perhaps because of pupils’ frustrations in relation to having to deal with other challenges.

The Government looked at the programme prior to my time in office—I think that it was around the time of the committee’s report—and reflected on the way in which funding was allocated. There was a bit of learning for the Government around that and we moved to the strategic equity fund model, which essentially accepts—the challenge was put to us by local authorities and others—that poverty exists in all local authorities. The move away from the nine challenge authorities to a more equitable distribution model involved a bit of learning for the Government in relation to how we can better support local authorities, so I accept that. We also now have a team of attainment advisers in Education Scotland, led by Dr David Gregory, who is on my right. They provide targeted support to individual local authorities. I do not think that those attainment advisers were in place at the launch of the SAC funding.

To reflect the real ask here—to give you that reassurance—the appointments process will have to take account of any amendments that are agreed to at stages 2 and 3.

In a previous response, I set out some of the progress that has been made. The positive destination statistic is a real mark of progress. A cohort of young people, certainly during my teaching career, were leaving school without any qualifications. I do not want to underestimate the change that has happened in Scotland’s secondary schools, particularly in the past 10 years, to give a chance to young people who were often leaving school at the end of S4 without qualifications. The positive destination measure is really welcome.

We might come on to this, but I was listening to some of the exchanges on the radio last Thursday morning between Mr Briggs and the headteacher of the Gaelic school in Glasgow. She made the point that we need to look at the totality of measurements in relation to the achievements of those young people. It might not be the five-highers measurement that we all experienced when we were at school. The breadth of qualifications that our young people are now achieving is quite remarkable. There is learning in that for the Government, and we might come on to that in the question-and-answer session, but it is important that we recognise the totality of achievement.

In every school that I visit, almost weekly, the different pathways that are on offer and the school-college partnerships are transformative. They did not exist 10 years ago. SAC has fundamentally changed the way in which schools meet the needs of our learners. I accept that there is still a challenge. The poverty-related attainment gap needs to close. We are doing all that we can to work with local authorities on that, but I am happy to hear challenge from the committee today on that point, because it is important that we focus on where the difference can be made. Some of that will be expanded on in relation to the PEF sampling work. You raised that with me in the chamber during the stage 1 debate, convener, and I am keen to share details of that work with you.

That will be a matter for your constituents in 2026, convener.

I put on the record my recusal from involvement in the Promise, due to my wife’s role in that, but I think that I am permitted to talk more broadly about care-experienced young people. I will allow officials to correct me if that is not the case.

I am told that I am able to talk about that. The gap has been narrowing since 2009-10. I know that Mr Rennie does not like that measurement, but we need to look at the trajectory of improvement between care-experienced young leavers and all children. The narrowing of that gap is welcome news. The gap has widened slightly for lower-level qualifications—across level 4—but it is still half the size that it was in 2009-10 and narrower than it was before Covid. As we often see in August when the exam results are published, to some extent, we need to discount the Covid years, because, in those years, different rules were applied to, for example, the qualifications system. With regard to the Covid measurement, the gap is still narrower than it was, but there remains a sizeable gap in relation to care-experienced young people’s educational outcomes, so we need to do more to focus local authorities on driving the improvements that are required.

In response to Mr Briggs’s question about attendance, I spoke about the role of virtual headteachers. They have been doing a lot of work at the local level in supporting care-experienced young people to access education and to come back to schools. There are a number of examples of how that works on the ground that officials might want to talk about—I see that David Leng has a wee note about that. The virtual headteachers programme has been used in a number of local authorities and is making a real difference to the lives of care-experienced young people, but there is still challenge in that regard.

Do you mean if the draft order does not pass today?