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I thank Mr Rennie for that. First, I will respond to the absence stats and to that measure in particular. I have mentioned already that the persistent absence stats are quite shocking, and I invite the committee to really interrogate those stats, as I have, because they show not only that we have regional variation in attendance across the country but that we have a cohort of young people who do not attend for up to 20 days of the school year. Think about the impact that that has on their educational outcomes. I am really concerned about that measure. As a Government, we had not looked at that measure since 2014-15. Therefore, we added that measure in last year, to give us more data in order to look at the real substantive problem.

The Children’s Commissioner for England produced really helpful advice in a report on absence in England, which I think was published last year. It contained a number of recommendations. She also quantified the cost of missing school in terms of academic attainment and positive destinations for those young people. All of that is bound up in our wider ambition, and GIRFEC is part of that.

At the start of the evidence session, we talked about mainstreaming. I still believe in mainstreaming—I think that it is the right approach—but I hear the anger and I hear the challenge. I want to reassure Mr Rennie and the rest of the committee that one of the first things that I did when I was appointed as cabinet secretary was speak to the teaching profession, which said, “We’re not ready for these reports. We’re not ready for reform. We need to work with you and we want to work with you, but we need to respond to the challenge right now.” Therefore, I paused education reform for a year.

We will bring forward proposals in the coming weeks, but, every step of the way, whether it is in the reform of Education Scotland, the qualifications body or our qualifications, our children with additional support needs must be at the forefront. They are part of the whole system; they are not the add-on that they might have been in 2004, which I think is where we were when the legislation was first passed. They are part of our system. In some parts of Scotland, half of our pupils have an additional support need, so we must get it right for them.

Right now, I see and hear the challenge, and I make a commitment to the committee to work with its members and across Government, because this is not just about education. In a number of different areas, we need to leverage the power of other parts of Government, whether that be health or justice, for example, in order to respond to the post-Covid challenges.

Yes, it is not one or the other.

Happy new year to you, convener, and to the committee. Thank you for the invitation to speak about the education and skills budget. As members know, the overall context for the budget has been extremely challenging, as high inflation continues to place extreme pressure on public finances. That is on top of more than a decade of United Kingdom Government underinvestment, which has left our public services with little resilience.

In my portfolio and across the wider Scottish Government, we have had to take decisions to protect priorities that are aligned with our three missions of equality, opportunity and community while ensuring financial sustainability. Against that challenging backdrop, I am pleased that the education and skills budget has increased in resource by £128 million, or 4.3 per cent. The combined capital and resource budget has increased by almost £121 million—that is 3.4 per cent—in cash terms.

We continue to invest in high-quality funded early learning and childcare and wider family support. Overall, the Government will invest £1 billion in high-quality funded ELC next year. We remain committed to keeping the Promise to Scotland’s care-experienced children and young people, and we will continue our delivery of the whole family wellbeing programme.

We are fully funding our commitment to pay £12 an hour to staff in the private, voluntary and independent sectors who deliver ELC and children’s social care. We are investing more than £387 million in our teaching workforce. That includes £145 million to maintain teacher numbers, as well as £242 million as part of the teachers’ pay settlement, which is making Scottish teachers the best paid in the UK.

In addition, we have our investment of £1 billion in the Scottish attainment challenge over the parliamentary session to support closing the poverty-related attainment gap. We also remain committed to supporting a high-quality post-school education, research and skills system, with more than £2.4 billion of investment.

That is not to diminish the extremely challenging backdrop to the budget. Like every cabinet secretary, I have had to prioritise legal and contractual obligations in determining how to deploy the budget.

Throughout the budget process, I have deliberately sought to protect those who are most disadvantaged. An example of that is the Scottish Government’s commitment to supporting families with the provision of free school meals at this time of financial uncertainty. We are starting the expansion of our offer to those who receive Scottish child payment this year, and budget has been provided for the infrastructure that is needed for delivery.

Similarly, we will make capital investment of £10 million in targeted device and connectivity provision for our most disadvantaged households with children.? That will bring a range of benefits for families who are struggling with the cost of living crisis while tackling digital exclusion among our most deprived learners. That approach will enable access not only to digital tools and resources for learning but to digital society and online public services, which will expand the investment’s impact beyond learners to their wider families.

This budget protects education spending throughout the lifetime of a child’s education, despite the headwinds of decisions that have been taken by the UK Government. Scotland is the only part of the UK to offer 1,140 hours of early learning and childcare for all three and four-year-olds, and for all eligible two-year-olds, regardless of their parents’ working status. That puts children first.

We have the highest level of spending per pupil in the UK, with the highest number of teachers per pupil. All primary school pupils in primaries 1 to 5, all children in special schools, and eligible pupils in primary 6 through to secondary 6 can benefit from free school meals in Scotland. That is the most generous national offer of any nation in the UK, saving families, on average, £400 per child per year. Those who need the greatest support will receive it, including through our investment of £1 billion over this parliamentary session to close the poverty-related attainment gap.

Following on from that, we are taking action to support our colleges, universities and skills system with more than £2.4 billion of investment. For those who wish to move into higher education, our long-standing commitment to free tuition remains unwavering, saving students in Scotland nearly £28,000 each and ensuring that the ability to learn is not predicated on the ability to pay.

I will finish there, but I very much look forward to discussing the budget settlement in more detail with you this morning.

Over the weekend, I listened back to my minister’s contribution to the committee, and I think that he set out a pretty pragmatic approach in relation to where we are at the current time.

As the committee will be aware, when I was appointed, back in March 2023, I inherited a teachers’ pay deal that required to be funded from my portfolio. I therefore had to make a number of really tough choices pretty quickly to fund that pay deal. The committee will, I am sure, go on to talk about the detail of some of those budget lines.

In November this year, the Deputy First Minister published details of where those reductions had come from. To be blunt, those in-year savings had to be delivered in order to balance my budget and pay for a teachers’ pay deal that had been negotiated prior to my time in post.

Those requirements for in-year savings have been baked into the settlement for this year’s financial allocation. I recognise the challenge in that regard, and I am sure that we will come on to talk about that specifically in relation to this budget line.

The allocations for colleges, in particular, will, for the next financial year, look broadly similar to those that colleges have experienced in the past financial year. I accept that there will be challenges in that respect—as we have heard today, the inflationary impacts are not going away for any organisation—and I am keen to work with our colleges specifically on what that will mean for them.

As Mr Dey pointed out, the challenge that Government has faced throughout this year has been the uncertainty around our budget allocation. I hope that, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer comes back with the spring update and statement, there will be additionality coming to the Scottish Government. I would certainly request that it came to my portfolio, as the convener would expect.

However, there is an opportunity to rebalance. To be blunt, we have been through a period of extreme financial pressure on the Scottish Government budget, which has meant that we have had to meet a number of record pay deals across the piece. I think that it was quite right for the Scottish Government to deliver those things, including the teachers’ pay deal, but it has meant that we have less money overall to go round, and we need to be pragmatic about what that means for every portfolio, including my own.

Just for clarity, convener, are we talking about the Scottish Funding Council cuts or the wider position?

I take your point, convener. I think that it would be helpful to set that out for the committee in more detail.

Some institutions are less dependent on international students than others—some universities can weather the storm more than others—but some institutions in Scotland are being harmed by immigration rules and decisions taken by Governments elsewhere.

On the face of it, Mr Greer’s point about getting it right is important. We have a new chair of the SQA, and Shirley Rogers will be key to driving some of the cultural change that the organisation needs. We need to change our ways of working, and part of that is about embedding teacher voice in the governance arrangements. We will do so through having teacher expertise on the board in a way that might not have been prescribed previously; I have been keen to set that out in relation to our governance expectations.

Clare Hicks may want to say more on the role of teacher voice in that regard. As we move to a new qualifications organisation, teacher voice has to inform, in particular, how qualifications are developed and delivered. To be fair to the SQA, classroom teachers and promoted teachers are currently involved in writing examinations and marking exam scripts, and delivering the qualifications. Nevertheless, with regard to the governance challenge, Mr Greer identifies an opportunity. In the draft governance arrangements that we have been considering, there will be an opportunity to embed teacher voice more, as well as the voice of learners.

I am not sure whether I will be able to give Mr Kerr a definitive list of outcomes, but a new qualifications agency—I refer to the point that I made to Mr Greer—must work better with the teaching profession. In my experience in school and on the committee, that was a major barrier, in many instances, to improving outcomes for our young people.

One of the best meetings that I have had recently—I think that I referred to this in the chamber in December—was with the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers. It came to me with a plan. It said that we do not need to throw out the whole qualification, and it suggested some changes that it thought would make the geography qualification more relevant. It talked me through it. I confess that I am not a geographer, but the suggestions that it put forward were eminently sensible. You could go to any professional association from any subject area in the secondary curriculum and get exactly the same feedback. In my experience, the missing link is that the profession is not as engaged as it should be in the development of the qualifications. To go back to Ken Muir’s report, those are the things that we need to fix in relation to the outcomes from the new qualifications organisation.

Of itself, as an organisation, or the qualifications?