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Are colleges that operate in more rural and remote parts of the country getting a fair deal, and are young people, learners and those returning to education in rural and remote parts of the country getting good-quality service under the current model?

Cabinet secretary, do you agree that high-quality teaching and learning remains the best way to close the attainment gap?

Actually, I think that most teachers say that teaching and learning is the core part of their job. Yes, they are concerned about children’s welfare and they see that as being really important, but they feel that they are being asked to do too much, and, by not focusing on the area in which they can make a difference in the classroom, they feel that we are seeing slow progress on literacy and numeracy and on other core components for later education. Do you think that that is—

But it is not necessarily fairly allocated to where the poverty exists if you are using a measure that is potentially flawed, is it?

I think it is all a little bit inconsistent, but, again, that is probably something to look at further as the committee thinks about the evidence we have heard.

The final thing that I want to ask about in relation to attainment is a challenge that I have become aware of that is impacting a small number of young Ukrainian people who have settled in Scotland. A number of pupils joined too late in the school year to gain qualifications in Scotland and, understandably, they are struggling to complete assessments for courses that they started in Ukraine. I seek your assurance that the Scottish Government will look at that and work in partnership with local authorities to make sure that those young people are not further disadvantaged and that their future attainment is not affected.

Did you model what an alternative would look like, based on low-income families?

Do you recognise that you can put many other things in place but that, without core teaching and learning, those young people are still likely to struggle when it comes to the more formal part of learning, such as literacy, numeracy and some of the other metrics that the committee has been looking at? Without good teaching, we will not see improvement in those areas, will we?

Do you think that we have the focus and the balance right so far?

Do you completely reject the idea that a lot of this money has been wasted at a time when the numbers of teachers and support staff have been cut, when there has been a failure to reduce class sizes, when we have issues with recruiting teachers in some subject areas in some parts of the country, and when we are still struggling to make teaching an attractive profession, as is seen in the on-going pay and conditions? We have spent additional money on things that are good, yes, but is there not a sense that we have failed when it comes to actually securing the fundamentals of the system?

I was at the Scottish Secondary Teachers Association conference last week, and there was no political representation from the Scottish Government there. Certainly, the message there was that teachers feel undervalued, underpaid, and undersupported, that our schools are underresourced and that it is starting to have an impact on young people. However, like other committee members, I do not think we are going to agree.

I will ask a specific question on PEF. Obviously, there has been a switch elsewhere within attainment funding to low-income families. Did you look at making that change in relation to PEF, and did you do any modelling on what that would look like for the distribution of funds?