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Do the other witnesses recognise that? If a headteacher has a small PEF budget but there are only limited resources to tap into in the immediate community, does that prevent the policy from working as well as it might?

Following on from Graeme Dey’s line of questioning, I think that the obvious thing to say is that there is a gap because schools are not always properly funded. I would not want to defend attainment funding being spent on other things, but schools that I see locally do not always have a choice. Keeping staff on is a priority for headteachers. Do you agree with that, Mr Dempster?

I will ask one last question. Do you think that using low-income households as the criteria for distributing funding—the Scottish Government uses that approach in other policies now—would be a potential replacement? That certainly appears to pick up more poverty in rural areas. I see that Andrea Bradley is nodding.

Thank you. That is all very helpful. I want to ask about the small group of schools—it has become smaller again—that do not receive any PEF money at all. When I look at the list, I am not convinced that no young people at those schools would be in poverty. I wonder whether the policy can be fully effective when some headteachers and some schools—many of which are small, rural schools—receive no PEF money at all. I guess that Greg Dempster or Jim Thewliss would be best placed to respond.

I hear what you are saying and I respect your answer, but we have had problems for years. In the previous parliamentary session, our predecessor committee raised concerns about the independence of the inspectorate, we have had repeated concerns about the SQA, and lots of the problems that you identify are well known among the teaching profession. Therefore, it is about how we have confidence that the Government is actually going to take those things forward and build that trust, when it has spent years trying to say that everything is okay, that those are not real problems and that everything could be sorted if only people asked less difficult questions. Do you have confidence that—[Inaudible.]

The point that I am trying to tease out is that there is also a cultural issue among Scottish Government ministers, who have exercised very poor oversight over those bodies. It is wrong just to try to shift all of the buck on to the SQA, as dreadful as its performance has been. Surely, if the education system was working well, the Scottish Government ministers should have identified sooner that something was going wrong. Are there not accountability and cultural issues there?

I want to go back briefly to the SQA. Professor Muir has said that problems in the SQA were becoming visible before Covid. Does it undermine trust in Scottish education when the person with ministerial oversight continued to say, right up until June 2021, that they had full confidence in that organisation?

Do you have confidence that the Government has taken the message on board? Should it have taken an OECD review and your report for the Government to recognise the significant issues?

Would that not take us back to before the OECD report and your report, which, in some respects, have already set us off in a direction? Would it not be a more genuine offer to teachers and front-line practitioners to say that we value their input from the start, rather than to put so many pieces in place and then say that we need to have a conversation?

That gets to the nub of the issue. We have brought in the OECD to work to a very restricted remit, and the Scottish Government brought you in, but neither you nor the OECD have really felt able to challenge the culture at the heart of the Scottish Government. The lack of ministerial oversight has allowed the issues that you identified to continue for five years, when Opposition parties across the Parliament have been calling for an independent inspectorate and raising concerns about leadership at the SQA. We have seen continued reboots of curriculum for excellence, but nothing seems to have changed. What makes you confident that this time is going to be any different?