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Absolutely. I am still wondering, though—if we were to significantly increase the amount of funding that goes to the third sector and the organisations that are reaching out to young people in other contexts, would additional funding alone ensure that we reach everyone that we are trying to reach if the objective is to close the attainment gap, or are changes in approach required as well?

I am trying to figure out for the purposes of our committee inquiry whether we should consider recommending that some of the money be allocated not to schools, but directly to third sector organisations. Is it as simple as reallocating the money or do we need to explore whether we should recommend changes in approach as well?

Thanks. That is all from me for now, convener.

Are you saying that, in the Scottish context, our 32 education authorities, which are essentially clusters that education is delivered through, are too big?

Is that not moving in the opposite direction, with 11 or a dozen regional bodies instead of the small clusters that you have highlighted?

I agree with you about the inspection system. I hope that it will be significantly reformed by the current process. Unless anybody else wants to comment on that—please indicate if you do—I will move on to a couple of questions for Laura Robertson about some interesting points in her submission.

Laura, you mention

“educational instruction outside of school”

as an intervention in the context of the attainment challenge. Will you expand on what is meant by that? How does it come up against the tension around consistency of access? As much as we are aware that there are issues with young people not attending school, the overwhelming majority of young people do attend, whereas far fewer young people attend youth clubs and so on, which I presume are the other contexts in which those interventions are intended to take place. Even if we funded them significantly more than we do at the moment, we would still not get a level of participation that was equivalent to the one that we get in compulsory education.

How would additional interventions in the context of the attainment challenge reach the young people that we need them to reach, compared with doing it through schools—where, admittedly, not all the young people are present, but the overwhelming majority of them are?

Convener, may I rescind my comment that I had finished and ask one more follow-up question?

That really is all from me this time, convener.

You mentioned that a number of countries provide good examples. Our predecessor committee in the previous parliamentary session visited Sweden and Finland, one of which provides a better example than the other. In the examples that you are aware of, is it the case that there is more administrative capacity in the schools, rather than at municipality level, to make the transition manageable? In other words, are headteachers able to manage the additional burden because they are not expected to do it themselves? Are there teams of administrators located in schools, rather than in the local authority, to help them with the work?

I will move on. One of my frustrations with the wider debate in Parliament this year—I exclude the high level of scrutiny that is provided by this committee—is that it has, yet again, focused almost entirely on spending, rather than on consideration of where and how we raise money. We can compare that with what was—certainly from my experience in Parliament—the highest quality of debate in any year, which was ahead of the 2018-19 financial year. That was the first time that we collectively, as a Parliament, seriously considered what we would do with the new powers over income tax.

At that point, the Government’s approach was to ask all the Opposition parties to provide proposals, which were submitted to the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Projections were worked up on that basis. My memory is that we could have had five options; in the end, four were submitted. That resulted in a much more informed debate in Parliament and one that was in some ways more comparable to the system that a lot of local authorities use, whereby opposition parties are obliged to produce their own alternative budgets rather than just voting for or against the budget that the council administration has submitted.

Could we open up the budget process to better parliamentary debate if other parties were provided with the opportunity to come up with alternative taxation proposals, and not just alternative proposals for spending?

I would welcome further discussion of that in the committee.

I will turn to a couple of points that you have made about the resource spending review. In your response to the committee’s report, the language that is used around the resource spending review mentions the need to make “difficult decisions”. The committee would acknowledge that, given that our report makes a point about the challenging public finance situation over the coming years.

I am trying to get a sense of exactly what is meant by “difficult decisions”. I think that we would all acknowledge that if we are to hit the Government’s three strategic targets on tackling child poverty, tackling climate change and economic recovery, it will require greater spending in those areas. All five parties in the Parliament agree that those three areas are important. We might mean different things when it comes to economic recovery, but we all broadly agree that it is needed, and we all agree on the climate and child poverty objectives.

However, that requirement for greater spending means that we need to make difficult decisions—about making savings in other areas, about where else to raise revenues or a combination of both. What is your expectation and intention in relation to that balance of difficult decisions in the resource spending review? Will the focus be purely on areas of spending that are to be disinvested from, as was mentioned previously, or will there be a wider discussion about where the money to hit those targets will come from? Would it come from other areas in the current budget or from other revenue-raising options that have not yet been explored?