 Welcome back. I apologise to everyone for the hiatus that we've just been to in terms of a suspension of our committee. We go back to the line of questioning and I'm turning to Oliver Mundell. Thank you, convener. I wanted to ask about rurality and poverty and whether or not those living and learning in rural communities were well served during the pandemic. There are lots of cases where people have struggled to access digital learning. Even in my constituency, in relatively more urban areas, there were lots of community support out there. There are lots of people working together, but there are lots of people who live in very remote communities where they struggle to access that kind of community support and it's just whether that's something you've picked up on at all. I'm just trying to think back to work that we did do in the response from children and young people and families in rural communities. There are additional barriers to pre-existing the pandemic and clearly exacerbated or reinforced by the pandemic, particularly around transport issues and being able to access both school opportunities and out-of-school opportunities as well. Issues around if you're growing up in a family in a very long rural area, you may be one of a few. There may be less part of a community. There are more issues in terms of making sure that that's not stigmatised or that there are no schools in education that handle that in a way that mitigates any risk of stigma. Ensuring that's supported. I'm racking my brains, but we have done a bit of work and I can share a bit more in terms of some of the specific cost barriers that young people experience in rural areas, but I'd need to go back and come back to you maybe with more of that work. On a lined area that I'd like to get at some point around mental health and wellbeing, we just published earlier this year an investigation by children in the Western Isles into mental health and wellbeing, so clearly speaking from their perspective and in island communities, and that's been presented to local authority and NHS in the Western Isles, so that's on our website. There's links to that in what we've submitted, so those children gave a very clear insight into their experiences in the last 12 to 18 months and also what they would like from education system and other providers in their communities. I guess the reason why I asked is yesterday we saw a shift in focus away from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation to low-income families. I've long lobbied the Government and asked about what was happening about hidden rural poverty, but I didn't at any point think that that support would come at the expense of our most deprived communities, because I think quite clearly that there's a concentration of poverty that presents certain challenges, and as you've identified in rural communities where you're in isolated poverty, you can have very different challenges and both need to be met. Do you think that looking at low-income families is the right measure for how funding is allocated or do you think that we still need the Index of Multiple Deprivation? I've always thought that a hybrid system was going to meet both those challenges. I think that we need to look at both. In terms of overall funding and ensuring that we're providing support and ensuring that the resources are available to tackle poverty wherever it is in Scotland, using family low-income data as a way of doing that makes sense. As we discussed earlier, there are also other place-based barriers that need to be as part of wider tackling poverty, tackling disadvantaged policies that need to be addressed as well. There are particular issues that are faced by families in rural areas with higher energy costs, in many cases, higher transport costs, not having access in your local community in a different kind of way than some of the most disadvantaged areas, but still having barriers to access out-of-school learning opportunities that don't exist elsewhere. It shouldn't be an either or. We need to ensure that overall funding settlements are adequate so that wherever you go to school, whether it's in a school in a area of multiple deprivation or if it's a school in a... To push a little bit, do you think it's wrong to move away from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation when it comes to allocating the attainment funding? Do you think that that was a mistake? No, overall, I think that using low-income data is a better model. It's a better model, but that shouldn't be... Obviously, we need to make sure that resources aren't that we're adequately funding schools everywhere to respond to the needs in their areas. That's part of a wider funding settlement in terms of how we fund our schools and education system. I see that we've got... Is it okay if I just come in? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, okay, thank you. Just very quickly, I wanted to come back on your last point and reinforce some of what John said about it needs to be a place and people approach that we take. And so looking at those on the lowest incomes or on low incomes across Scotland, I do think that we may be able to look to see how we can take more of an intersectional approach which recognises the way different inequalities and how they impact on you and your family may mean that what you're experiencing as a result of poverty could be different. And we can look at how we respond accordingly to support single parents, people from Black and minority ethnic communities, those with a disability in the family, et cetera, and a combination thereof. I think that in terms of the morality question, what we saw was some of the issues John spoke about around transport, the availability of support, the logistics of getting support, and one of the things that we heard across the board from single parents, but in some ways a bit more intensified from those in more rural areas, was that feeling of isolation, increased isolation, not even necessarily living physically close enough to anyone to be able to see other people and stuff like that and how that intensified the experience. And I think that some of what we need to be looking at in terms of how we respond to the sort of multi-layered nature of poverty and inequality that's being experienced by children and young people on low incomes. Thank you. That's really helpful. That's me done, convener. Thank you all of our co-capture. Thank you, convener. Thank you for emphasising the need for a holistic approach in tackling poverty. Over 30 years as a teacher, I've taught in many demographics and lots of areas of multiple deprivation, so a lot of what you're saying has resonated with me and seeing the whole child and the family, so I just wanted to put that on record for that. Over the years, but also more recently with Covid, do you think that there has been a change in culture in education with regard to having a greater awareness of the impacts of deprivation? As we recover, how can we make sure that learners and families are at the heart of that recovery, rather than just talking about systems and the focus is on the people, rather than the actual mechanistic side of things? I'd like to hear from Colin first and then from Satwit and then John, please. That might seem a bit strange in terms of the focus that this committee has, but I think that the focus on attainment is the wrong focus. I think that the focus needs to be on the experience of the pandemic, how that's been experienced by families with least resource, least access to all the supports that might have been available, families who were cut off from many services that they relied on until those services found a more creative, different way of working. For me, the focus was during the pandemic on wellbeing and on mental health. That's what schools have told us was their main focus. They realised that every good teacher—if I can call them that—that we knew and we engaged with professionally was focused on some very basic things such as maintaining the connection, checking in with children, asking them how they were, providing them some fun or structure to the day, however limited, making sure that their mums or dads or grands whoever they lived with had the basics that they needed, checking in that there was food in the house. Those are the kind of things that teachers were doing, many teachers were doing during the pandemic. They invested all that time in those relationships and wellbeing. I'm sorry if I'm going a bit off script on your question, but now find themselves back in school with this intense pressure on what we call attainment. We had a very visceral reaction to something just recently in a school that we're working in. I won't name them because that wouldn't be fair, but we've been working with children and staff and we've been asking children about their current experiences and current views of their educational experience. One of the things that came back very clearly was children saying, teachers aren't very interested in me out with school in my life. When we reported this back, there were tears among some teachers. They were very moved by that and quite hurt really, and they were saying, we've spent 18 months being so clear about how we love these children and doing all these things, and now we're back in school, the children are feeling like we care less. What they've done is amazingly quickly, they've turned it around, every child is on a soft start, the whole school is on a soft start, there's much more emotional wellbeing check-ins. They realised that this pressure that they felt internally or coming from somewhere, who knows where, that the focus now has to be on literacy and numeracy because there's been an inverted commas lost learning. We need to park that because what we're doing is we're going to lose all the grounds that we built in terms of maintaining relationships, especially with the most vulnerable children. Sure, we want our children to do well in terms of literacy and numeracy. This isn't a primary school, but unless we maintain those relationships and continue to look after the children, we're just chasing our tails in some way. We're not going to make that up. On the other hand, we also know from last year that we had children up to the age of 14 reporting in our surveys that more than 50 per cent were anxious about exams. These are children under 14, and that grew during the pandemic. What we have is an education system that's perceived to be about attainment, about exams, when in fact its focus, if we're going to have any sense of what we call recovery, needs to be on mental health and wellbeing. It feels like we're losing ground. It feels like we're layering more pressure on teachers and learning support assistance and losing any sense of what we might have gained through relationships. I think that we said in our submission that recovery is not going to be on a spreadsheet with exam results. That is such a loss of purpose and a misdirection. We feel quite strongly about it because we're seeing it in schools when we're there day to day at the moment. So, where do you think that that pressure is coming from then, for that focus on attainment that you were talking about? Where is that coming from? At one end of the system, it's coming because we have an exam diet that's been announced will happen this year. In terms of secondary schools, the focus is now on, my goodness, we're going to have a full set of exams as they were pre-pandemic. So, we are now working towards that, knowing that a number of children disengaged or found it difficult to learn. In the primary school, we have testing, we have a cultural language, a norm around children doing well and making up for what's been lost. For me, education leaders should be leading a discussion that is a cultural shift that says that we are most interested in the wellbeing of our children. For the next few years, that is going to be our priority because we have all this evidence that says that wellbeing has been undermined. I don't know about you, but in my broader family life, in my workplace, I see the impact of that. In our professional lives, we are seeing it all the time. In this building, we must see the impact of mental health issues, anxiety and depression. Those things are very real, and they are real in our children. We can chase this thing called attainment, we can think that we can get children back to whatever normal was, but I just think that it's such a lost opportunity that it's a mistake. I'm sorry, I think that I've probably gone way off what your question was about. That's all right. It was interesting to hear what you had to say on that. My question originally was about the cultural change in education and a greater awareness of the impacts of deprivation and putting families and children at the heart rather than systems. It goes back to something that you mentioned just before you asked a question about the holistic approach and the greater awareness of needing to work with the whole person and not a particular aspect of the person. We certainly saw in our experience during the lockdowns that there were some schools, some headteachers and some staff groups who absolutely got that. We administered grants for energy costs for single-parent families, etc, and there was one particular school, but it was the head who spent the whole day doing applications to make sure that families got the money that they needed. They knew that was the priority for their families, supporting their wellbeing and supporting them with the additional material costs that they found themselves experiencing. I really want to echo what Colin has said. What we need to do is to be focusing on creating the conditions for children and young people to thrive. We know that children learn best when they are secure, they are not anxious about anything and not worrying about whether there is going to be enough food in the house for them or what their mum or dad is coping with. A lot of what we saw were anxieties that the children also had for their parents and how their parents were coping during this and what it meant for them. There were some families who are still having to live under tighter restrictions due to health conditions and things like that. We have not all gone back to the way it was, and I think that it is right that we take some time to think about whether we need to go back to the way things were. We had some families reporting that, actually, it really took the tension out of some of their relationships, not having constant battles about getting ready, getting to school, doing your homework, etc, and stuff like that and being able to have more of a flow and a rhythm to the day that suited where their children and young people were at. It is an opportunity to pause to think about to listen to what children, young people and families are saying is important to them and to use that as the starting point of how we begin to focus on recovery post-pandemic. I think that it is right that there are lots of anxieties around educational qualifications, exams, etc. One of the things that families told us was that we do not expect us to be able to start off from where we left off to pandemic. The impact that this has had on mental health and wellbeing means that we need to start way back. We need to get ourselves back to where we were pre-pandemic. It is critical and crucial that we look to see how we can support families through schools and what that nature of that support needs to be in a broader sense than just thinking that they seem to be lagging behind on X, Y and Z. Let us see how we can intensify teaching and learning to get them there. That is not going to work unless they are ready to learn and thrive. That phrase of readiness to learn is one within the profession that I remember talking about quite a lot. John, I did not want to take your way, your opportunity, but I am conscious of time as well. I am thinking of interventions that can help the situation. Somehow we always need to measure it, do not we? We need to have that proof as well, I suppose, on outcomes. I am thinking of things such as clothing grants, free school meals and universal credit cuts and benefit caps that are mentioned in written submissions. Can you give me some examples of interventions that have made a positive or a negative impact on children and families? Yes, positive impacts some of the interventions that were made over the last couple of years, the replacement of free school meals, particularly when that was cash replacement. Children and parents reported back to us what a difference that additional resource made to them, the introduction of the hardship grants and bridging payments to bridge the gap to the full roll-out of the Scottish child payment and the introduction of the Scottish child payment. All that additional cash support into families makes a difference and is really important, and they report that back to us. In terms of school level interventions, as I mentioned earlier, the evaluation of costs of school day would suggest that, at school level, there is a difference in outcomes, participation and engagement. I do not think that we are at the stage yet where we are able to say that these interventions have impacted directly on the attainment gap as yet, but whether it is school-based interventions or wider interventions to improve family incomes and boost the incomes of our lowest-income families, they are clearly part of a process that will improve family resources and reduce the costs that children face at school. The theory of change behind that will impact on participation at school, engagement at school, young people feeling enjoying the school environment, and all of which are absolutely critical for improving children's overall experience of school and their attainment, their achievement and their sense of what they get out of being at school. Bob Doris I think that I would like to focus on the potential role of people with equity funding going forward. I would like to look at the level of funds. I would like to look at how, because that can make you up during the budget process enemy, how the funds could be spent. We have heard evidence this morning that schools pretty much know their children and families better than they have ever known them, because that was unavoidable truth as they sought to help them during lockdown. I would like to know about the opportunities going forward in relation to how schools can use funds over a four-year period that can plan strategically in theory over a four-year period. In a silo, in isolation, there are opportunities for equity funding to be used within the wider community to support the learning needs of children and the wider needs of families more generally to make them ready to learn when they get to school. Any thoughts about how equity funding might have been used well in the past during Covid to help young people and their families and what the opportunities might have been going forward? That would be quite helpful to get on the record this morning. I thank you for having said who should come in. As far as I understand it, there is good evidence that it might not be easy to find on the national improvement hub that is published by Education Scotland, but there is evidence that was a lot of evidence pre-pandemic about how PEF money was being used and about what is an effective intervention in terms of attainment. There is that evidence there. What I do not know is how that evidence has been used, read and understood by regional improvement collaboratives or by school clusters or by schools. I suspect that many teachers do not have a lot of time to find and read evidence, but there is evidence there pre-pandemic as to what an effective intervention is. There is certainly some great stuff that I remember reading written by educational psychologists about initiatives that they knew that were effective in terms of individual learning. We also have a lot of the work that has come out of the improvement methodology, so there is small-scale things that people have scaled up. There is lots of evidence, but that is pre-pandemic. Now, I suggest that, although we need to look at that evidence, we also need to be rethinking what we are using our PEF money for, because priorities have changed for me. The priority should not be a purest view of attainment and what an attainment gap is, but it should be about health and wellbeing. That is our absolute priority for children in order to get to the place where we can address their learning. I know that some schools have been great at using PEF money previously to work with on family learning and parental engagement. It is probably one of the hardest things for them to do, they would say, but there are schools that direct their PEF money to that purpose, and that is probably even more important now. There are examples of PEF money being used to reduce the cost of participation at school, school trips and activities, out of school clubs. Ensuring that that money is used to make sure that there is not a cost barrier or a financial barrier to participating in school life is important for health and wellbeing. Ensuring that children feel comfortable in part of the school day as well as ensuring that they are able to fully participate in learning at school, as well as examples that Collins mentioned of funding home school engagement support. So involving families, understanding families, identifying why there are needs of families to ensure that, again, by working with families that those barriers to engagement at school are removed? I would just echo what has been said by both Colin and John. I certainly, in terms of what the main issues are that I have spoken about earlier for the families that we directly support, anything that can be done around family mental health and wellbeing, generally, in collaboration with others in the community, and looking at those opportunities to support families to be able to re-engage locally, to be able to see what they can participate in and how, and to support the broader learning outcomes would be a really valuable use of how we could look to see how we can use some of the pupil equity funding going forward. What we found in some of the areas where we work, where we have got services for the pupil equity funding, is the importance of that consistent relationship. Someone who is there for the child and young person and family and can connect in with the school and other services has been critical during this period because that is somebody who has remained in touch overall. Is some of that broad and non-siloed thinking about how it can come up with local community-based solutions with the school as part of that and PEPF as part of that, aligning it with other support that is available? In each area, that is going to look slightly different. That is where proactive engagement with the families is so critical. I would really welcome that being seen as a core and critical use of PEPF is to look to see how we can more meaningfully support and engage families. Can you just briefly follow up on that? Yes, please. I think that that went to the nub of what I was trying to ask without leading the witnesses down that road. Schools do not exist in a silo. They are anchors within their community. They are already working with what is called third sector organisations. There are payment councils and pupil groups. There is a whole plethora of organisations around the school. There is a real opportunity with PEPF funding now guaranteed over a four year period to do some key planning and consultation at a local level with the local community to decide how best to tackle poverty and enhance entertainment in the wider road. I think that is what SACWAT was effectively saying. I do not know if other witnesses want to come in and say that is how they would like to see PEPF used in the years going forward. I think that what you are saying is theoretically yes, but it is more patchwork than pattern, I think, as the expression I would use. It is not the same everywhere. You can have school clusters next door to each other who have very different approaches to this, who have very different levels of community engagement, of parental involvement, of a real commitment to learn our voice and participation. Those things are way too dependent on the leadership within a school or the culture within a school. Those things are not embedded everywhere. It is with UNCRC incorporation that this is one of the things that we need to smooth out, if you like, because it is unacceptable that, as a child—it is a bit of a lottery—that, as a child or a family, I would have this particular experience with an early learning centre and a different experience if I go to one five miles down the road. Those are the things that we need to address systemically. It is not okay, it is a bit of a lottery at the moment, so there is no guarantee that a school receives PEPF money and uses it in a way that you are describing. That, for me, is something that we need to think about. That is helpful. There is a contradiction between that local independence flexibility and how we get consistency across local authorities and across Scotland. Mr Dickey, any final comments from you? I would come back in after that, if you know that is my final question. UNCRC incorporation. The child's rights are the same if they live in Dunbar, North Berwick, Glasgow and the Western Isles. That we cannot be doing within consistency anymore. It is not acceptable. The rights of the child mean that all of those things have to be consistent across the country and there are means of redress when they are not. It is fine to have something that we want to call local accountability or power within a local system, but, in an overarching way, the system that the Government is responsible for delivering equity and that is equity of experience. John Finnie was looking to come in with a final word on this. I was just going to add two points to what was already said on the PEPF money. One, just building on Colin's point, was the importance of talking to children, young people and parents as part of that process to identify what are the barriers that they are facing, what are the issues that they are facing in terms of being able to engage at school and engage in learning more broadly and using that as a starting point. Secondly, PEPF is not one source of funding, but it needs to be how that works alongside other sources of funding that support families, support in the community, third sector more generally, as well as the general funding centre in schools. All that money needs to work together to ensure that we are providing a holistic package of support to families. Thank you for that, and apologies for cutting you off. I now turn to Ross. Thanks, convener. Before going on to my main line of questioning, I want to pick up on the point that Colin made there around UNCRC. Certainly, through the process of passing the bill and passing the bill, everyone that I have encountered across the public sector and politics and so on, we are all broadly talking the same language around UNCRC, but I am concerned that there is an inconsistency in understanding how that is going to change the practice of service providers or anyone else. You make a very valid point there around the difference between local flexibility and inconsistency in ensuring compliance with rights. Do you think that there is a broad and consistent understanding across Scotland about what UNCRC is going to mean for service providers and what changes to their practice it is going to mean? No, I think that there is a very poor understanding of that at the minute. Our responsibility is people who have worked hard for it all these years to make sure that people get the kind of support for that, whether it is professional knowledge or capacity building, in a broad sense. As an example, the Children's Parliament currently has two bits of work. One is funded by Young Start, which is called CP Investigates how professionals make rights real. We are working with children and local professionals in Clackmann and Charny Slothian to develop an approach, a resource so that front-facing professionals understand what the convention means. Children and professionals are working together on that. We are working on another piece of work in Aberdeen and Edinburgh called Dignity in School, and we are working with primary schools so that they can become hubs for human rights practice. There will be a resource that comes out of that that people can use to support that journey. What we are trying to do is to help front-facing professionals to understand how that impacts on the work that they do today. To do that in a way that involves them and includes them, because it can be a wee bit scary if people think that this is going to bring radical changes or that this is another initiative. What we need to help people to do is to weave it through to go with the things that they do intuitively that are already rights-based but begin to name them as such. We need to give them some support so that what we are talking about is progressive realisation. There is not a cliff edge. It will take a number of years to get this right, so we want to get alongside people to do it. I do not think that front-facing professionals are really understanding what it means. I do not think that they are being given the support that they need to understand what it means as yet. It is not just about a training introduction to UNCRC. It is much more about how they do their job and what being a duty-bearer means to them. We have a lot of work to do today. Thanks for answering that. That is an issue that we will probably want to return to. Go back to the deputy convener's line of questioning about positive interventions that were made over the past 18 months. When we had the children's commission around a couple of weeks ago, he made the point that, in a perverse way, given the overwhelmingly negative consequences of the pandemic, it did allow for some breakthroughs and positive developments. For example, with young people who were already disengaged with schools, in some cases remote learning actually gave the school an opportunity to connect with those young people and their families in a way that they had not been able to do successfully before. I would be interested in your thoughts on whether there were any positive interventions, positive developments caused by the pandemic that were in danger of losing as we returned to normal in whatever way that means? Are there any particular changes in practice that were clearly caused by the change of circumstances that were overwhelmingly outwith our control, but that we should be looking to preserve because of the benefits that they have brought about beyond the stuff that John John in particular mentioned about additional funding, free school meals, et cetera? I am interested in changes in practice in particular. I would hope that some of the things that we have learnt from the pandemic are now being built in so that recognition that devices connectivity support to ensure children are able to engage in remote learning and not just remote learning, learning is part of the package of learning. Part of that is done at home using devices even when we are not in lockdown situations. There is commitment now to ensure that every child has a device and connectivity. What is critical now is that we ensure that Governments help to account on that front and that that happens in a way that ensures that that is in place. The other thing that I have already mentioned, which was a kind of learning through the pandemic, was the importance of cash-based responses. The most effective way of ensuring that families have resources, generally speaking, is to ensure that they have more money and that they are able to make the choices about whether that is spent on paying the energy bills, paying for food, paying for school clothing and what have you. I think that there are things to learn. There are some positive things to learn. I think that now it is about making sure that we do not lose sight of those commitments that have been made over the past two years and that they are now just bedded into the system as mainstream approaches. The fact that we had to do through necessity was to look to see how we could try different ways of ensuring that we were able to connect with, reach and engage people. In some cases, that worked really well for those who might have been disengaged or found it more difficult to make their way physically to school for a whole number of reasons. For others, it presented particular challenges. This is anecdotal. I know that you received some evidence from Sally Cavers last week, which might have been around some of those children and young people who needed additional support for learning. Some found it very difficult to engage and be able to absorb what was happening in terms of online sessions and learning and the intensity of them. I think that something about how we can use hybrid methods of learning is one of the things that is a positive that could have come out of that. The greater understanding of home and family, which many institutions said that they now had as a result of being in people's homes in a way digitally or whatever, and seeing what those conditions were like. I think that digital access and recognising how critical and core that is as we go forward from this day on. Thinking about it, we all experienced this pandemic differently. There were lots of anxieties for many of us, but they were intensified for those families who had real financial concerns as a result of that and greater financial barriers. I think that what is critical about more broader learning going forward is how we ensure regular and predictable income for families. John Smith mentioned the Scottish child payment. I would say that that is one of key mechanisms that we need to be looking at to see how we can support those families on low incomes. We would argue that, the quicker that can be doubled, the better for families. It is one less stress to think about and it allows you to focus on other things. Just recognising the importance of that as the bedrock in terms of adequate, addictive and regular income will be critical to how we can go on to support children and young people to achieve some of the best outcomes that they can. That is really what we are all about sitting around at this committee. I think that there is learning about what has worked well for some, what has not worked so well for others and what families and schools will be able to tell us some of that and what Collin has spoken about for the work that they are doing well. How do we integrate hybrid ways of working and supporting young people going forward? If you find it really anxiety inducing walking into school, how can we get you into that classroom virtually? We have shown that it is possible. It is now about making sure that we have the tools, the connectivity and, most importantly, in some ways, over and above that support for the families. We have technical hitches today. There was a team working on that to get us through that. The technical hitch happens at home. You need to be able to access someone for that support. It is about equalising access in those ways, and there is a real opportunity here to look to see how we do that. A real learning for us has been that parents and carers have begun to value themselves as educators a bit more, which they are. They are the primary educator. During lockdown, when a day was not every day was good, I am sure, they began to realise that the play, the baking, the getting out on the bikes are fundamental to a child's development. The problem with that is that many of them also come with costs. For a family struggling financially, what we saw was other third sector organisations working really hard to make sure that the kids could get a bike to make sure that they had contents for baking. For families who had these means, those moments were really important. We should continue to verbalise our acknowledgement of parents and carers as educators and be involved with families so that we understand when they do not have those extra things now. If your child is home economics in school, if it is about bringing ingredients, it would be a cost of the school day issue, but it is also just about being able to do those things at home. Is it possible for a child to do those things at home as part of their learning? We have had an insight into family life as educators that we need to remember and not lose sight of. I think that it is important to understand what the other priorities and pressures are on families and parents. Although you may have been furloughed, you may have been working from home, but that may no longer be the case. There is something around being able to work with what the family situation is, and it is not one size fits all. When we are looking at hybrid models, it is recognising the other responsibilities and requirements that parents have, particularly single parents. I do not have anyone else to share any of that with and to make sure that we are not adding additional layers of pressure on families. That brings us to the end of our evidence session this morning. I would especially like to thank John Dickie, Dr Colin Morrison and Satwat Raymond for their evidence day, which has been very useful indeed—very insightful, in fact. I would also like to mention that we were to be joined by Matt Crilley, who is the president of the National Union of Students Scotland, but for reasons completely beyond Matt's control, he was not able to join us for this meeting, although we have met him before. We look forward to meeting him again, but it would be absolutely appropriate that I put on the record that we give special congratulations to Matt, because he graduated from the University of Strathclyde earlier this week. Well done, Matt. You are now in the official record of the Parliament with our congratulations. The public part of today's meeting is now in the end. I will now suspend the meeting and can ask members to reconvene on Microsoft Teams, and allow us to consider our final agenda items in private.