 Good morning and welcome to the seventh meeting of the Education, Children and Young People Committee in 2021. This morning's meeting is being held virtually. The first item on our agenda today is a decision on taking business in private. Can I ask whether members are content to take agenda item 11 in private? I am not hearing anybody else but I am getting content messages, so I think that we are all agreed. Thank you. The second item on the agenda is to take evidence from the Auditor General for Scotland and officials from Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission for the Committee's pre-budget scrutiny. Joining us this morning are Stephen Boyle, Auditor General for Scotland, Sharon O'Connor, Accounts Commission member, Tricia Meldrum, senior manager and Rebecca Steedle, senior manager in Audit Scotland. Welcome to all of you. It is nice to see you all with us this morning. Before we move on to the committee's questions, and we have quite a few questions to get through, can I invite both you, Auditor General and then Sharon O'Connor to give a brief opening statement? Thank you very much, convener. Good morning, committee. I am delighted to join you this morning for your pre-budget scrutiny. I am responsible for the audit of central government bodies, including the Scottish Government, and the Accounts Commission is responsible for auditing local government bodies. Through our joint reports, we are able to look across the public sector and public spending in Scotland. Sharon O'Connor, Accounts Commission member, was one of the commission's sponsors on our joint report on education outcomes. Audit Scotland provides services to me and the Accounts Commission, as you say, convener, members of the audit team who are responsible for our work on education outcomes, early learning and childcare universities, colleges and our upcoming work on skills. Our report on improving outcomes for young people through school education looked at the national priority outcomes, how they were being achieved, how well was public money being used. The report found that outcomes have been improving, but there is still wide variation across the country and that there has been limited progress in closing the poverty-related attainment gap, which remained wide. Outcomes, of course, are not all about exams, and this is reflected in the national priorities and national curriculum, but there are still gaps in the data that are available to assess if the wider outcomes of health and wellbeing are being achieved. Children and young people's learning, wellbeing and economic circumstances have been affected by Covid-19, with those living in the most challenging circumstances at risk. Addressing inequalities needs to be at the heart of the response to Covid-19, longer-term recovery and improvement. Post-school education also plays a vital role in helping us to learn new skills and help Scotland's people to fulfil their potential. Scotland's colleges and universities make significant contributions to the economy and wider society. Our recent reports focusing on the financial position of the college and university sectors may also be of interest to the committee. I am delighted to pause for a moment and hand over to Sharon, and thereafter the four of us look forward to answering the committee's questions. Thank you very much, convener. I am very pleased to be here. I am a member of the Accounts Commission having been for the past three years. My own background is that I was chair of the Education Authority in Northern Ireland for five years, and previous to that I was a chief executive in the local government. In the Accounts Commission, as you are all aware, our role is to provide oversight of the performance of local government in Scotland. We do that in a range of ways, in partnership with our colleagues in Audit Scotland. We are particularly interested in education and support for young people. As the Auditor General has said, the work follows on from the last review in 2014, and there have been subsequent reviews that have looked at early years and other areas that are related to the matters under discussion today. The Auditor General has already outlined the highlighted findings of the report, so I am content to leave it there. Thank you very much. We welcome Sharon and the Auditor General to our meeting, and Tricia. I think that Tricia was the lead senior manager on the March report. We have a really great team of people from Audit Scotland, with us this morning. Let's get under way. I will turn to James Dornan, who will kick us off. Okay, thank you very much. I would like to ask a couple of questions around the mention of Christie. You just hold on a second, please. I am having some problem with my computer here. There we go. We talked about the pandemic. How has the pandemic led to delivering Christie at scale? What are the lessons to be learned and pause the approaches? I am happy to kick off. I am quite sure that Sharon, Tricia and Rebecca may wish to follow me with some examples. You are absolutely right in terms of Christie. I think that, like many organisations over the course of the past few months, we have taken the opportunity to reflect on the 10-year anniversary of Christie, the extent to which I think that there has been a general consensus that its ambitions have not yet been fully delivered in respect of moving towards a more preventative agenda, ambitions around public sector reform and more clarity on what outcomes are being achieved from public spending. We also refer to some of the barriers to Christie's being delivered. I will come on and say a bit about those and how those relate to public services in a moment, but we particularly do attention to public bodies typically prioritise delivery of their activity around some of what their priority measures have been. It seems that that has acted as a barrier to some of the innovations that we probably would have expected to see in the delivery of public services. However, the pandemic has changed that, so there has been increased collaboration, the delivery of essential services to people in greatest need and some really disrespecting on some of the boundaries that had been some of those barriers in the period before that, so public sector, private sector, third sector organisations all working collaboratively, setting aside roles and responsibilities where appropriate accountability arrangements actually getting out services to where they were most needed over the course of the pandemic. What that means in the future remains to be seen and whether that acts as a template now for that sense of there is no wrong door, there is no wrong access point to public services and we can see where that will take us. I think that there was some degree of optimism that the lessons of the past 18 months, if anything good can come out of it, can act as that new accelerant to delivering some of Christie's ambitions 10 years on, but we remain optimistic, but I will pause Mr Dornan actually, as I am sure Sharon, Rebecca and Tricia, we want to say a word or two more. Sharon, can you come in? I think that you are on mute. Yes, I am on muted now, convener, I hope. Yes, just to echo the very positive aspect of collaboration, which featured in the work that we did. It is important to remember that this report was a snapshot in time, which was unfortunately interrupted by Covid. I guess the big lesson in terms of progress is that progress was interrupted and we know that in terms of the poverty-related attainment gap, it was why, but only further exacerbated by Covid and that is one of the key messages that we really need to support collaborative working to give particular attention to closing that poverty attainment gap. Thank you, chair. Thank you, convener. Thank you. Any other comments? Tricia, did you want to come in? Hi, thanks. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Thank you. In relation to the education work that we did and the report, some of the things that we did was, as the Auditor General made, that joint working and that increasing working, not just within the education sector but with partners outside of education, at a national and local level, with partners in social work and social care with the third sector, so that much more breaking down barriers and funding being used in ways that was not what was intended but the money following where the needs were. The early years funding for the expansion was able to be used to target where the needs were raised so that it could be reallocated to meet needs. The attainment challenge money again could be reallocated to meet needs. We heard of things like schools delivering food and other essential items to families who were in need, so that we were breaking down on people just doing what was needed in the best interests of the children and families that they were working with. I highlight some of those examples. Rebecca, would you like to say something? Thank you, convener. Just building on the theme of collaboration, one of the impacts of Covid was that we saw colleges and universities working very closely with local and regional partners to try to identify short-term solutions to some of the skills needs that emerged during the Covid pandemic, so looking at things like shorter, sharper courses and ways that they could all work together with employers and other partners to be able to equip people with the skills needed to fill some of those short-term skills gaps that were exacerbated by Covid. We were seeing good examples of collaboration. James? Obviously, after the OECD report and reports such as yourselves, there is likely to be a significant programme of reform in the coming years. The Scottish Government has already said that it is committed to learning from what it saw during the pandemic, particularly roundabout the areas that you are talking about, where Christy was almost in action. What key actions do you think the Scottish Government should be taking to ensure that this programme of reform plans for good outcomes and reflects the Christy principles? I am happy to start again. The OECD report and the Government's acceptance of the recommendations and setting out of plans for reform of some of the bodies in the sector, whether in terms of oversight of the assessment process, the curriculum and then changes to the inspection model, all of which will happen over the next few years. As ever, with changes in structure, there is some degree of risk that when difficult structural change happens, the focus becomes over on the structure itself and not necessarily on the intended outcomes from the structure. It is important to guard against that. There has not been a significant huge amount of public sector reform over the past 10 years. We arguably have changes in policing and fire, which have been the most significant in that period, with other smaller examples in the sector through the college's bodies as another one. Making such structural changes is a risk, but what matters is that focus remains on what is intended from the changes that the outcomes are clear. What it has come for many years, Mr Dornan, you will be familiar with, has commented on the need for a clearer framework for how public spending translates into outcomes. We are starting to see some progress on that in the Scottish budget in closer connection between spending and the national performance framework. It is important that that is retained within the sector, that the national improvement framework, its connections to the national performance framework and public spending are all clear. The material will be familiar. We have published in recent years various documents about planning for outcomes, the process around milestones and the need for interventions that are required are all mapped out into the intended longer-term outcomes. There is material and guidance available, but it is clearly important to guard against some of the risks with public sector reform and the change of the continued focus on what is going to be achieved for people who use public services. You are saying that any changes should not primarily be structural changes, that they should be changes in emphasis or what precisely? I apologise for cutting across your note. Structural changes are an inevitability, and one that we are close to neutral on is for Government policy makers to determine structure to deliver public services. We have seen in recent times that the change in itself can become the focus as opposed to what the outcomes from the change led to the change, and our encouragement remains the focus. In building a new structure, it is clear as to what that structure is intended to achieve and what public spending will deliver in terms of those outcomes. James? No, no, I am happy that Mdales wants to come in. That is great. Thank you for that, James, and thank you, Stephen and other witnesses. To you, you have published a blog very recently, Stephen, Christie's Clarion call Can't Wait another decade. There has also been a publication on Christie, it's really now or never. What you are saying when you say that, if I have heard you correctly, please could you pad out a bit more about the impact that is a little bit more for us, but are you really saying that we need concrete measurements on policy measures that are intended to prevent, and are you saying that we need to have concrete measurable policy outcomes that we can say, yes, this is really working or it's not really working? Is that what you're saying or am I putting words in your direction? That's a generally fair assessment, convener, of the opportunity that both myself and the interim chair of the Accounts Commission took over the course of the past few months to reflect on the delivery of Christie and its ambitions. I think that there is a general consensus across those who are interested in Christie, preventative spending and so forth, that the ambitions of the Christie commission 10 years ago haven't been fully delivered, but there hasn't been the extent of shift in preventative spend, that sense that that's a more effective way of delivering improvements and services, a better way of delivering public spending. There are a variety of reasons for that, and I think that we highlighted that as we came out of the financial crisis of 2008 and the constraints on public spending that followed that period, was undoubtedly one factor. However, we also drew attention in the blogs to that measurement point that you make that public services will inevitably be delivered on a collaborative basis. They happen best when that happens, but the measurement of how public spending is delivered in Scotland was perhaps too narrowly focused and too orientated towards one organisation as opposed to a collaborative basis and at leaders in public bodies. First, there is no physiological objection to collaboration, but rather how people's performance in their roles are determined isn't reflected in the performance measurements that support preventative spend or support collaboration. An opportunity that we are undoubtedly in favour of is reviewing those performance measures. There is often an example reflected that, although it is undoubtedly very important—if I just focus on an NHS example for me—that A&E wait times are for those people who are in waiting for services in an A&E department, they are not necessarily the best performance measurement of how health services in Scotland are performing, and I was looking to place more emphasis on that wider suite of performance measures. Sharon, you want to come in. Yes, thank you, convener. Just to echo the attorney general's point about risk attached to major change processes, but also opportunity. One of the clear findings of the report was that there was no clear relationship between spending and outcomes. It was really about how schools targeted and used money. I think that a lot of what needs to follow through is clearly engaging people in those processes in terms of learning from what worked and what has worked well. We have some good data around that, but there are also data gaps. In order to have a direction of travel, we need to know what the targets are and get everyone engaged in pursuing success towards those targets. Both of you have highlighted the importance of measuring outcomes, and you mentioned milestones. Let me give you one real-time example and get your input on this. My question is what should be? What will you be looking at when we talk about, for example—this is the example that I want to share with you—that there has been such a large increased number of teachers in Scotland. I am referring to the report that was published in March, when it was reported in the report that there had been 1,423 new teachers and 247 new support staff recruited for Covid mitigation. I would like to hear you talk about what assessment you have made or planned to make about the roles, how permanent they are and what actually happens because we have recruited all those teachers. What are the milestones, what are the measurements that we should be looking at in terms of outcomes? I am happy to say a word or two, and I am sure that Charon and the team will wish in particular that we want to come in. First of all, I echo Charon's earlier point about the issue of parity and quality of data. Across the public sector, but undoubtedly in the education sector, one of the key findings of the report is that there is a huge amount of data measuring the performance of the attainment system in Scotland around exams, but the other pillars of curriculum, for instance, did not have that same level of quality data. Turning back to your question, convener, additional money that has been spent on Covid mitigation measures, additional teaching and support staff have come into the Scottish schools and learning environments. Probably what you will see from that is that there will be data around attainment and literacy and numeracy rates across the curriculum, but the other aspects of the curriculum have not yet got a robust measurement of how well that money has been spent. Auditors will be auditing the additional money that has gone to local authorities, and Charon will want to comment on that too, I am sure. Until we move to a wider suite of data, there will not be that informed assessment of how all aspects of the Scottish curriculum are performing, and that is one of our ambitions. When we follow up on our reporting, as we do over the next couple of years, it is to see progress in that there is improved parity of data across those all aspects of the curriculum. I will stop for a moment, convener, as I am sure Charon and Tricia will want to say a word or two more. Thank you, convener, and I defer to Tricia, who led the detailed work in the report. The headlines of what we are looking at in local government are that we know the gap between the most and least-deprived narrowed in the majority of councils, but in 10 areas it has increased. What we need to know is why. There are many and various challenges across Scotland's large country, the demography, the challenges in local areas may be very different, recruitment of teachers, support for leadership in schools, decisions around how money is spent. There are lots of areas that we need to give attention to. We just need to have a clear understanding of what it is that we are trying to measure. As the Attorney General has said, attainment is about much more than exams, so we need to have a more nuanced system in terms of capturing that sort of data that will help us to improve the offer to children and young people. I am sure that our Tricia will have more detailed information to provide. Tricia? Thank you. I agree with what has been said about the broader outcomes. Noting that well-being in particular, young children and young people's well-being, has been highlighted as a particular priority around Covid recovery, but at the moment it is not possible to tell how that is progressing and what that looks like. That is being really important in relation to teachers as well. It is also around not just the numbers of teachers but the numbers of pupils and what the teachers are doing. That focus around the national improvement framework identifies six drivers for improvement. Leadership is one of the drivers. Teacher professionalism is the driver there. Use of data, self-assessment and self-evaluation. It is making sure that the teachers are able to work within that framework of the improvement drivers. They also have the support that they are getting, the training that is needed to help them to really progress around the areas that have been identified as priorities and the new drivers, which have been identified as the things that most help with improving outcomes for the children and young people. We really want to be seeing that all of those things are going forward together, that is not just a lot of additional teachers, but that the teachers are doing the right things and have the right support and infrastructure around them. Some of that broader data is available to look at the outcomes that have been identified as priorities moving forward in terms of recovery. You led the really interesting, but very well-put-together March report. Is it in your work plan to revisit all of that? Specifically, I am interested in the difference that all the new teachers and support staff make. Have you got any work schedule to revisit all of that and look at measurables? We would anticipate doing some further work, but we have not identified that before. That will be decisions for the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission as we develop the work programme. In fact, I mention of him here he is. He wanted to come in. Thanks, convener. It is perhaps worth highlighting in May of next year that the Accounts Commission will publish our latest Covid-19 public spending report. That is really reflecting. It is not specific to education, but it is in its widest sense of how well public bodies have performed, how public spending has achieved the intended outcomes of all the vast additional sums of public spending that has taken place over the course of the pandemic. That is probably the next milestone in terms of our reporting, but given the significance of education sector and its prominence, it remains in our thoughts and in our work programme. We, in light of the pandemic, have arrangements in place. We go through a quarterly review of our work programme, but education will remain prominent. How that specifically translates into the additional public spending that is from the teacher numbers, we will keep an open mind on, but education will remain very clearly in our forward work programme. On that theme, I think that you want to come in at this point. I listened with great interest. Just before I ask my questions concerning local authority funding, I am just interested in your gaps in data. If you could just let me know why do those gaps exist and why is it not within your scope to collect that data, I am just interested. I am happy to start. I am pretty sure that Tricia and Sharon will want to say a word or two. Unfortunately, it is not unique to the education sector. We have commented regularly that there are too many examples, unfortunately, of where policies have been commented, but there is insufficient robust data from Government and public bodies to measure those milestones and to measure how well public spending has achieved the intended outcomes. It was a key report in particular of the legacy public audit and post-legislative scrutiny committee of session 5 of the Parliament that are urging all of Government and public bodies to have more robust data so that it is possible to track how well public spending has achieved the intended outcomes. We have continued to focus on it through our own work and the need for action from Government and public bodies to resolve the issue. As it relates to the education sector, again, Tricia will want to say a few words. I am sure that we found that there is plenty of data in the education sector and there are huge amounts that are recorded, but that it is skewed into attainment as opposed to those wider pillars of curriculum for excellence. I think that a similar finding that the OECD found in the report is that there is just not enough imparible measure of data. That perhaps informs some of the behaviours around league tables and barriers to parity of esteem for attainment and wider achievement. A range of factors—we know that that is being pursued through our own work and the Parliament—is clear data between what public spending is intended to achieve and what the actual outcomes have been delivered from those monies. I will ask Tricia to come in and say a few words more about the data in education. There is definitely a lot of data in there, but it is not necessarily on all the issues that have been identified as national priorities, so that was where we are starting point. What has been set out as the priorities and can we tell if those are being achieved? That is where we found some of the gaps. What we were able to do in the report was to use some more one-off pieces of information and data that had been gathered, particularly in looking at the response to Covid. Scottish Government's equity audit, which was really looking at how that had impacted on potentially more vulnerable children and young people, surveyed by the Youth Parliament, the Children's Parliament, and other third sector bodies by academic departments. We were able to use that information to give a snapshot of how Covid was impacting on children and young people's wellbeing and other outcomes. However, going forward and being able to track back as well, it has not been an area where there has been good data. We know that there were plans—the Scottish Government did have plans to be doing a census—that have been delayed because of Covid. We understand that that is going to be happening at the moment, so there will be some data. Just to say in relation to wellbeing, there are things like snapshots, so there is some data available, but it is not surveyed data, so it is limited and it is not necessarily timely. Some of that relates back to 2018 and has not been updated since, so it is definitely an area where there needs to be some further work. To highlight the findings from the OECD about the disconnect between the stated ambitions of curriculum for excellence and the data that is available to see whether those are being delivered. I just wanted to move on to the area that I was particularly interested in. Obviously, overarching policies and budgets are set at the Scottish Government level, but we know that in education it is local authorities that ultimately deliver and implement policies and services. I wondered whether your analysis found that you did not find a link between spending per pupil and educational attainment. However, we know that there is an expectation that a significant amount of funding will go towards supporting education. What do you think are the policy implications of that finding that pupil spend does not correlate to performance? Can any of the panel share any observations of the characteristics of local authorities that perform well in terms of cultural policy and delivery approaches? I think that I would defer entirely to Sharon O'Connor on that point. Thank you for the question. We routinely review the performance of councils and, as I said earlier, in terms particularly of the poverty attainment gap, the evidence is that it has narrowed in the majority of councils but in the number it hasn't. We examine the good practice that we say that we are not necessarily about finding where things have gone wrong and highlighting those. It is also about drawing out the good practice, so that is a routine part of our discussion with councils about their own performance. Clearly, you and I both know who are the high performers here, but there are aspects of even the intervention. For example, if we look at the funding that has gone in to support the attainment gap, there are nuances in terms of how that impacts on rural areas and perhaps how the criteria relates to rural areas. In general, what we are saying is that we have a watching grief in terms of educational performance where they are to examine what the issues are. Those are many and varied. You speak to councils where they have particular and striking issues in terms of recruiting school leaders, recruiting key areas of professional staffing in the education environment. We have other councils that are extremely well provided for in terms of finance but have particular local issues. We can say that one size does not fit all. Scotland has a great degree of diversity and variation in terms of local need and local challenge. We are about routinely trying to find what is good and what is not working so well and give attention to trying to support improvement. How do you share that? Obviously, the report is here, but are there any other briefings or documentations that are shared with councils in order to spread that good practice or to shed light on councils that require a bit more support? Recently, the team from Audit Scotland presented at the Scottish Learning Festival, where we shared with school leaders the findings of the report. In our routine work, we work with councils directly. The audit team will produce a report. If education is an area that needs particular attention, that will be examined by the audit team. Findings will be produced, the Accounts Commission will review the findings and will make further findings, if necessary. We also meet with the councils to interrogate their own situation to try to find out what the issues are. We may make recommendations of further actions that need to be taken by the council. That is the routine work of the Accounts Commission—the interaction with councils. As I said at the start, we are also about highlighting good practice. There are many examples of good practice. It is worth recording that the evidence of literacy is good overall, but we have particular areas and particular parts of the country that need further attention. However, it is not a wholly positive report, but there is a lot of very positive stuff in it. If members are interested, they will see the individual reports on individual councils and individual performance contained in that report. Thank you for that. Just as the last query that you mentioned in that part of your report, I just wondered whether there was any information available on how much money councils were spent, because I know that there was a certain amount of schools estate that the private finance initiative was used to fund those buildings. I wondered whether there was any data that was available on how much money is being spent there? I would like to refer that back to the team who does the work on the ground. You are better placed to answer the question than I am. That data will be available, but I do not have it to hand. We can provide that to the committee later. That data is available through the local government financial returns. Thank you. One of the recommendations in your report that you were the lead on was that Education Scotland should work with schools, councils and BRICs to understand the factors that cause variation in performance across schools and councils. Does that mean that you are not satisfied as auditors that Education Scotland was not already doing that work and did not understand what those factors were? That is key part of the role of Education Scotland. We visited a number of council areas and we saw how Education Scotland was working with councils, schools and BRICs. I think that our point is that, given the scale of the variation that we are seeing and the variation across councils and within councils for different groups of different schools and different populations, so that I need to be done more consistently, there are still big gaps in that variation. You answered what I was going to interrupt you to ask, and I apologise for being over you. It could do better, I think, is the nature of that recommendation, is what you are saying. It could do better. That more needs to be done. Fergus Ewing, I think that we should bring you in at this point, because your area of concern directly relates to all of that. Thank you, convener, and good morning to all our guests. I represent and have done for 22 years in Vernes and Nairn, a city in a town, but most of my constituency is rural. In fact, the Highland Council covers an area nearly the size of Belgium, 20 per cent bigger than Wales, with 10,000 square miles, or, if you prefer, 26,000 square kilometres. The point is that the costs and the challenge of providing public services, including education, in a largely rural authority, are considerable. Indeed, 98 per cent of the landmass of Scotland is rural and 17 per cent of the population, so that is not unique to the area that I represent. As far as education is concerned, there are 203 primary schools and 59 high schools. I can safely say that, having been around the bloc a few times in parliamentary terms, that politicians from every party feel that the needs of rural Scotland, and particularly the costs of providing services, especially in education, are an issue that, at best, is not perhaps sufficiently understood and at worst neglected. Do Audit Scotland and the Accounts Commission feel that, in their work, sufficient regard has been had to those issues? Good morning, Mr Ewing. I am happy to start on your question. I am sure that Darren and colleagues may wish to say a word or two. If I may start with some of the specifics of our findings from the education report and draw attention to the Scottish attainment challenge funding and its application to primarily driven cases of the Scottish incident deprivation, that additional funding mechanism to improve outcomes through school education. One of the findings that we make in the report is that perhaps too blunt a tool takes to the point that I think that you are making about that it does not necessarily take account of other instances of deprivation—rural challenges in particular—where there are pockets of deprivation in otherwise more affluent areas. In the evidence that the Director General for Education gave to the Public Audit Committee a few weeks ago, he shared that the Government is planning to adopt a more targeted tool of the children in low-income families mechanism as a perhaps better tool of identifying how to allocate public funding within different areas. More generally, we are also conscious of the findings that the former Public Audit Committee made in the report about examples of rural inequalities and how we might capture that in our work. We have commented a lot on inequalities and public spending over the course of the past 18 months. That is a central part of our thinking to develop our work programme on a national basis. I am sure that Sharon will want to come in to say a bit more about the extent to which our work is tailored, and certainly through our audit work on individual public bodies across the NHS and councils. I am not sure how well public money has been spending in it, but I will post more on that. I might say that it is worth saying that the Accounts Commission has members who come from quite remote areas of the country. There is a good understanding of the particular challenges of education in rural contexts. I am married to an islander from the western Isles, so I have some understanding of those issues. We do work with the councils directly, visit with the councils and talk to them about their particular issues. We try to reflect that back in the work that we do and the reports that we produce. I am entirely sympathetic to the points that have been made in the challenges. We have made the point in the report, and the Attorney General has just covered it again in terms of how policy is nuanced and appropriate, and recognises the particular financial and other challenges of providing education in areas that are not within the central belt. It is at the front of our thinking in these matters, thank you, convener. I just wanted to pursue this further, more specifically, if I may. If I can give a few examples. A high school in my area, Grant and Grammar, has got an excellent record. I have attended prize-givings, if they are still called to that. I have seen the success that pupils and parents have achieved working together. A systemic problem facing them and many other rural high schools is the provision of all the relevant subjects, for example, the full range of science subjects and other subjects of the mainstream curriculum. Therefore, if there is no physics or chemistry teacher, how can a child in rural Scotland have access to the range of careers and university places, such as in medicine, for example, where success in advanced hires or whatever in those topics is a sine qua non of access? In other words, how do we prevent this rural inequality being systemic? I stress, convener, that this is a topic that has been raised with me over the years, but not frequently, relatively infrequently. However, what I am really trying to get at is, what regard do the Accounts Commission and the Auditor General pay to this? The second specific that I wanted to raise, and I have a general point, but I will maybe leave that until after the answer on the specifics, if you do not mind. I have a different general point to make. As well as the universality of provision, which can be dealt with in various practical ways, such as teachers visiting other schools than the ones where they are permanently based and other sharing and swapping mechanisms—difficult though they are to organise—there is also the endemic challenge of repairs and renewals, convener, to the 203 primary and 29 high schools. Although some success recently has been achieved in the allocation of funding for which I am very grateful, not least near an academy, to be replaced in about four or five years. Nonetheless, that leaves a huge backlog of drafty old inadequate buildings, often in the 60s, where, for some reason, the common sense of the construction world seemed to have momentarily departed the planet in the buildings that were put up. As I said, convener, that is shared in perspective across all political parties, and those of none. Of course, a great many senior independent councillors would make the point that I am making today. On those two specifics, do the Auditor General and Accounts Commission feel that they have really given a sufficient mined time to these matters? I am happy to comment. Mr Dweyrenhouse and Sharon, I am sure, will say a word or two as well. I think that we are aware of the challenges that you refer to. There are probably limits to our role in respect of the judgment that our regulators will make, most specifically about the scope of the curriculum, which probably extends beyond our remit in terms of how we would refer to that of Education Scotland and the inspectorate about the quality of learning and teaching that takes place in individual establishments. In the wider sense, though, we are very conscious—I think that the point that I am making is about equality and equity of opportunity. That is very clearly part of our work programme. On a national basis, through the work that I lead, I want to say more about how that translates into the audit work that takes place in individual local authorities. I might wish to speak just of the opportunity to your point about how education spending is consumed on repairs and maintenance. It touches on the PFI question from earlier that those are challenges that we have reported on. We have done recently in our work on the overview of other education colleges in Scotland similarly that the longer-term sustainability of the model requires all of those costs to longer-term planning. In the wider sense, we are very aware of the issues. We are alert to them. We are capturing and auditing the response of public bodies across the 200-plus bodies that we audit and featuring in our forward work programme. On the specifics of how that relates to your local authority area, I will pause and invite Sharon to say a few words. Thank you very much indeed, Steven. Thank you for the question. Clearly, it needs to be said that clearly in the council commission, our job is to have oversight of the performance of councils in the area of education. We are not involved with the policy making around the educational framework. Our job is to review how councils are performing. Clearly, local decisions are about how local funds are spent in terms of the delivery of education. I am sure that that will not be a satisfactory answer to Mr Ewing, but we do not really have a remit there in terms of those matters. We can certainly comment on the delivery of educational service. We will comment on the successes and deficiencies of it. We will point up areas of improvement and talk to the council directly about how those matters are being undertaken. I am constantly struck by the innovation that happens at a local level. I visited a tiny little primary school on the Isle of Mawl to see a science project a couple of years ago at a partial capacity. The work that is being done in tiny schools in preparing people for careers in science, technology, engineering and the like is very impressive. If things need to be addressed, those are above my pay grade, but we certainly have an understanding and an appreciation of the challenge. We are very keen to be part of the conversation in terms of trying to improve matters for rural children. I am grateful to witnesses for their answers and for their obvious willingness and constructive approach. However, there are a couple of points that I want to put in concluding the topic. The first point is that Steven said that, with regard to the attainment fund, there will be a further look at hidden poverty in rural areas and deprivation in rural areas to see if there is more inequality that needs to be addressed by additional funding. Whether the role of the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission should, as advisers about financial performance, include in their criticism to the Scottish Government that more needs to be done here, I welcome that. However, the point that I am making is rather more basic. Inequality is inherent in the system of cost allocation because it costs more to provide the same services in an area where there is sparse population because you need more buildings, smaller roles. The cost per head is obviously greater. I would contend that inequality is a systemic issue. I did not quite get from either witness that that was a point that was accepted. To illustrate that point, I read the document that was prepared by both bodies, which is entitled to improving outcomes for young people through school education. Although I am not necessarily a top-grade student, I never really detained the time of the judges much in price-giving decision making. In 149 paragraphs and 49 pages, there is no reference whatsoever to rural cost issues. The word rural does not appear anywhere so far as my reading of the document over the past 24 hours reveals. I put it finally to the witnesses that that is an area that appears to be neglected and omission a lacuna agap. I urge them to take that away on a constructive point to look again to see whether the approach of our bodies needs to be amended. Although Sharon is correct that they are not policy-making bodies, their role is essential to good policy-making, and their advice informs that policy-making, as I know from my time of 14 years as a minister. I am happy to accept your point and your suggestions on what I think is effectively factoring into our forward work programme. I focus on rural poverty, and I support and confirm that that is clearly part of our thoughts. Bills are not just from your own contribution, but similarly that of the former Papal's report and their enthusiasm for further audit work on rural inequalities and rural poverty factors. We are very happy to confirm that that will be part of our forward work. It is probably the grain area and boundary between the choices that policy makers will make on an inevitably competitive environment for public spending, which captures rural factors and the issues of urban poverty and concentration. Audit Scotland, for many years, has been addressing the point that the Scottish budget has a closer connection to the intended national outcomes. We have seen progress in that through the most recent budget and we have seen more transparency through the past 18 months with a summer budget revision and increased witness and expectations that future budgets will have a much closer connection between what will be achieved from public spending rather than just the quantum of what has actually been spent. However, it is why the sense is just happy to hear today that it is very clearly part of our forward work programme that our work can focus on inequalities across Scotland. Thank you, Fergus Ewing. I think that we have a couple of supplementaries on the subject that we have been on for about 20-25 minutes now. Stephanie, do you want to come in as a supplementary to this area? Yes, please, Stephen. Okay, so thanks very much for all your answers so far. It has been really interesting to hear quite a lot of talking around the data, talking about sharing good practice, talking about local issues and challenges there. When it comes back to quite often as well, it is about reflecting, being able to properly reflect all our children's strengths and skills, and not just about the academic achievements, if you like, there and about the policy ambition and actually being able to deliver that on the ground. I am wondering about how this all kind of knits together and joins up with looking at putting vulnerable citizens at the centre of decision making, so really involving them. I am wondering if you will get any comments on how all that kind of knits together. Thanks. Stephen. I am probably going to quickly ask this to Tricia, if I may, who I know has seen some examples and some of the challenges that you rightly say, Ms Callaghan, as to how users of public services are effectively able to shape the service that they get. I think that in the context of our work in education, I think that in some examples where children and young people have been able to give back the service that they got and their survey data included in our report about the experiences that Scotland's children and young people received through Covid, but we absolutely agree that it is important that citizens' services or children and young people are able to feedback that their voices are heard and how well public services are delivered. I guess that is in its widest sense, but I would be enthusiastic to hear Tricia's examples in a perspective on that. Tricia. Thank you. Again, this is an area where we find there is quite a lot of variation across the country. All schools, all councils have arrangements in place to engage with students, to engage with pupils, to engage with learners. Some of that works better than others, and some of it can be the engagement, but not necessarily. Is that leading to a difference or are they feeding back to the children and the young people around what has changed as a result of that engagement? We certainly identified some areas for further improvement. We know that there is quite a lot of concern and is also raised through Covid, through the initial response around the rights of children and young people and that they are not really being taken on board as they should, in particular concerns raised by the Children's Commissioner at that time. We know, for example, that it was not until October that young people joined the education recovery group and there was a separate recovery group set up around children and young people, so some of those things happened a bit later than ideally they should have done. Certain things are happening, and we know that there was lots of engagement with children and young people in terms of the pandemic and how they were feeling what the key issues were for them, but not always again seeing that translated into action and feeding back to the children and young people what happened on the back of what they shared and the information that they were giving. That is an important part of the whole kind of engagement side, that you are not just talking to people, but you are actually acting on it and officially feeding back on what you have done and what kind of change you have made. Thank you, and Michael Marra has a supplementary in this area as well. So, Stephanie, do you want to say something more? Sorry, sorry, Stephen. I was going to say that that is really, really interesting to hear, and I noticed as well that there was a comment as well about the pandemic leading to delivering the Christy scale, and I was wondering what lessons are there to be learned there as far as policy approaches are concerned. I am happy to say a word or two about that, convener, and Sharon may want to as well. I think fundamentally that we have seen across the piece some of the scenarios that we talked about earlier this morning, but public bodies, stir sector, private sector were able to set aside some of the more traditional boundaries of who was responsible for which aspect of public service delivery. Aspects of bureaucracy, responsibility, performance measures were also done likewise, and therefore, at the time of crisis and greatest needs, services were delivered to people. In a way that we hadn't seen over the course of the 10 years since Christy was published, so it gives us perhaps hope for optimising that things can change, that they can be done, but there's a role, as you suggested, Ms Callaghan, that some of those lessons are linked as to what were the behaviours, what were the steps, what were the responsibilities that led to some of the interventions, the delivery of those services over the course of the pandemic, why they happened then and why they didn't happen in the years that preceded. I think that I'm left with a degree of optimism that, if the conditions can, not to sustain a pandemic, of course, but that the conditions that led to the collaboration can be sustained, that we can set aside some of the barriers, whether it's performance measurements, organisations not agreeing on who would be responsible for particular aspects, if those factors can be set aside, and that we can make the type of preventative change, the interventions, that serve well over the course of the past 18 years. Stephen, I think that what we're doing now is that we will go to Michael Marra, who's a supplementary on the subject that we were talking about, and after we've heard Michael's quick supplementary and you've had a chance to respond to it, we're going to go to Willie Rennie, who's going to take us in a different area. Michael. Thanks, convener. I appreciate it. I mean, I thought Fergus's line of questioning was very useful. I mean, obviously across the UK we have the Barnett formula, which delivers an additional £14 billion of spending into Scotland specifically to provide services across a more broader geographic area. I just wanted to say to the Accounts Commission, I think that it would be particularly useful in that piece of work to look at the school building programme provided by the Scottish Government via the Scottish Futures Trust and seeing what the match-up between the aspirations for that and the policy on how it's delivered. My second point on that was what co-cabs point around private finance and building schemes and others. I think that it would be useful to make sure that that included non-profit distribution models, all the various forms of private finance initiative that the SNP has used since it came into power in 2007, which I know that Audit Scotland has previously identified as a private finance initiative. Just to see the full scale of those models as well, if we are being provided with that information to the committee, I think that it would be useful. Thanks, convener. Thank you. That was more of a point than a question, Michael Crest. In that case, we go straight to Willie Rennie. I want to talk about colleges and the regionalisation. Do you think that the regionalisation has achieved the objectives that were set out back in 2011? Morning, Mr Rennie. I'm happy to start on them and I'll invite Rebecca, who is our expert on apologies to supplement my contribution. I'm not sure that we're able to make that definitive yet, that it has achieved the objectives that I think are examples of where there have been challenges in terms of the regionalisation model, challenges of integration. Specifically, as the committee will be familiar with, there are moves away in the Lanarkshire region around the success of the regionalisation model. Our audit work on colleges remains. We've commented that there are still financial challenges in the area that there have been instances of governance and leadership challenges. The theme of this morning, if I may, is that there is still a need for that public spending translates more clearly into outcomes. We draw on the report that the Scottish Funding Council recently published and the Government's subsequent response to it, that there needs to be a clearer model in place around outcome agreements, which will be the most fundamental basis of how well public spending in our education sector is performing. However, as it relates to regionalisation, I'm not sure that we've yet seen the full benefits that were initially intended. I'll invite Rebecca to say a few more words. Thank you, Auditor General. Building on what the Auditor General said, I think that it is very difficult to assess whether all of the intended benefits of regionalisation have been met. In 2018, we looked specifically at the three multi-college regions, so those in Highlands and Islands, Glasgow and Lanarkshire. We found that, although those regional strategic bodies were fulfilling their core statutory duties in meeting the wider aims of regionalisation, progress there was mixed. We recommended that the Government and the Funding Council review those arrangements, and that was something that the Scottish Funding Council took forward as part of its recent review of tertiary education. They found that, for various reasons, in those three multi-college regions, the current arrangements weren't really working as intended. They made some recommendations around reviewing and refreshing those arrangements, and that's something that has now been taken forward, and discussions are on-going in those areas around that. In terms of the aims of regionalisation more widely, so ultimately making the sector more efficient and more responsive to the needs of students, local employers and local areas, those wider aims are reflected in the recommendations of the Scottish Funding Council's recent review of tertiary education. That sets out an ambitious range of recommendations, which includes Pathfinder projects, which are intended to explore options for better strategic planning at a regional level. The Government, in its response to the review, has encouraged the SFC to move those projects on at pace in order to identify learning and to share those lessons more widely to help to improve regional collaboration on a wider scale. We'll be closely watching what comes out of those Pathfinder projects and how they're taken forward and the types of lessons that are coming out of that. I think that we've touched on themes during the course of the conversation, in terms of taking forward the recommendations in the review, particularly around regional collaboration. We would highlight the importance of clear and robust governance and accountability arrangements, clear and simple funding streams, clarity of intended outcomes, and how progress against those intended outcomes will be measured and assessed, what action will be taken if progress isn't being made. Obviously, effective collaboration between partners will be essential. You're both being very diplomatic. The danger with all of this is that those are big bang changes. Many will know that I was a critic of the centralisation of the police. We've got a form of centralisation with colleges. We're about to go into a form of centralisation through the national care service. The more diplomatic you are about whether objectives have been achieved, the more difficult it is for us to make the right decisions about further big bang reforms, as I would call them. I encourage you to be a little bit blunter about whether the college regionalisation has been effective. If it's not been a success, surely that in itself should cause us to pause, even if you're not clear whether the objectives have been achieved. Surely a little bit more of a direct response from yourself would help us, because we've got big decisions to make. I might be wrong about all of those things. I don't think that I am, but my fear is that we're going to end up with another set of reorganisations that won't deliver. We'll be back here in five years' time with you saying that the objectives are not clear whether they've been met with national care service. I encourage you to be a little bit blunter, because we've got big decisions to make. I'm happy to accept Mr Rennie's invitation to be direct and to reassure him and the committee that we do so where the evidence is clear and supports it. I would suggest that much of our work on public sector reform has identified that the intended objectives were either unclear or that they hadn't delivered better. Mr Rennie referenced police reform given on the back of what had been seven successive statutory reporting on police reform. I think that we've been very clear that the intended benefits that arena hadn't been delivered as intended. Perhaps if we've been a little bit more circumspect in respect of regionalisation, as Rebecca said, the intended benefits haven't been delivered yet. For us, that's pretty clear that we are being direct in our judgments. We'll continue to reassure the committee in its widest sense on the delivery of public services. Under that on-going theme that we've touched on a couple of times this morning, structural change has to be clear in its purpose. That purpose is about improving outcomes for people who use and rely on public services. All the work that we've commented on and planning for outcomes at those milestones is clear on the intended benefits opportunities for intervention. Public spending is mapped at all places, particularly in the Scottish budget to the national performance framework, on what is going to be delivered from the significant amounts. I'm grateful for the invitation to be more direct and we'll continue to do so. Forgive me for being a bit provocative. Bob Doris has also got a line of questions about colleges. Thank you, convener. I'm hoping to have a few brief questions about college generalisation and about some of the underpinning budgets of colleges more generally. I remember many years ago when I've been at what was then Springburn College and I think that then Minister Alasdair Allen was there ahead of the regionalisation process in talking to students. One of the ambitions was that curriculum planning would be a lot clearer and that students could move seamlessly between colleges in the one region where courses wouldn't duplicate, they would complement, they would align, cost credit requirements would articulate with each other and it would empower students in relation to that. I have to say that I don't know what progress has or hasn't been made on that but I would ask whether the witnesses today, if that's something that they've looked at, I want to turn to the finances and future reforms in a moment but, in terms of that ambition, has that been realised? Morning, Mr Doris. I'm just going to invite Rebecca to take your question. Thank you, Mr Doris. That's not something specifically that we've looked at in our work on colleges so, unfortunately, I don't have that information and we could certainly speak to the Scottish Funding Council about that and see if we were able to offer any additional information to you on that in due course. Okay, that would be helpful. I would start talking about potential further reforms and I'm just wondering whether that ambition had been realised now. Another aspect of college regionalisation in Glasgow is when I have Glasgow Kelvin College, Glasgow Cloud College and we have a city of Glasgow College. My constituents go to and benefit from all three and offers will be slightly different at each college. We've also got an original board in Glasgow as well and that has a staffing budget of around £300,000 to £320,000 a year in terms of running that original board. I'd always thought that perhaps in Glasgow the colleges could have direct relationships with each other and have the capacity to develop their own working streams in relation to a strategic approach to courses within the city. I'm just wondering whether, again, Audit Scotland has taken any thoughts as to whether the structures in place post-regionalisation are fit for purposes and not really the expression that we'd use, whether they are content that they are appropriate in the current environment. Thank you. I'm sorry, Auditor General. Do you want me to pick that up? In terms of them being fit for purpose, we did, in a 2018 report, highlight some concerns and some of the arrangements in the multi-college regions, including Glasgow and some concerns around how well they were working in terms of governance, accountability and other areas. As part of the SFC's review of tertiary education, they looked more closely at the arrangements and last year recommended that Glasgow College region look at how they may be able to more efficiently and effectively work in a regional setting between all of the colleges and discussions around that are on-going. The role of Glasgow College board will, I imagine, be something that will be considered as part of those discussions. I couldn't comment any more in terms of the progress on that or some of the specific actions that may be taken forward around that. Of course, that's helpful and moving forward with some of Willie Rennie's comments on regionalisation. I shared some of Willie Rennie's comments. Not all of them I have to say, one of them was that there could be centralisation, but what we have with Glasgow Clyde College and Glasgow Kelvin College, in particular in my constituency, is that we have really anchor organisations, community-based colleges and a pretty city of Glasgow College, but they are more of a large west of Scotland regional college such as their scale. I think that many members of the Scottish Parliament would have concerns if we lost something in relation to the community-based colleges' aspects that Glasgow Clyde and Glasgow Kelvin offer. Has Audit Scotland looked at the strength of community-based colleges under the regionalisation model? I want to say a little bit more about the finances next convener in relation to this, but has Audit Scotland looked at how the structures suit that community-based approach to college education, which is vital in my constituency? We haven't specifically, but we recognise that communities are at the heart of college provision and the importance on colleges being able to provide services to the needs of their local community. That's the young people, learners who want to go through college and local employers. As I mentioned previously, we have seen examples of colleges working closely with stakeholders at a local level to be able to meet the needs of their local areas. We recognise the importance of that, but we haven't looked at that specifically within our work on colleges, which has focused on college finances. I hope that you don't mind me raising that as a Glasgow MSP representing Mary Helmsbury, but I would certainly be concerned if Glasgow washed three independent colleges, two of them smaller in scale but absolutely grounded in the communities in which they are based, and I think that we'd lose something. I don't think that that would be efficiency, I think that we'd be throwing something out there. In terms of the funding position of colleges, it's really interesting because I see that in the year 1920 there was a 2 per cent rule terms increasing the revenue funding of colleges, and in the year 2020-21 there were additional £70 million mainly due to Covid to tackle problems faced by students. I also got a little bit confused over the undoubted financial challenges that still exist for colleges because there's a £54 million deficit mentioned, predominantly due to pensions and other liabilities that sit there. Once that's stripped away, colleges have been looking at a £19 million deficit, I think, for the last financial year, but they're now saying that that's turned into a £3 million surplus. I sort of have thrown those numbers that you've reported on back at you during this evidence session, but I'm looking at a 2 per cent rule terms increase. I'm looking at additional £70 million again for the year 2020-21. You're reporting the financial position is better than colleges have thought, and in one respect they've got a £54 million deficit, but they've always got a £9 million surplus. As a committee, when the Scottish budget is published, we have to take cognisance of whether the settlement for Scotland's colleges is adequate and, with those numbers, there's not really a clarity what the current financial position is for Scotland's colleges. I'll just see if the Auditor General wanted to say anything on that before I come in. Thanks, Rebecca. I'll definitely come to you in a moment to address Mr Doris's point. All those numbers are correct, and I recognise the point that you made that they somehow appear contradictory at the same time. The committee will be familiar with that through its own work and Audit Scotland reporting that the college sector has been experiencing financial challenges and sustainability concerns for a number of years. Like almost all sectors of public services that Covid had been anticipated to exacerbate those financial challenges, but in reality some of that was teased out at the round table on college financial sustainability that the Public Audit Committee held a few weeks ago. Given the dominance of public funding as being the primary source into the college sector, it's perhaps been a bit more insulated than other sectors. Most direct comparisons are probably the university sector, which has been more adversely impacted by Covid given the presence of other sources of income relative to its total. There is more public-orientated in the college sector. It's not entirely rosy picture, though. As you say, there are still financial challenges, but there are still concerns related to the pay arrangements across the sector, tensions, concerns, increasing national insurance contributions and the quality of its estate that will all bring financial challenges to the sector. Rebecca mentioned that the Scottish Funding Council had recently done a review of tertiary education in Scotland and one of the recommendations therein was in respect of moving towards a multi-year financial settlement. We see that the Government has accepted it and I'm sure that that will be of interest to the committee as part of its free budget scrutiny. As to what that looks like and what it's got been in favour of long-term, medium-term financial planning, which you would expect and promoting it for many years, the advent of multi-year settlements gives the college sector that better opportunity to plan the delivery of its services beyond the 12-month planning horizon, but it should give it more scope to respond to the challenges if they are not met with directly increased funding allocations. I hope that that's helpful for Mr Doris in his wider sense, but I'll pause and ask Rebecca to come in if there's anything in the specifics that she wants to do to me. Just on some of the specific figures that you quoted, Mr Doris, there are, as the Auditor General said, all correct, but we recognise that there are a number of different things at play there. We report on the difference between income and expenditure just to highlight the increasing financial pressures on colleges, but we recognise that there are factors at play there in terms of depreciation of assets and pension contributions and other things that are out with the college's direct control. We then strip them out to present an underlying operating position, which we think gives a slightly more accurate picture of the financial health of the sector, and that's where the surplus figure comes from once you've stripped out some of those elements. In terms of increased revenue funding from the Government, I think it's probably just worth noting that in recent years those increases have primarily covered additional costs from harmonising staff terms and conditions. They, alongside contributions to pension schemes, remain one of the biggest financial pressures on colleges at the moment. We have one more quick question on the subject area. I'll try to keep it brief. I know that there's a lot of airtime for the committee. It's incredibly helpful that expression about stripping out some of those liabilities to get a more articulate, accurate real-time assessment of colleges' finances, so that would be £9 million surplus rather than £54 million deficit. That's really helpful when we come to look at budget scrutiny. Finally, I haven't mentioned attainment and attainment gaps in those existing colleges as well. I'm conscious that Glasgow Kelvin College, a fantastic college in my constituency, has an attainment rate of 60 per cent. There are other colleges with higher attainment rates, although I would note that the college has a strong positive destination outcome. The students who go to Glasgow Kelvin College will be far more top-heavy in SIMD 10 and SIMD 20. I'm just wondering whether Audit Scotland and others look at the outcomes for colleges. We look at the attainment gaps. I saw a figure saying that the Scottish Government wants attainment levels to 75 per cent over the next few years. That's a target that we have at 66 per cent across Scotland at the moment. Are we taking into account the poverty-related attainment gap within Scotland's communities as it presents itself in colleges? That might be a case for additional funding, but it might be a peth for the colleges, for example, in terms of how we address some of that. Any comments on that would be helpful. I won't come back in after that question. I'm happy to say a word, and I'm sure that Rebecca will do as well. Our work this year, in particular, focused on finances, as Rebecca has said, in previous reporting on the college sector, we have gone wider to explore its performance. As you rightly said, there are measures of performance in terms of positive destinations, of course completion rates, and the performance of individual sections of society in the college sector, too. There is a wide degree of performance already. I think that when we are thinking about our own work, we are best at adding value through our reporting on how well public money has been spent and what has been achieved, what the outcomes have been achieved from that. It remains within our thoughts to offer you that reassurance, Mr Burris, that we will continue to explore not just what has been spent, but also what has been achieved from that across the college sector, too. Again, I'm happy if Rebecca wishes to add anything to that. Well, very briefly, Rebecca, because I need to move this along. Absolutely convenient. Probably just to say that attainment rates in terms of identifying different groups of students are collected and reported on. In terms of looking at students from more deprived areas, that information is available and the Scottish Funding Council reports on that. In 2019, attainment rates for students from the 10 per cent most deprived areas were sitting at around 67 per cent, which compares to about 71 per cent of students overall. Just to give a sense of the difference in terms of the attainment rate. Thank you, convener. Thank you, thank you, Rebecca. And a brief supplementary from Willie, and then we go straight to Michael. Thanks very much, convener. Yeah, I just want to touch on universities. Universities are under, particularly being more reliant on potentially volatile international student numbers, because the world is volatile. The finances in those institutions that are otherwise amazingly successful are still unpredictable. There's quite a significant demand on the public sector, but nevertheless they're quite independent, and they have been so, and that's in large part why they are so successful. How do you go about doing your job with universities? I know a little bit of frustration in one of the remarks about being unable to measure effectively, because it's not so easy to do so. I'm just wondering how you strike the balance between those institutions' independence and, therefore, success, but also the need for the public sector to be able to measure and scrutinise what's happening in those institutions. Thank you. You're right that I don't appoint new auditors for Scotland's university sector, unlike the further education sector. We are independent autonomous organisations, and that reflects their audit and scrutiny arrangements, too. What is Scotland does, though, has retained its interest and has reported on the university sector, so most recently my predecessor reported on Scotland's universities in its widest sense under the powers under the Public Finance and Accountability Act. That probably reflects the point that you're making, Mr Rennie, that there's still a significant amount of public funding that goes into Scotland's universities. That deserves assurance of the opportunity for the Parliament to scrutinise that. We did that in 2019, and it remains part of our thinking and agenda to where it's going to add value to continuing reporting on the university sector. We agree all the points that you make about the volatility and impact of the pandemic, and we'll see that through the reporting of individual universities. The theme from the 2019 report is that where those universities are relying on international students, the volatility of that will be the most challenging factor to deal with and the long-term need for future planning. The only additional point that I would make is that it refers to the Funding Council's report on the Government's response about how best to make that translation into outcome agreements, which, in judgment, led that it hadn't been a terribly effective process establishing what was being achieved for the vast sums of public money that were invested in the university sector and a need for a more straightforward process. We would make the continued point that there still needs to be transparency opportunity for public scrutiny that it's clear that, as Scotland's public services are investing in universities, there's a line of sight as to what's being delivered from them. Okay, thank you. Michael Marra. Thanks, convener. My questions to the auditor general regarding his report and his name that was produced prior to the election in this session of Parliament on education. Obviously, that report concluded that the gap in education inequality remained far too wide and had fallen short of the Scottish Government's aims. Since that work was done in the main, we have had the pandemic. As far as we can tell, there's been a huge disruption and the impact of that has been very unequal as well, affecting some of the most deprived and less privileged groups in our society. What sense does he have on any work that is on going around the impact of the pandemic on exactly those kinds of outcomes that he looked at in his report? Good morning, Mr Marra. I would stress if I may that it was a joint report between myself and the Accounts Commission on improving outcomes for Scotland's children and young people through school education. I recognise the point that you make, and one of the clear findings from the report is that the poverty-related attainment gap, on a national basis, although closed and as a result of improvement in attainment levels for the most deprived communities in Scotland, still remained wide and hadn't closed at the rate that the Scottish Government had set out. The terminology that the Scottish Government used was stretch aims, but it hadn't done so at the pace with which it would want to, and Shannon Connerby was to say more about how that translated into the work of individual councils. When we published the report, we got to update for the impact that Covid had had on Scotland's children and young people in a school setting. Of course, we all recall the instance of lockdown, home learning and supply of digital devices. We refer to all the factors in the report, instances of digital exclusion, digital poverty and the challenge of sustaining an education system during excessive lockdowns. The overall conclusion is that we reached matters improved by the time of the second lockdown, when digital devices were more readily available and that learning from schools and education providers further progressed by the second lockdown than they had been initially. Nonetheless, the challenge fell—of chance of the pandemic, undoubtedly—on the most deprived children in Scotland society, for the various factors that some of which are education-led and some will be factors in the household about health concerns, the provision of work, parental support and all of those factors will undoubtedly be true. I am happy to pause and I am sure that Shannon will be able to go. I am sorry, but if I can on that point, I would be great to hear from Shannon. Are you aware of any work to quantify any in terms of lost learning across Scotland, the general impact? I understand your description there in terms of the reaction in terms of how education authorities locally and nationally tried to deal with the immediate impact. In terms of the longer-term impact on children, do you have any sense of any work that has been done? That was my core of my question to assess what the impact on young people has been. I am happy to invite Trisha. I am perhaps best described by the analysis that education authorities have done, but, perhaps more important, the assessment that the Government and Education Scotland have undertaken about the impact on Scotland's children and young people. If I may, I will go to Shannon and invite Trisha to sit down for the committee. I have a few things. One of the things that I mentioned was about the equity audit that was published back in January. Just before we had published our reports, we were able to refer to that. That was joined together with a lot of information that was available about how the pandemic had impacted on the more vulnerable children and actions to be taken forward and priorities to be taken forward. Health and wellbeing, for example, will be one of the priorities in relation to how that had such a big impact on children and young people. We know in terms of reporting that the new national improvement framework and the progress report and update and all the data will be published, is due to be published towards the end of December, so that is something that we will be looking to see how things have moved on. Again, what are the priorities that have been reflected through the updated version of the national improvement framework? One of the things that we have flagged in the report was around discontinuous data. We have got the exam results for this year and last year, but we have obviously been done on a different basis to previous years. How do you factor that into looking at what that means in terms of progress towards the straight change that has been set out? It will be interesting to see how that has been reflected. There has been gaps in the collection of data around curriculum for excellence levels. They are now being collected this year, but we have a gap last year and the basis may be a bit different this year. There are quite a lot of factors going on there, but the big thing will be the new NIF coming out in December this year to see how all that data has been pulled together and what the priorities are moving forward. Maybe Sharon was about to come in there and give me that. I do have other questions. Thank you for the question. As a matter of routine, we review educational performance with individual councils and those reports are available publicly. It is important to recognise the hard work of everybody involved in education. I think that one of the big opportunities out of Covid, particularly in terms of children who are socially and economically disadvantaged, is the fact that parents were involved. One of the big learnings for me is that we have an army of supporters in terms of the educational process and for the future. That might be something that we might think about as how we keep parents involved directly in the education of children who are perhaps more disadvantaged. Thank you, convener. Sorry. That's okay. Michael. Thanks, convener. I think that more data in this area would be very helpful, I have to say. I know that the equity audit was not quantitative. We need to see more information on that so that we can assess in this kind of work whether the current policies and spending priorities of the Government address what is now far greater problem in terms of the level of need. That brings me on to two specific areas. One is around PEF spending. I wonder if colleagues from both the Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland can comment on the availability and transparency around how that money is being allocated in different areas. I have to say both as a councillor, which I am at the moment up until May, as well as a member of the Scottish Parliament. I find it very difficult to find out what that money has been spent on and to what ends on a local level and a national level. There might be some comments on that, and then I will come on to another issue regarding school buildings, if that is okay, convener. Thanks, Mr Marr. I am happy to say a word or two, and again, if you are content to invite colleagues in to supplement my response. The report on education outcomes prominently features the additional funding that PEF was allocated across Scotland's local authorities. Overall, it was not clear enough to see the impact of PEG spending on attainment levels across the country. In addition to our own work—Mr Marr, you may be familiar with it, but I am sure that I am in the committee too. Education Scotland, if memory serves me correct, I have undertaken three separate reports scrutinising how PEF has been used across the country for recommendations for good practice and sharing of learning across different local authorities across Scotland. What happens next feels equally important, given the Government's commitment to spending £1 billion on the Scottish attainment challenge over the course of this parliamentary term. It goes back to the key themes of the report. With public spending on that scale, there needs to be clear outcome measures that the data needs to support scrutiny interventions as required. Public spending is being properly targeted to those in greatest need, and the outcomes reflect that scale of public spending. On some of the specifics, I am going to pause Mr Marr, and I am sure that Sharon, Tricia and I will want to say for that. I would like to say, in response to that question, that I endorse the auditor general's remarks. It is a matter that we have reviewed previously, and we continue to take an active interest in, and it is all about measuring the right things. We will continue to have an interest in that area. I think that those answers are slightly worrying, I have to say. This is £1 billion of taxpayers' money. At times, how it is being allocated is impenetrable. I have seen those reports from Education Scotland, which are case studies of best practice and what might be copied elsewhere, but the practice across Scotland is hugely variable. There is very little in going back to the comments that were made earlier about tying that up to what the outcomes are going to be. That is an area for me in terms of the granularity of what money is being spent on. How is it delivering change for some of the most vulnerable young people in our society that we need as politicians and policy makers to know an awful lot more about? At the moment, I am afraid that it is pretty difficult to find that out. My last question, if I can, can be related to that. I appreciate that. It relates to ventilation spending. There is £10 million allocated recently to record the amount of CO2 in classrooms, essentially to tell teachers whether to open the windows or not. I wonder whether Scotland or the Accounts Commission had looked into the issue of school buildings and how they are prepared for the pandemic that we remain in and what the issues relate to that and how public spending is being used to adapt buildings to help to prevent infection. I am sure that colleagues will want to comment on the ventilation point, but if I may just go back to the PEF, I think that we would agree that that was fundamentally the one that the public spending on PEF and the attainment challenge was not clear enough yet what was being achieved from that, that the outcomes were felt too anecdotal, they relied on surveys and teachers' perspective on the money. I am not to challenge that, I am sure that that is their reality. However, if we are now allocating a further £1 billion of public spending, we need more robust data about what has actually been achieved from that. That was clearly one of the judgments that came through in the report. If I may, Mr Marra, I am not sure that we necessarily have the answer to your point about school ventilation, but I will just check in the first of a shot on that and give you the best place to answer it. I do not have an answer to that. We are not currently looking at it as far as I am aware, so sorry that I do not have anything further, convener. Okay. That is fine. Thank you very much, convener. I appreciate that. Thank you, Michael, and thank you to our witnesses. Thank you, convener. I am now off mute. 1140 hours. I am sure that we can all agree that we want our children to have the best start. 1140 hours has been a bit of a revolution, as far as Scottish childcare is concerned. Previously, it was only 412 hours, and I know as a parent of school-aged kids myself that it would have made a huge difference to me to have those nursery hours there. While the pandemic delayed things by a year, it has still been a pretty incredible achievement to get that rolled out there. We have got about 97 per cent, I think, of children getting 600 hours plus 87 per cent actually taking the 1140 hours completely there. My question is, and I know as well, of course, that the Scottish Government has committed to wrap around childcare for before and after school, and it has also expanded to all two-year-olds for early years education. How should the evaluation of expansion to 1140 hours inform many future policy-making in that area? I will say a word or two, and then by Darren and Tricia, who are part of the authors of the report, to say a word or two more. We would agree that this would be a hugely significant programme of public policy implementation in early learning childcare for the 1140 hours, as you described. When we reported in March 2020—I think that it was our last report just before the pandemic—the progress was explored by the Public Audit Committee and others, and some were slightly falling short in overall delivery, but there had been a successful programme and the anticipated benefits were expected to be considerable. The judgment that we reached and informed by the Government is that the programme is now complete across all local authorities in Scotland that are now offering the service. The question that you make about the evaluation of the judgments that we made in the report is that there were opportunities for, as the Government undertook its evaluation of the programme, to explore some of the wider economic implications and benefits, what that meant for employment opportunities for parents who were able to enter the workforce in a way that we had been prevented from doing so. We recognise that this is one of the hardest things to do, and it has not seen from the discussion on the education outcomes report that some of those other implications such as what were the implications around family well-being and so forth, given the very significant change that that would make. We recognise that as a very supportive report on the implementation of a very significant part of education policy. Those were the points that I would highlight as the evaluation takes place, the scope to broaden that out to capture those wider factors. I will pause there again, as I am sure Sharon and Douglas will want to say a word or two more. I would just like to add that it is a matter of refinement and review and endorse what the auditor general has said. Obviously, it is a very important development that is welcomed by parents and educators, and it is really the heart of the matter in terms of giving children the very best start that we can, so it will be an area where we continue to take a very active interest in. That is absolutely great. I want to make it clear that I am currently a councillor at South Lanarkshire Council. I was delighted to hear the positive comments on the collaborative work that South Lanarkshire Council has been doing as well as far as education is concerned. I turn now to Ross, who is now available. We are delighted to have Ross join us. Thank you, convener. I hope that you are able to hear me. I apologise due to the size of the event. The ventilation is on pretty strong, so if the background noise is… We should explain that you are at COP26. Yes, sorry, I realised that I explained that in the previous, but not when the meeting went into the public session, so I apologise to our witnesses that I have had to drop out. Given that, I am not going to go on for too long, because I have a lot of questions that have already been asked. In the first instance, though, I was really interested in the part of your submission that mentioned future work that you are planning, looking into the provision of additional support for learning in schools. I was wondering if you could weigh out a little bit more what you are envisaging for the scope of that work. Is this a look into the provision of ASN services in mainstream schools? Will you build special schools? Are you looking across the board at all ASN provision in tertiary education? As I am happy to kick off and then let colleagues to come in it, we have retained an interest in ASN provision for many years. We are encouraged to undertake further audit work by Angela Morgan, part of her review about the quality and content of additional support needs across Scotland. We have signalled our interest in it. What we have not yet got to is scoping out the nature of our work. As ever, we are grateful to receive recommendations and comments from Angela Morgan and the committee before we settle on the timing and scope of our activity. I think that we recognise how important an area of education policy is. Some of the changes that have taken place, as you alluded to, are the provision of special schools and the more mainstreaming of education. We are thinking about how we best undertake public audit in this area. I am perhaps not able to say much more than that at this stage, but, as ever, Sharon and Tricia may wish to. I would like to defer to Tricia, because she is directly involved in the work and will give you, I think, a better response than I could. Thank you, Sharon. As the auditor general said, we have not done the scoping work yet, so it could go in a number of different ways. In addition to what he said, one of the other areas that we are considering is the issue around transitions. The transitions from early learning into primary and secondary and then potentially into both school destinations, so links with colleges, might be a potential area of focus, given that we can look across the whole range of public services and the whole learner journey. However, we have not made any decisions yet, but those are the kind of things that we are thinking that could potentially be important. Thanks very much. I recall quite a few years ago, when our predecessor Stephen King came to meet us, what the scope of the potential inquiry into ASN services might be, so I would be more than happy, but my office has built up quite a lot of data on this over the years through various FOI requests, written questions and so on, so I would be more than happy to discuss that for yourselves. My other question is in a different area. You made a point in your submission to the committee written submission, I believe, paragraph 9, around measuring against the wider objectives and curriculum for excellence, a lack of data, a lack of systems that we have to actually measure against those wider objectives rather than just attainment and assessed subjects. I would be keen to hear whether you could expand on that. What areas of data do you think are missing in those wider areas of curriculum for wellbeing, but other areas as well? In what areas do we have a significant lack of data that inhibits your ability to conduct your work? You are right in the submission and also in the report. Did you catch all that? I think that Mr Greer was asking about the difference in the quality of data between attainment and the other pillars of curriculum for excellence. We would recognise that as one of the main findings from the report, that there is an abundance of data in the Scottish education sector on attainment levels, key features both in the primary phase and secondary school too, but I am probably mirroring the finding of the OECD report is that we do not see that the extent or quality of data on the other components of curriculum for excellence. Perhaps that informs some of the views and judgments in the commentary that happens around education and the appetite in some places for league tables on attainment, which, as educationalists tell us and as we put in our own report, is really only one component of Scotland's education system and the potential barrier to the parity of esteem, the wrong path and so forth. We particularly talked about health and wellbeing in the report as there being a lack of data around those factors. We note that the Government has plans around health and wellbeing census. The director general talked about that in the evidence to the Public Order Committee. We are keen to see progress. I do not think that there is any dispute that there is not the consistency or quality of data across all aspects of education in Scotland, but there is a need for progress. We were heartened by the Government's recognition in that evidence session. Similarly, from Education Scotland, of their intention to make progress, we will continue to keep that as a part of our forward work programme to comment on the impact of subsequent activity that we wanted. Thank you. Ross? Thanks, committee. Just one final question continuing with that theme. You mentioned the similar artist between comments that you have made in the OECD report. The OECD report offers another level of detail that is specifically critical of the value of the data produced by the SNSAs, the Scottish National Standardised S. I would be interested in your view on that. Do the SNSAs produce data that is useful to you for your objectives at a national level? It was an area of interest for our predecessor committee to try and get a handle between the value of SNSAs at individual formative data, so for teachers interacting with individual pupils, versus their value as a national or even a local authority level dataset, so I would be interested in whether you find that dataset at either regional or national level to be useful or if you think that there are better ways to collect that kind of data. I think that if I am being frank, I am not sure that we have gone into that level of detail on that particular aspect of the dataset. For the purposes of reporting, we are keen to track public spending to outcomes by the sense, rather than the dataset, and I am happy to defer to the judgment that the OECD made in its reporting. I am also keen to invite Trisha just to, and by all means, to contradict if there is anything that we have seen or not on. Thank you. No, we did not look in particular at that dataset, and it was not something that we asked about when we did our fieldwork, so we do not have any feedback from others around how you slowly have found that data or how they use it to know nothing to add there. Thank you. I think that that might be an area of potential interest for us in committing the future and that one of the intended purposes of SNSAs is to measure our progress and narrowing the attainment gap, given the targeted funding through the attainment challenge fund, etc. If SNSAs are working as intended, we should, in theory, be able to use the dataset that they produce to measure against whether those targeted funding interventions are actually working. I would encourage other colleagues on the committee to consider this an area that we might want to look at in the future, but I think that we are on the spot on that. It would be helpful if some further thought could be given us to whether or not they are fulfilling that purpose in relation to the targeted funding. That is all for me for now, convener. Thank you for bringing me in. Thank you, Ross. Thank you to our witnesses. We have reached almost two hours into the meeting, and I am hoping that Stephen New and your colleagues will bear with us for a little longer. We have at least one more round of questions before we conclude, so I am going to turn to Oliver Mundell. In terms of pet funding, we have already heard that more than £1 billion of taxpayers money has been put into that scheme. I wondered whether you have talked a lot about the importance of being clear on the policy objectives. On a number of occasions, the Scottish Government has attempted to position that policy as being about giving headteachers greater autonomy at the same time as enhancing equity. Did you reflect on that and whether it is possible for the same policy to have those two different aims? Morning, Mr Mundell. You are right. As with the discussion with Mr Marra, we reflect in the report that increase in public spending and education spending are attributable to PEPF. It was not clear that the intended outcomes were achieved when we saw the data and how that reflects at the various levels of performance on what were the attainment challenge councils relative to non-attainment challenge councils. That wider point was recognising that headteachers through survey and discussion were satisfied and optimistic that PEPF would deliver those equity outcomes that allow them to target spending as the best-soffit delegation of authority point that you are making. I don't think that the two things are mutually exclusive, that there can still be effective support guidance for spending at delegated levels, but that there is an appropriate framework that takes place around that spending to perhaps building on Education Scotland's work to how to best target the interventions that are still giving headteachers the level of autonomy through the policy objectives that they know best what their school and what their children and young people need. That is helpful. If you reflect at all, there is a small group of schools that tend to be predominantly rural, smaller schools who end up being ineligible for any of those funds. Headteachers in those schools anecdotally say that most reasonable people would accept it to be the case. There is significant poverty and deprivation and an exclusion from opportunities in rural areas. Headteachers in those schools do not have the opportunity to make sure that we see the same education equality for everyone. Is that something that you would look at when you are auditing, when you are looking at the success of a policy? There has certainly been a theme through the report and the subsequent evidence sessions that the Public Health and Sport Committee heard from the Government in recent Scotland that essentially SIND as a mechanism to allocate public spending is perhaps too blunt and does not take account of aspects of rural poverty or where there are pockets of poverty in an otherwise affluent area. Therefore, as a consequence of that model, as you described, some schools and some children and young people that would have benefited from the additional funding were not eligible to receive it. We await with interest to see what happens next as the Government is set out in that evidence session to the Public Health and Sport Committee the intention to refine the funding model for £1 billion. You would recognise the tension between a policy objective that says that it is about giving headteachers autonomy and then denying or not enabling a relative group of headteachers to take those decisions in relation to their pupils. There is a tension between saying that that is the policy objective of equity funding and then, because of where the threshold is set, that opportunity has not been available in all schools. That was a clear finding from the report that the health funding mechanism for allocating did not address all aspects of poverty in Scotland. For those two factors, we discussed aspects of rural poverty and then pockets in an otherwise affluent area. Those children and young people would not have received that level of funding and the headteachers would not have been able to direct funding had there been a more refined area. I think that the hearing Government described their plans to adopt the DWP methodology for children and low-income families as a better tool to allocate funding. We will watch that with interest and factor that into our forward audit plans. I had another question. I know that other members have brought it up around college funding. I know that you say that the college sector has not had the same unpredictability as the university sector. However, there has been a long-standing feeling in the college sector that they have not had the same funding flexibility. Over time, that makes it more difficult for colleges to make strategic decisions. If they are under significant financial pressure day-to-day, it is more difficult to vieshate. In relation to the kind of community, it is difficult to expect colleges not to react nimbly and quickly when they do not have the kind of fair funding capacity or reserves to reconfigure their offer. Is that something that you would recognise? I suppose that, taking those points in reverse, if I may, the arms-length foundations of colleges that were set up at construction took place often acted as the need to support some of that structural change within colleges that you described, particularly for changes in employment range events. Those reserves are dwindling, so it will become a factor that, as colleges look to change their operations and their way to deliver services, they will not have that ability in the future. We were enthusiastic to see the better opportunity for the roll-out of meeting a long term financial signal than the SSC review and the Government's response to it, that multi-year financial settlements will be filtered on. If I am potentially rolled out, I think that, as a mechanism, that provides colleges with better opportunities to plan the delivery of their services and give them the flexibility that you described, Mr Mundell. For now, because of time, there was one last question just on the 11.40-hour workforce, and it is something that you have covered extensively previously. I continue to receive concerns from the PVI sector that they are not able to recruit and retain early learning and childcare workers, and that often those who are working for them are displaced into local authority settings. Do you feel that that is still a risk in terms of the success of that policy? Again, I will ask Tricia to come in at the moment, if we are any more up to the information, but we would recognise the issue and the concerns that were raised by the private sector that they are able to compete with local authorities to retain and to attract. If there is a disparity in the issue of pension arrangements, there will be a barrier. As the policy in the report mentions, there is a neutrality in provision between the public and the private sector. The private sector is an essential component in the delivery of that policy, and as the Government evaluates the policy, it will need to come back into its thinking to evaluate the evidence behind recruitment, retention rates and the inability of the private sector in the delivery of that policy. Again, I am happy to pause, as I think that Tricia will probably want to say a word or two of update on this. Thank you. We certainly identified that as a risk when we published the report back in March 2020. It means a risk, and we plan to do further audit work next year to plan to look at how did the roll-out happen, was it successful, in terms of all the children and young people getting the 1140 hours that they really wish to do, but we will be looking at the workforce that is delivering that service and whether or not and the impact that it has had on the private voluntary sector. That is reassuring. I think that the sector will be worried about the timing and the vulnerability of a number of settings, but I accept that you have worked to the time scale that you have got. Thank you Oliver. I have two very quick questions to end our session on. Willie Rennie has a question. If you would direct that to the relevant witness, Willie, and then I have a quick question just to the end. She has gone back to early years in learning and childcare. There has been, councils have done quite an amazing job getting the roll-out to the 1140, but I was a bit concerned about the reference to, we are now into refinement when there are big questions about the viability of private nurseries based on the rates of return that they are getting, that we are only getting about a third of the entitled two-year-olds into nursery and the proclaimed flexibility that, when we were setting up this scheme, was going to be insculpt to it has not been achieved. So it was just your reflections on that. I suppose that that is more of a point rather than a question, but I was just alarmed that you thought that we were into refinement when there are major problems with aspects of the roll-out. These are all areas that we will be looking at when we do the further work next year to look at how the roll-out was delivered to one of the things around flexibility. At the time when we published the 2020 report, we thought that there were risks around if some councils were able to use some of their contingency arrangements, that potentially because their illnesses were not available on time. Some of that may have happened in some councils, so therefore the children and families would not have the same flexibility that they would when we moved out with the contingency arrangements into the more permanent type of arrangements. So, yes, we will want to follow up on things like that. The two-year-olds scheme, we know that the Government is doing work with the UK Government around getting better access to data around two-year-olds who are entitled because of having access to various benefits and things. We continue to have discussions with the Government around some of the risks and how some of that has been taken forward, but we will report on that next year. And my final question is to the Auditor General for Scotland himself. We are, Stephen, at the beginning of our journey of scrutinising work at the start of session 6. I wonder if you could just give us your advice, welcome your views as to what issue or consideration you would highlight to the committee that we could most usefully pursue or keep in our thoughts as we continue our journey of scrutiny. What is your thought? Very grateful for your invitation. I would like to spend some time with the committee this morning with colleagues. The fundamental point—I think that it has come up a number of times this morning—is that what has been achieved from public spending matters as much as the assurance around what has been spent, that the outcomes are clear. Does that continue to focus on—as Parliament considers Scotland's budget over the next few weeks—we see the mapping of public spending to the national performance framework outcomes that are intended from that? You will no doubt have your very clear interest through the work of the committee. In terms of our own activity, as Tricia has mentioned, we will be following up 1140. We will continue to look at education outcomes. We will be publishing a report in early next year on the alignment of Scotland's skills system and the work of Scottish Funding Council Skills Development Scotland. As we come out of the pandemic opportunities, we need, inevitably, for training and retraining as Scotland's economy and industry changes, and we will be of interest to the committee too. Lastly, it is worth highlighting that both myself and my colleagues in the Accounts Commission extending the outcomes theme have recognised that Scotland is not an equal society, but there are many of us who rely far greater on public services than others—the inequalities that surround how many of us live our lives. We are continuing to focus on that through our audit work and what has been achieved most fundamentally from public spending. As ever, convener, I have greatly welcomed the chance to join the committee this morning, and we look forward to doing so at your invitation, again, as we produce reports that are of both interest to the committee. Thank you, Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, Sharon McConnor, from the Accounts Commission and Tricia Meldrum and Rebecca Seidel, who are senior managers at Audit Scotland. I thank you for being with us this morning. The public part of today's meeting is now at an end, and I will now suspend the meeting. I ask members to reconvene on Microsoft Teams, which will allow us to consider our next agenda items in private. Thank you and good morning.