 Siamhlynd, a fawr i gynnyddio gydag y 12 yma o'ch trafnannaurestodd ond uníig arnynno at Lywodraeth yng nghymch gan melynwyr ar gyfer yn 2021. We have received apologies from Oliver Mundell, and we welcome back to our committee, Megan Gallacher, who is joining us as one of our substitute members. We have also had apologies from Willie Rennie, who is not with us this morning. The first item on our agenda today is to take evidence on subordinate legislation SSI 2021 379, protection of vulnerable groups Scotland act 2007, applications for removal from list and late representations amendment regulations 2021. A motion to annul this instrument has been lodged by Oliver Mundell and the motion will be moved by Megan Gallacher. As is the usual practice in such circumstances, we will have a brief evidence session. First, with the minister for children and young people who have joined us this morning, which will allow members to ask questions and seek clarification. I will give a warm welcome to Claire Hawkey, who is the minister for children and young people. Good morning, minister. The minister is accompanied by Lynn McMinn, who is the director of policy, customer engagement and communications, Disclosure Scotland. Rachel McLean, Disclosure Scotland act implementation manager, Disclosure Scotland. Rosie McQueen, solicitor. Denise Mackay, Rosie is not here this morning. So Denise, good morning and welcome. You are also a solicitor for the Scottish Government, legal directorate. We got that bit right, but it is good to see you here with us this morning. I invite the minister to make some short opening remarks. Thank you for inviting me to speak to the protection of vulnerable groups Scotland act 2007 applications for removal from list and late representations amendment regulations 2021. I will not go into the technical detail of what the regulations do, because that is already explained in the accompanying documents produced by Scottish Government officials and is complemented by the SPICE paper. I will say that the PVG act has always included provision to allow barred individuals to make an application to be removed from the barred lists. Removal is contingent on ministers being satisfied that the applicant is no longer unsuitable to work with vulnerable groups. To be absolutely clear, the policy proposal allows people aged 18 to 25 to apply to be removed from the barred lists sooner, but such an application does not lead to automatic removal. There is a thorough and well-established process for considering removal applications, one that replicates the process for inclusion in the barred list, carried out by Disclosure Scotland's protection services. The proposal in the regulations is also consistent with the situation in the rest of the United Kingdom, where individuals are able to ask for a review of a barring decision by the Disclosure and Barring service. The system of state disclosure that we have today is in direct response to the tragic soul murders of August 2002, and this Government will never forget why this service is so important. Indeed, my predecessor brought forward the bill that became the Disclosure Scotland Act 2020 and will, once fully implemented, deliver a range of reforms to the protecting vulnerable group scheme that strengthens the national barring service. This Government is committed to giving everyone a better chance to overcome early adversities, including youth offending, in order to allow them to become productive and valued citizens in adulthood. Our policy proposal in the regulations is in keeping with the wider reforms that were achieved by the Disclosure Scotland Act 2020, striking a balance between safeguarding and proportionality by enabling people with offending in their past to move on for safeguarding considerations to allow into employment, work or volunteering. Disclosure Scotland has been engaging with relevant academics and experts in the formulation of policy supporting this measure. There is a clear association between age and assistance from crime, and the evidence supports that that should be recognised in policy. However, in every case, it is right that the individual circumstances are considered in order to make a safe decision about whether it is right to remove a person from the barred list. We know from the responses to the 2018 consultation on the protection of vulnerable groups and the disclosure of criminal information that there is stakeholder support for the changes made by these amendment regulations. Particularly for the benefit that they will provide care-experienced individuals who are more likely than their peers to have experiences with the criminal justice system. Who Cares Scotland said in their published consultation response that can be viewed on the citizen space website that they welcomed this change and said that it is motivated by an understanding that those who commit crimes at a younger age are often trying to move on when coming into contact with PVG processes. I invite Ms Gallacher on behalf of Mr Mundell to withdraw his motion to annul. If the motion is pressed, I would ask members not to vote in favour of it. Thank you minister. I'm now going to turn to colleagues. I think we'll start with actually Megan Gallacher, whose name was just mentioned, who may have some questions for you. Thank you convener and good morning minister. Minister, if I could ask you to outline the justification of amending the legislation in particular, where did the five-year limit originate from? The regulations that we're discussing today will amend the prescribed period that must pass before a person has the right to make an application and it will increase the age threshold for what is referred to in the principle regulations as the shorted prescribed period from under the age of 18 to the age of 25. That means that an individual, including in the barbed list, where the age between 18 and 25 will be able to make an application to be removed after five years have passed from the date of inclusion rather than 10. Again, I want to make it absolutely clear that those regulations do not automatically lead to individuals being removed from the barbed list. They simply amend the circumstances in which an application for removal is competent. As I said in my opening remarks, the proposed changes are consistent with the situation in the rest of the United Kingdom, where individuals are able to ask for a review of the decision of disclosure and the barring service. The threshold is consistent with the situation in the rest of the UK, where individuals are able to ask for that change at the age of 25. It is also in line with corporate parenting responsibilities as they apply under the Children and Young People Scotland Act of 2014, in which we acknowledge that parenting does not stop at the age of 18. That was the reason why that age in particular was chosen. I am still not clear, if I am honest with you, minister, because I hear what you are saying about the rest of the United Kingdom. Of course, we have a devolution settlement. We can be different in Scotland than quite rightly so, on many occasions. Why was the age of 25 chosen? Why specifically 25? I am not sure that I heard an answer to that. To answer Ms Gallagher's question, the five years are already in statute, so when we did our pre-engagement and early engagement with stakeholders and then during the consultation, there was no consensus to change from the five years and 10 years that is already prescribed in legislation. We felt that there was no need to change those that are already set in the current regulations. We also feel that five years and 10 years provide the right balance between proportionality and safeguarding. With regard to why we picked 25, there are a number of reasons. During the consultation, we provided a number of age points between 18 and 25. The majority of the responses to that consultation favoured an increase in that age and the majority of those in favour of an increase in age were in favour of the 25. As Ms Hawhey said, there is legislation where we already have the 26 or 25-year-old threshold that meets our corporate parent and statue. The Children and Young People's Act recognises that care-experienced people will need access to services until 26 because of their life experiences. They do not have the support systems that their peers would have. They are also more likely to interact with the justice system, unlike their peers at that age. It is also, as Ms Hawhey said, in line with the rest of the UK. If I could move on briefly, would the introduction of those regulations make it easier and more accessible for people between the ages of 18 and 25 that are identified as harmful to wards children be allowed to work with vulnerable groups sooner? Is there a risk there? We all have a responsibility to ensure that children and young people and vulnerable adults are safeguarded. As I said it again in my opening remarks, the process that someone would have to go through to have that barring lifted is the same process as when that barring is imposed. There are robust processes around that. We want to ensure that we protect children and young people and vulnerable people. What those changes and regulations do is recognise that for offences of people placed on the barring list under the age of 25. There has to be some change there and some recognition that young people move on from lifestyle choices and behaviours that have been harmful in the past. In terms of the actual legalities of it, perhaps Denise or Lynn want to come in on the actual process that someone would go through? Just to emphasise, no, it won't make it easier. Under the current regulations, anybody over the age of 18 can wait 10 years to make an application to remove the bar list or it can be sooner than 10 years if they can independently evidence that there has been a change to the circumstances that led to the barring in the first place. As Ms Hawley said, the process to be removed is as robust as the process to be added to the barring list. The protection unit would—an application for removal does not necessarily mean that you will be automatically removed. There is a robust process. Our case workers have the same information powering, galling powers that they have under the current system and a system to be added to the barred list. It goes through an evidence-based process to make a determination on an individual case-by-case situation. In the past 11 years, we have had 19 applications for removal and 13 have been successful. Of those successful applications, two have been under the age of 26. Ms Gallow, I am going to ask Michael to come in at this point. He wants to ask a supplementary to something that you have raised. The robust process has been mentioned a few times. Can you say a little bit more about what the mentioned evidence is gathering and what that entails so that we can have some confidence in it? There is a case working process done by a protection unit. It follows guidance in a case work manual that was developed and co-produced in 2014 with clinical psychologists. It is peer reviewed by other psychologists. It went to a committee of experts and academics, psychologists, care workers and unions. There is a decision-making process. Not one individual makes a decision that goes through a triage. Each case is looked at by multiple people before a decision is taken. Information is gathered from the court service, Police Scotland. It can get information from social work, educators. It can get specific reports around risk assessment. It can get specific clinical and psychological reports. The information is gathered in pairs wide and allows them to gather whatever information that they feel necessary to make a decision. That is helpful. Thank you. Please, convener, just briefly again on what we are talking about there about people being able to work with vulnerable groups sooner. When we are looking at the victims that have had these crimes committed against them, how do you think they would feel if someone was able to go through this system, be approved and be allowed to work with vulnerable groups more sooner? I think that there is a risk that the legislation could favour the perpetrator over the victim in this instance. Sorry. Obviously, we recognise that the victims of crime have to be respected and have to feel that they receive appropriate support, regardless of the punishment or otherwise of the person who perpetrated that. I think that it is worth recognising that the group of people that this change in regulation will affect will have been young people. There is a robust process around looking at whether they should be removed from a barred list, as you have heard from Lynn about the process that people go through. We can be assured that, if they are removed from the barred list, they are suitable to be able to work with groups that they had previously been barred from. I do not think that any of us would wish anyone that we did not feel was suitable to be able to work with children, young people and vulnerable adults. Thank you. I have one last question for the convener, but I am happy for him. Yes. I just wanted to ask about the right to rehabilitation. If you could explain a little bit about where that rationale comes from and how that has been supported through evidence from Who Cares Scotland, for example, or other agencies that have been part of that. I think that it is really important to acknowledge that there was wide consultation when this legislation was proposed and going through Parliament. I mentioned in my opening remarks about Who Cares Scotland and the support that it gave to that, but there were also other supporting voices such as recruit with conviction. There was a joint response from the Centre for Youth and Criminal Justice, an improving life chances implementation group, who expressed their support for increasing the age threshold to the highest age offered. There is certainly widespread support from stakeholders in making this change in regulation. I wonder if the minister could give me a bit of information around automatic listing, what exactly it entails and what sort of percentage of people are on it, and how many have ever been taken off it. Denise, sorry, Glyn. Are you able to give Mr Dornan a bit more information on the process around automatic listing? There are a series of offences that are set out in the statute that we refer to as automatic listing offences. If you are convicted of one of those offences, there are offences such as murder of a child, rape etc. You are automatically listed. If you are just giving me a moment, I will try to find the stats. I can tell you that we have never removed anybody from the barred list who has been automatically listed. I think that the make-up for 26 per cent of the over 8,000 barred people in Scotland. To add to that, I know that anyone who is convicted as being mentally ill and lacking capacity at the time of their conviction would also automatically be added to that list. In the spirit of continuing this putting on the record, the circumstances as people appear, their names appear on this barred list. Minister, can you tell us on what basis people, other than the automatic measurement that we have just heard about, what are the other circumstances in which people are on this list specifically? Yeah, absolutely. Lynn, do you want to? Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, other offending behaviour can result in you being considered for listed and then, after an investigation, being put on the list. There's also the proximity of that behaviour to the regulated work that you might be doing. There's also referrals from employers, so you may be working in regulated work and behaved in a manner that was not appropriate or deemed appropriate, and they can refer you to putting a referral disclosure in Scotland where, again, an investigation would take place, and then you can be listed. You can be listed not necessarily by being convicted of a crime. Police Scotland can also push in other relevant information, which might be information about somebody's conduct that could also result in you being considered for listed and then, possibly, after an investigation, put on the barred list. It's not just criminal convictions that could result in you being barred. It's a situation where an individual has, in the course of doing work, regulated work, has harmed a child, placed a child at risk of harm, engaged in inappropriate contact involving pornography, engaged in inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature involving a child or a protected adult, or has given inappropriate medical treatment to a child or a protected adult. That's how people end up on the list. So, when we speak about a change in circumstances, what does that mean? How do you define a change in circumstances when people... I mean, this is pretty serious. Pretty serious. Whether you're 16, 24, 34, this is a serious misdemeanor. I mean, not everybody who's on the list will have committed those offences. It could be that you've committed a series of offending over a period that could be theft, for example, and you want to work in a care home. Because you've offended in the proximity and how close that offending is to you wanting to do that work, that could be taken into factor. So, not everything is those serious offences, as she said. Changing circumstances could be that you've been convicted of an offence, appealed it and it was cost. It could be that your behaviour that led to you being barred was the direct result of, say, addiction to alcohol or drugs, and then you can evidence sometime down the line that you've actually sought treatment, that behaviour's desisted and you know it's no longer a behaviour that is of concern. But like I said, just because, again, you put in an application because you claim that your circumstances have changed, it will still go through a thorough investigation before consideration is given to whether or not you should be removed off the list. Currently, if someone was convicted of an offence that put them onto the barred list and then that conviction was overturned, are you saying that they'd still have to wait 10 years currently before they are? No, they can put in a... Because they can show that they're... They can do that now. Yeah, they can show that they're... So there's no need to change to five years in those circumstances that you've just described. An overturned conviction would take them off the list anyway. No, no, you don't... As I said earlier... It's a separate issue. It's separate from the legislation that we're considering now. Yeah, that's fair enough. In terms of the process answer that you gave to Michael Marra earlier, and I should really be directing this to the minister, I do apologise. It's the minister that I know that's the lead person here. Who handles this process? It's disclosure Scotland, is it? There's a protection unit within disclosure Scotland that was set up in 2011, and they handle... They do the work on behalf of ministers, and they do the work to determine whether or not somebody should be added to the list, and they do the work to determine whether or not somebody should be removed from the list. And then they recommend somebody to the ministers? They make a recommendation to the minister? You make decisions. Occasionally, depending on the circumstances, it might be that it goes to the minister, but generally we make... It's done in the name of the ministers. Yeah, it's done on behalf of the ministers. Yeah, you act on behalf of the ministers. Right, with you. Okay. Fergus Ewing. To ask for clarification of the minister and her officials, two questions, fairly simple questions. First of all, is it right that, before any individual is removed from the barb list, there is and must be and will continue to be a full and robust consideration of whether that person remains unsuitable? Moreover, that this regulation won't change that, so there is at the moment a robust test of detailed, careful consideration, and that will remain the case if these regulations are passed. That was the first question. Yes, I can confirm that. And the second question, thank you minister. And the second question is, is it the case that what we are doing here will in effect bring Scotland into line with England and that that will see the same hurdles and time provisions apply? Yes, I can confirm that too. Thank you minister. It's not essential, of course, that we're in line with England. But anyway. No, convener, but I think it gives some context round about... It seems rather strange conversation, doesn't it, in a photo book context? I guess it just gives some context round about the changes and that we're not doing something that... Because it's being done in other parts of the United Kingdom. Yeah, that's not a good reason to change anything in Scotland's law. If you're barred, I mean it consists across the borders, it's helpful because if you're barred in Scotland, you're barred in the rest of the UK, and therefore if you're removed from the barred list, you could well be removed from the rest of the UK if you're barred in... If the barring service in England and Wales deems you unsuitable because you've applied there, then you're barred in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK as well, just for clarification. All right. Okay. I think we've probably... I'm looking for any other questions. I don't think there are any other questions. I think we've given it a fair airing and appreciate the candor and willingness that we have seen from Minister and her colleagues in answering our questions. At this point, I want us to move, if we don't unless anyone objects, to our next agenda item today, which is consideration of motion S6M-0253, which is asking the committee to agree to recommend that SSI 2021-379, protection of vulnerable groups Scotland Act 2007, applications for removal from list and late representations, amendment regulations 2021, be annulled. I would like to ask Megan Gallacher to speak to and move the motion. Am I required to repeat all of that again? As previously mentioned, so Megan Gallacher. I speak to move the motion on behalf of Oliver Mundell that the Education, Children and Young People Committee recommends that the protection of vulnerable groups Scotland Act 2007, applications for the removal from list and late representations, amendment B annulled. Currently, those aged 18 to 25 who wish to apply to be removed from the children's or adults list, as set out in the protection of vulnerable groups Act, can apply to do so after 10 years. Individuals on the children's adult list are on there because it has been decided by ministers that it would be inappropriate for that individual to work with children or vulnerable adults. Reasons for referral can include in engaging in child sex offences, among other things. The SSI would lower the threshold from five years for 18 to 25-year-olds, meaning that they can apply to be removed from the children's adult list five years after being placed on there. That is concerning as it may allow people who have been identified as harmful to children to be allowed to work with children sooner, as they could re-offend and they can reapply within the five-year limit instead of 10. That could also perhaps reduce confidence in the disclosure system if the individual who was on the children's adult list has been removed. There are also concerns relating to victims who will feel that the Scottish Government is perhaps favouring the perpetrator over them. Of course, if they are living within the same community, there could be wider issues within the community environment there, too. In terms of the discussions that we have had this morning, the sort of offences in cases are too wide. In terms of the legislation, perhaps that would need to be looked into further in order for it to be approved. There are also other concerns relating to the issues that are raised in relation to the five-year limit and the overall justification of amending the legislation today. Moving the limit is a serious cause for concern and one that should not be taken for the reasons that I have listed today. In terms of the outstanding concerns that has been raised by members, I therefore move the amendment in Oliver Mundell's name. Do any other members have any comments on the motion? It looks like maybe not. I beg your pardon, James Dornan. Can we just get it confirmed that this is not about letting somebody leave from being barred, but it only allows them to make an application? There seems to be some confusion here. It is almost as if what we are saying is that, after the five years, they would automatically be free from the bar that they already have. Thank you for that comment. The minister may address that in her remarks, which I will invite her to do shortly. The issues that Megan Gallach raised are certainly worthy of the airing that we have given them in this committee this morning. It is hard to understand exactly why, at this particular point, it is felt necessary to reduce the ten years to five years, given the fact that there are already flexibilities that were highlighted by Lynn McMinn in response to the question that I asked about overturned convictions. Although it is true that there are a variety of convictions or behaviours that result on someone being on the barred list, the list of those in the main who are on this list consists of people who have committed fairly serious indiscretions in relation to children and to vulnerable or protected adults. By the way, those are my comments as an individual member of the committee, not as the convener of the committee. I think that I am allowed to make my comments known without prejudicing the chair, and I will conclude my comments by inviting Ross Greer to make his. Thank you, convener. Just very briefly on the point of the seriousness of offences that might result in an individual ending up on the list. It is fair to say that it would be very unlikely for an individual who has committed some of the serious offences that we are talking about to be in a position that their application to be removed from the list would be granted. Some of the examples that we have heard, for example, of an individual who might have committed theft and wishes to work in a care home, that is exactly the kind of circumstance that we talk about in the debates that we have had in this Parliament around the rehabilitation of offenders, acknowledging the adverse childhood experiences that some young people are affected by the relationship that this has with care experienced young people. What we are not talking about here is a mechanism solely for allowing those who are guilty of the most serious offences to get themselves removed from this list. In all likelihood, those who would be able to make a successful application would not be those guilty of the serious offences that you have mentioned. Those who have done something that is of far, far less gravity—in fact, something that might indeed not be a criminal offence but might be something that resulted in them being placed on the list in the first place. It is important to put that on the record. A lot of this debate has, understandably, focused about the minority of people who are on this list because they have committed a very serious offence. In all likelihood, the application of the mechanism that would be allowed through this instrument is not going to be common for it to be applied in those cases. It can be much, much more common for it to be applied in cases of far less seriousness that fit absolutely into the category of the rehabilitation of offenders that we have discussed many times in this Parliament and that we passed legislation on in the last session, I believe, unanimously. Thank you, Ross. Fergus Ewing, to be followed by Stephanie Gallaghan. Thank you, convener. Yes, I would endorse what Ross Greer has just said and just add a couple of points to that. First of all, my understanding is from the response that officials gave is that if the regulations are passed, there will be no change at all to the test that is applied to continue to protect the public from those who have committed, as has been said, a more serious offence. There will be no change at all. The only alteration is that people will be allowed to make an application at an earlier age, but if that is an application that would be refused, it would simply refuse when they are younger. Any suggestion that there is an increased risk seems to me to be nothing short of scaremongering, convener, and I am sure that nobody would wish to do that. It is particularly disappointing to hear those kind of arguments when we have already heard that one of the benefits will be, and this is the other point that I wanted to make, is that there will be consistency of approach throughout the UK. That means that those children in Scotland who may succeed in an application to move south and take up advantages there and vice versa. I think that they may, in fact, have practical benefits to be followed. For those reasons, I will be voting against the motion to anall. Yes, I hear what you are saying, Fergus Ewing. I think that it is Stephanie and I apologise for getting your surname wrong. I am getting my… Thank you, convener. I would agree with Ross and Fergus. I would challenge your assertion as well around the fact that it is all serious offences. It is certainly not. For example, you have quite often young men who are unable to find a toilet after being out at a nightclub, and there can be indecent exposure offences, et cetera. That is something that I have experienced as well in my work with young people. I think that it is also an opportunity to keep in mind about keeping the promise, which is something that we have all really supported, and the fact that care experienced young people are more likely to have that involvement with the law, as has been said earlier on there, too. That is a key period for them as well. That five-year period is a key time when they are looking at employment, further training, et cetera. We have to give people the opportunities to move on and to have success in life. Right now, they are not nearly as likely, statistically, to be successful, and we have to do all that we can to support that without putting people at risk. There are proper safe ads in place. On the issue of there being no risk, I will ask the minister to address that issue for the record, that there is no risk at all attached to this change in measure. Thank you. Just to make my own comments on it, I came into the discussion and wanted to listen to the minister and officials with a fairly open mind about this. I think that what I have heard is that there are strong safeguards in a robust process across agencies to make sure that the public can be protected in that regard. I think that the practical effect of that seems to me that we go through the same process, but in a timious manner that allows people to have a chance in their life if the process comes to a positive conclusion for them. I am also satisfied that the numbers of those in the barred list that are making such applications are almost vanishingly small, and that within that there should be sufficient capacity to make sure that those processes are fairly robust. I have listened to the arguments and I am convinced that this is a reasonable step with a robust process to protect the public. I want to say directly to Fergus Ewing that I do not think that it is fair to accuse a colleague of fear mongering if they have genuine concerns about what a change in legislation might create in terms of increased risk, even for one person who might then re-offend with disastrous results in the lives of others. It is rather unfair to accuse colleagues of that on the basis of legislative consideration. I now turn to the minister, who I know is only too ready to respond to the points that have been made. Thank you, convener. I have listened very carefully to the debate and I am grateful for having had the opportunity to explain the Scottish Government's position with regards to the SSI. With regard to the point that Mr Dornan raised, I think that it is worth reiterating that I am absolutely clear that those regulations do not automatically lead to individuals being removed from the barred list. It simply amends the circumstances in which an application for removal is competent in that it changes those timescales. As I said in my opening statement, I invite Ms Gallacher not to move Mr Mundell's motion. However, if pressed to a vote, I will ask members to vote in favour of passing the regulation. Thank you, minister. I will now invite Megan Gallacher to wind up. Thank you, convener. There is not much more to add in terms of the debate today. However, I would like to touch on two points that were made by colleagues to reiterate the point of scaremongering. It absolutely is not the case. This is legitimate concerns. It is about weighing up risks. I am not convinced that the legislation would eliminate the risks that we have spoke about and raised today. In terms of all-series offences mentioned by Stephanie Callaghan, that is not what I said. I think that she has perhaps picked me up wrong. I said that there was a wide-ranging list of offences. I think that that is weird. Again, another concern comes into it because, yes, it could be something minimal, however, it could be something more serious, and it is weighing up what would be approved but would not be approved. I think that that is something that we need to have more discussions over instead of approving the legislation as is. If I could touch on the BARD list as well, I understand James Dornan's point. However, as we heard earlier, out of the 19 applications, their team was successful. That shows that there is a sway in terms of applications being approved, and that is okay if they have gone through the robust processes. However, it adds in that further element of risk. That is the point that I would like to add to the debate now, convener, and I will finish there. Thank you. The question is that motion S6M-02353, in the name of Oliver Mundell, be agreed. Are we all agreed? We are not agreed. As we are in a hybrid meeting, I would like to invite members who are attending virtually to vote via the chat function. Members who are in the committee room can vote by raising their hands. Please keep your hand raised while the clerks record your vote. Can I ask members in favour of the motion and attending remotely to put yes in the chat box now, and members who are present in the room to raise their hand? Can I ask members who are voting against the motion and attending remotely to put no in the chat box, and members who are present in the room to raise their hand? Can I ask any members who wish to abstain and are attending remotely to put abstain in the chat box now, and members who are present in the room to raise their hand? Everyone has voted, so we are clear on that. On my matter, I have now voted. The results are as follows. The results of the vote are two in favour, seven against no abstentions. The motion is therefore disagreed. The committee must now produce a report on this draft instrument. Is the committee content to delegate responsibility to the deputy convener and I to agree this report on behalf of the committee? This will be a brief factual report with a link to today's official report. Are we agreed? We are agreed. I would like to thank the minister and officials for their time this morning. We will have a two-minute suspension to allow the witnesses to leave. Thank you very much. Welcome back. Our next agenda item is consideration of SSI 2021-380, Disclosure Scotland Act 2020, commencement number one, and transitory provision regulations 2021. Can I just pause there for a moment? I do not see any colleagues on screen. Are they with us? Are they there? I think they are. Yes, they are. So, let me resume. Our next agenda item, colleagues, is consideration of SSI 2021-380, Disclosure Scotland Act 2020, commencement number one, and transitory provision regulations 2021. Do members have any comments? I do not see anyone indicating their wish to comment, so is the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? Are we agreed? We are agreed. Our next agenda item for business is that we will be taking evidence on skills alignment with business needs. To that end, I would like to welcome to the committee Leon Thomson, Executive Director of Scotland UK Hospitality, Leon Welcom, and Paul Mitchell, who is Head of Employment Affairs of the Scottish Building Federation. Welcome, Paul. We have an opportunity now to ask questions of Leon and Paul. To that end, I would like to invite Fergus Ewing to begin the questions. Thank you, convener. Good morning to witnesses and thank you for joining us today. Obviously, the written submissions that we have had indicate quite rightly that business wishes in order to help us to achieve economic recovery following the effects of the pandemic to focus on areas where there has been a special damage. Tourism and retail have been mentioned, although there are others. I agree with that, and I welcome that. Leon Thomson in particular will be aware of the work of the tourism task force that was completed, which looks at some quite specific measures involving particular universities and colleges and establishments that have a very distinguished track record, for example in tourism. I was also slightly concerned to see in the evidence from our retail colleagues that the number of apprentices in retail has reduced over recent years. I guess what I would like the witnesses to focus on in supplementing their written submissions, convener, is to provide us with as specific as possible a set of measures that they would wish to see in place, rather than generally saying that you should do more. What in particular should that more be and who should provide it? I appreciate that those are complex matters, convener. I am acutely aware of that having been in a driving seat of sorts as a minister for 14 years and how difficult it is to deliver objectives into reality. However, some very positive and specific prescriptive suggestions about how in particular we help younger people and how money should be focused on those areas, such as tourism and retail, would be very welcome. The question is to both witnesses. Leon, would you like to go first? Yes, convener, I am very happy to do that. Thank you very much for inviting me along today. In response to the question from Mr Ewing, I think I would start off by saying that hospitality works very closely with education providers and also with Scottish and UK Governments. It would take a partnership approach to developing the workforce for hospitality. There are some great examples of where things are working well at the moment. We have some terrific colleges delivering outstanding courses and bringing young workers through into the sector. We have businesses working with those colleges and education providers, providing pathways and routes into work. We are working closely with the UK Government around kick-start. A number of our members are making very good use of that and with the Scottish Government around the young person's guarantee. There are a lot of initiatives that are already there that are working well and are delivering for hospitality, albeit with the disruption that is caused by the pandemic in the foreground. We have good partnership working and strong connections. We are, as a sector, offering some great jobs and some terrific careers for our young people to take up. We have a real hurdle that is still challenging some of the perceptions around jobs and careers in hospitality. Collectively, we can look at addressing beginning to talk up those roles in hospitality and more widely in tourism. We are getting schools, parents on-side with talking to their young people about careers in hospitality. We work closely with the Scottish Government immediately after the reopening of hospitality earlier this year. The Scottish Government put £100,000 into a promotion campaign to encourage young people to consider jobs and careers in the sector. That is something that we would like to see more of in the future. Again, that demonstrates some very good partnership working between the sector and the Government. Yes, thank you. I am aware of the loss of good work convener that is done by Visit Scotland, by Kickstart, by colleges and universities throughout the country. I won't name them, but it would take too long, but there is much good work done. My industry is partnered with the public sector in many ways to help young people into tourism and to give specific work experience to youngsters whilst they may pursue an academic, classroom-based training courses or certificates or, indeed, degree of some sort to provide practical experience. I think that the industry is to be congratulated for that. However, I would be grateful if Leon, the UK hospitality association, as well as bodies such as the Scottish Tourism Alliance, could continue the good relationship that they have with the public sector and the Government of Scotland to build on what happens, because I think that more needs to be done. I agree with Leon's point, which is the last thing that I will say, convener, before inviting other witnesses to respond, that there is still a perception risk, even though tourism and hospitality and the deep food and drink and events offer terrific career opportunities and will do in the future, as well as they did in the past. Yes, Paul Mitchell. Thank you, convener, and good morning. We really do appreciate the opportunity to give evidence to the committee this morning. In answer to Vivi Hew's question about what specific measures can be taken at this moment in time, if we look firstly to the Covid recovery situation, we currently have in the construction industry a cohort of around 500 apprentices who should have completed their time-served construction craft apprenticeships and biblical trades that join their aid bricklaying painting in August and September of this year. For a number of reasons, some of which are related to the coronavirus pandemic, some of which are related to the arrangements for the apprenticeship obligations. Those candidates have not managed to finish their apprenticeships yet, but the future is uncertain. It is causing an awful delay for employers as well, and we really need to look at measures to get this group of, as I say, 500 apprentices through their qualification as soon as possible. With that in mind, some new consideration has to be given to allowing candidates to undertake simulation with a view to completing their portfolio of evidence. It is not always possible to collect evidence from site during the pandemic, and it is an opportunity to allow simulation to go ahead with these candidates because they have now been delayed for a number of months, and that uncertainty is on-going. To mention two other issues, the first of which would be the reform of the flexible workforce development fund, which is derived from the apprenticeship levy contributions, we have seen earlier this year evidence that financial incentives are provided to employers to recruit apprentices, apprentices for recruitment increases. Of course, earlier this year, we had the apprenticeship employer grant, which defined £5,000 to employers to take on an apprentice and construction apprentices work through the roof at that time. I think that creating some sort of hybrid model where the existing provision for college training and up-scaling and de-training is retained, but also allowing some element of incentivising apprenticeship recruitment to the flexible workforce development fund. Perhaps that could be targeted in areas where there are no skill shortages or areas where there are underrepresented groups, but I think that that would be a real step forward. More broadly, my final contribution just now would be to say that I think that taking measures to re-engage with industry, we feel very disenfranchised at this moment in time in the relationship to the skills planning, landscape and development and arrangements for our apprenticeships, re-establishing those connections with industry perhaps through the means in the board apprenticeship registration bodies, which were organisations that consisted of 50 per cent of employer representatives and 50 per cent of employee representatives would be a new step forward in that regard. Thank you. I don't know if Fergus wants to come back in. I think that both witnesses have provided some positive suggestions and I think we should pursue these afterwards, so no doubt we can discuss that, convener, but I think we have got some pretty concrete pointers in the right direction. I just want to just perhaps to ask Paul one small supplementary question, if I may. Is there concern in the construction sector, Paul, that there is, generally speaking, a shortage of skilled labour in many of the particular trades that are essential to pursue construction projects? Would you agree with me, as someone who represents a largely rural constituency, that the shortage of available contractors means that it is very difficult to get competitive prices for projects and that that has led to price inflation in many projects, both in the public and private sector? Does Paul consider, as part of the solution to those issues, that we really need to take up the suggestions that he makes in order to ensure that there is a larger stream of young people coming forward in rural and urban Scotland in the construction sector to carry out the work that we all believe is necessary for schools, roads, hospitals, railways and private sector projects as well? Thank you. In houses, yes, absolutely. Paul, do you want to come back on that supplementary from Fergus? Yes, certainly. We do have skills shortages and issues at this moment in time, particularly in rural parts of Scotland, bricklaying and labouring of two areas in which I know that our members are reporting difficulties. That has, of course, had some impact, not only on project costs but on project timescales. There are other issues relating to costings and, as I'm sure members would be aware, that there were material supply sites issues earlier in this year, as we recovered from Covid. That really pushed the cost of materials works. We are happy to deal with that inflation on an ongoing basis. I can advise that the latest study that was conducted in construction recommended that between 2020 and 2025, the construction industry in Scotland required over 26,000 new entrants to our industry. There are fantastic opportunities within construction to build a care. We do need new entrants. It is worth pausing for a second to recognise that construction. Even during 2020-21, we have recruited 50,000 apprentices who are still very much top of the class in terms of all the other sectors. That is something that we are immensely proud of, not just the number of opportunities that have been created but the debts and the scale of those apprenticeship offerings. I can ask a question of Leon. The impression that people have got, the perception that hospitality is largely about casual work, is something that students do, or the popular idea about employment in the sector that you represent. Obviously, it works against hospitality as a sector, so what has the sector done in order to try to change those sorts of perceptions and pitch itself to particularly younger people who perhaps do not see it currently as a skilled route to a career? The sector is very much on the front foot with this and businesses are doing a lot of work with schools, going into schools, talking to young people at schools, when they are considering their employment options after school education and talking up the roles and opportunities that exist within hospitality. On the comment about schools, do you get into all schools? Employers, I speak to you, find that yes, there are some really positive experiences engaging with schools, but there are also some where it is very hard to get through the front door. Yes, that is absolutely correct. It is patching. In some areas and in some instances it is working very well and in other instances it is not working so well. It is a very much locally driven approach and what we could really do with it is getting some consistency across the engagement that businesses can have with schools so that they can actually set out the employment opportunities that are there. Is it entirely at the discretion of the head teacher as to whether employers or any employers or some employers get through the front door? Is it entirely a local head teacher decision? Local is the sense of local authorities, but also schools as well will obviously have a say on how they engage with local businesses. That lack of consistency certainly hinders businesses perhaps taking a more proactive approach on that. There are some excellent examples that already exist, so the template, if you like, the model for doing this very well is already there. In the broader pitching of the sector in terms of career structure, what has the sector been doing in order to sell this to younger people to attract people into the sector? I mentioned the social media campaign that was run in conjunction with the Scottish Government back in June, so that was very much talking up all the different roles that exist within hospitality. That is one of the key issues for the sector, which is being able to unpack the variety of the roles that exist in hospitality. People will automatically think about front-of-house staff, they may think about chefs, but there is a whole range of roles and jobs available. Those can lead to very fulfilling and rewarding careers within businesses and across the sector as a whole. A number of our members run their own promotional campaigns as well, encouraging people to apply for the roles that they have available. We have members who have set up their own hospitality academies as well, so that allows them to recruit and, crucially, retain staff, particularly young people as well. People join those businesses and there are opportunities to expand and to learn more on the job, which highlights the real career opportunities that exist within the sector. Where would you describe you on the journey from the perception level, low-skill to higher-skill, or the perception issue around low pay to much better pay? Where is the sector on that journey? I think that we are doing well. We are moving forward. We have obviously had a setback with the pandemic, and businesses are still grappling with that at the moment. The biggest challenge that businesses face just now is probably the issues around job security and hospitality, being the first to close and last to reopen during the pandemic. That is a big hindrance at the moment. Of the students who are currently studying hospitality-related courses, they are saying that they intend to enter the sector once they have completed their courses. That is incredibly encouraging. There is that pipeline and young people are coming through into the sector, but there is more to be done. The sector, as I mentioned, is working very closely with the Government on that. The sector is also looking at running a national campaign at some point in the next year, which will highlight the diversity of the roles available to people who are entering hospitality. That will be an important initiative in breaking down some of the perceptions that wrongly exist out there. The way in which that is coming across, Leon, is that you seem to be saying—don't let me put words in your mouth, by the way—that the sector understands that the ball is at its feet as much as it is at the feet of anyone else in terms of perception change and selling the reality of a really positive career in hospitality. That is absolutely correct. As I said at the start of the session, partnership is absolutely key to what we do. Here in Scotland, UK hospitality Scotland works very closely with skills development in Scotland. Our partners in the Scottish Tourism Alliance and the education providers as well. It is very much a team effort to make the changes and to attract people into our important sector. Michael Marra Thank you very much. My first questions go to Leon on the skills gaps and the impact of the pandemic. I do not think that plenty of us have seen signs up in whether it be pubs or cafe windows. We are certainly looking for staff. Some shops and pubs say that they cannot open because they do not have enough staff. Do you feel that that is a short-term shock to our labour supply that is particularly acute? You have talked about the long-term working. If we can leave that to the side of the moment, it is good to hear about the good partnership working across those different areas. I am particularly keen to see what we can do in the short-term to try to help industry to address those issues. The big challenge at the moment is that we do not have enough people in Scotland of working age to fill the vacancies. With the economy having restarted, there is a huge imbalance in the demand for labour versus the number of jobs that are available and the labour supply that is there. We are experiencing severe disruption in the labour supply for hospitality at the moment. Pre-pandemic, we were the third-largest employer in Scotland, employing 285,000 people right around the country, every corner of Scotland. Our members are saying at the moment that they are experiencing shortages of anywhere between 10 per cent and 16 per cent in the number of workers that they need. Businesses are looking at how they can manage with fewer workers. They are bringing in people who do not have perhaps any experience in hospitality. That is a good opportunity for people to come in and learn some new skills and get involved in a sector that they are perhaps not familiar with. However, the fundamental challenge remains that, right now, there seem to be more vacancies than there appear to be people available to work. Businesses are grappling with that just now. We mentioned students coming through from colleges, but we have had disruption to that pipeline of talent with many students repeating years because of problems in delivering courses through lockdown and so on. We have also got that disruption. There is a whole number of reasons as to why we are experiencing those problems. We also have the changes in the immigration system, which has compounded some of the challenges for some businesses. Businesses are doing what they do best. They are being adaptable and resilient. They are looking at how they can increase productivity with the number of workers that they have. However, as you pointed out, some businesses are having to reduce the service and hours that they are available to operate. That is holding the sector back and moving forward with the recovery. I find that useful in terms of the trends that you are laying out early on for the sector. They may have emerged due to the rapid rebounding of the economy. I think that that has taken most people globally by surprise the scale of Government investment to try to make sure that that has happened. It has been welcomed, but the skills shortages are illustrating and I think are taking place in many countries around the world. I do not doubt that some of that has been exacerbated by the shape of our own labour market in regard to immigration as well, but this is something that is fairly common. Do you believe, as a result of that, that longer term changes about behaviour in both people and working patterns and consumers? Do we need to then have some slightly more profound reset into how we address those issues? You have talked about the positive atmosphere in terms of working with agencies. That is great. Do we need to look at some of those issues in a more concerted way to think about what is emerging as a new normal? Yes, absolutely. We see that the sector will need to keep adapting. We will need to continue to present itself as an attractive place to work for people to come in and work and to build their careers. Right now, businesses have made a number of changes to make their offer more attractive and more appealing to young people coming in. We are looking at more flexibility around ours. Obviously, pay is a key issue as well. We are in a very competitive market for labour, so that is driving up wages as well. The majority of businesses will now be paying the real living wage, if not above, in order to attract and retain its workers. We are already seeing that kind of rebalance going on as market forces are dictating that businesses need to do that in order to recruit and retain their workforce. My last point to you. I have been speaking to colleges in the past couple of weeks who are telling me that they are struggling to retain students due to the opportunities that emerge for well-paid jobs in your industry. They are completing courses and making sure that they have the qualifications to hand to allow them to work through a longer-term career. Obviously, there is a drive on your side of the fence to try and get people into work, and that is a great thing. Are you working with your members to ensure that their new recruits can complete those courses and get the credits and make sure that they have the credentials that can provide a longer-term career? Yes. Our members are very clear that they want to have skilled workers coming in—people who have completed courses, who have their qualifications and so on. Obviously, it does not end there on job training, which is absolutely critical, particularly in a sector such as hospitality. Businesses are in this for the long term and are looking at building talent within Scotland and making sure that we have that constant flow of skilled young people coming into the sector, because that is very much where the future lies for our sector. Last one, if I can, to the colleague from the Scottish Building Federation. I am interested in issues pertaining to net zero and training of not just young people, which we have focused on principally so far in the discussion, but older and more experienced tradespeople and people who are bringing skills to the labour market. Do you think that there is enough being done both by the industry and by the associated agencies to support you to upskill and refresh the workforce so that we can meet that challenge in terms of higher building standards, different approaches and new technologies? Are we building capacity and are we reacting enough as institutions to help you to do that work? We are guaranteed to take steps in the right direction. I think that, like any other sector, it has an impact on that. We do recognise that we have a problem within our sector in relation to company's professional development. Often, when the class people complete their apprenticeship, the only training that is after is in relation to health and safety. There has to be a cultural change, there has to be a mindset change. We have looked at initiatives such as supporting tradespeople to be accredited to pass the price standard. That is something that we are going to have to look at. There is also an opportunity going forward to look and review the apprenticeship qualifications through the new staff apprenticeship approval process. That is an opportunity not only to look at embedding to the apprenticeship process, but also to look at modern methods of construction, building information and technology to make sure that our apprenticeships are modernised and contemporary and that the flight boats are happening out on site, but the requirements of the policy are in the same way. On the point that Paul has mentioned, it might sound like a slightly daff question, so hear me out. Do we need to rebrand foundation apprenticeships? I have had a concern for a while that, if you are my age or older, the word foundation in education and skills terms is generally associated with the lowest of the three standard grade levels. A foundation apprenticeship is a really attractive opportunity and it is a substantial course in employment opportunity. My concern is that the brand that we have given it from some of the feedback that I have had from young people puts them off. It sounds as if it is something that they should not consider, because there are other opportunities that sound superficially more attractive. Do you think that we have the branding right around foundation apprenticeships? I do not think that we have got the branding correct at all. I would agree with those comments, but I do not think that the skill foundation must be the lowest of the three standard grade levels. I do not think that it sends out the right message to candidates and to employers, and I think that it would benefit from community change. Who knows perhaps a pathways apprenticeship or something of that nature, but I certainly think that the branding has to be with that. Specifically in construction, there is a little bit of an issue with foundation apprenticeships. We do not want to have three candidates in bricklaying or drawingery in order that they can then go into the market and start operating. There is no licence on an employment or a craft person in Scotland, so we need to be careful that we are not giving somebody a little bit of knowledge that we are actually treating them to the right way. We will make sure that we get a pathway from that foundation apprenticeship into a modern apprenticeship, and that we go into a new technology apprenticeship. Thanks very much. Moving on to another area. About five years ago, our predecessor committee did quite a wide-ranging inquiry into what we call personal social education in schools. It touched on some of the soft employability skills. It touched on questions around are schools preparing young people in skills such as CV drafting, preparation for interview, etc. At that point—I think that it was five years ago now—what we found was that there was huge inconsistency across the country. Some schools were excellent at that. Young people were leaving at the end of the fourth, fifth or sixth year knowing how to draft their CV, knowing exactly how to prepare for and perform in an interview. In other schools, that simply just wasn't part of their PSE curriculum at all. I have been interested in both of your reflections on whether or not that has improved over the past five years. Are you getting the impression that young people are leaving school with those kind of employability skills, or is there still an inconsistency there? I think that there is still a lack of consistency there in speaking to members in terms of the applications that they get. There is a very mixed picture. Some applications are very good and some are not so good. I think that skills have improved in that area. There is a lot more in the way of resources available for young people to access now, as well as support that they get at school, around applying for CV, putting together CVs and preparing themselves for interview. However, the picture is still very mixed and still quite patchy. Right now, applications are coming through from people looking for work, which is perhaps not particularly strong on paper, but because businesses are looking for workers, young people are getting those opportunities to come in for an interview, which is probably incredibly helpful for them because they are getting some real-life experience sitting down and talking to an employer, which, even if they are unsuccessful in securing a place, will help them in their endeavours in the future. Yes, I would agree with Leon that there is still a level of inconsistency there. A lot of our members are employers when they are looking to be put on the fence once. It will core basically what might be referred to as meta-skills. That is the one somebody who can turn up regularly, who is punctual, who has an attitude, and they can then move them into a craft person for the future. I just wanted to turn quickly, if I can, to the conversation earlier about working skills and experience development. That work is always really important. As a federation, we have our local associations, and we try to engage with schools through each of our local associations across Scotland. To be candid with the committee, the problem for construction is not a lack of demand from candidates for construction apprenticeships. Despite the high levels of apprenticeship offerings and construction, the problem is that we do not have sufficient levels of opportunity there. We need to make sure that we create the right conditions, the right environment to encourage employers to recruit apprentices. That is where I have the real concern going forward. The lack of engagement with the industry, the neutering and marginalisation of the industry voice in the skills and planning landscape, has led to the introduction of changes that are really detrimental to employers, which then turn employers off in the prospect of offering them apprenticeship opportunities. I can give you one example, and I am happy to the right figure to give. I have said more examples, but one example from just this week has been told by the Scottish Government and the Scottish Government in Scotland that a candidate will not be considered to be an apprentice unless they are registered on SDSE's FIPS system. That does not reflect the different practices within the Scottish construction industry, and it could really disadvantage some employers and some candidates. To illustrate that with an example, if an employer recruited an apprentice in the start of the summer time, but perhaps they did not get registered on FIPS until now, that period of months would not come towards the time to have their recruitment of the apprenticeship, and that would have the effect of extending the apprenticeship time to that period. That is not what employers want, it is not what trade unions want, and it is not to the needs of employers and the apprentice. There are several issues like that now tied up across the apprenticeship office offering a construction because that employer voice is not in the room. That industry voice indeed might be in the college as well, but it is not in the room to make critical decisions on FIPS. That is all from me, but Paul's last point about the SDSE apprenticeship registration system is probably one that we should write to the Government about to ask for an explanation of the rationale behind it. That is a very important piece of evidence that Paul has just given, so thank you, Ross, for getting us to that bit of evidence. Michael Marra. If I may, I think that the core to that point about the representation of business and employers in those groups appropriately should be included in that as well. I am sure that we will touch on that later in our own discussion of the evidence, but I think that that was particularly powerful evidence. Thank you to colleagues for the question so far. I would like to talk a bit more about apprenticeships, because I have a bit of a thing about apprenticeships. I, like Ross, believe that this is a fantastic thing that we should all be very committed to. Leon, most of your members, I presume, will be paying annual salary bill in excess of £3 million, are they? Many of them will be. Yes, something of that order, yes. So they are paying the apprenticeship levy? That is right, yes. Do they see it as good value for money? There are still a lot of questions coming back from members as to whether there are getting what they need from the apprenticeship levy, from the payments that they are making. I think that we would welcome a discussion with Governments around the apprenticeship levy and how we get it to work better for our businesses. That was a brilliant political answer, Leon. You have another career ahead of you based on that answer alone. Was that no? They do not think that they are getting value for money? Certainly, some members have spoken to the question whether they are getting it. Okay, let me ask the same set of questions to Paul. I think that I have a flavour of what Paul might say to those questions, but most of your members are certainly paying over £3 million a year in the annual salary bill, and therefore they are paying the apprenticeship levy, yes? Yes, there are approximately about 100 employers in Scotland in terms of the construction industry that our apprenticeship lady feels. However, the new problem that we have in construction is that we also have our own industry training levy. You do, the construction industry training board, you also pay money to them as well, don't you? That is correct. So many of our members are paying twice for the industry training levy and again for the apprenticeship levy, and I touched on the issues that we have with the apprenticeship levy in Scotland. My second question is, do your members think that they are getting value for money, based on the fact that they are being double levied? What is the answer? I better not lead the witness. What is your answer? Value for money? I think that the answer to that would be no. What would have to change in the way that this money is being spent in Scotland for your members to begin to believe that they might be getting value for money? What would have to change? Give us the changes that you would like to see happen. I was beginning to think that my comment about another career in politics had put you off so much that you had left the meeting. Not at all. I am not sure that I have enough detail on this to give you the answer that you are looking for just now. I would be quite happy to come back with some further information that I could send in writing. For our members, it is very much about looking at how there can be more flexibility built into the scheme. That is probably one of the key issues for them at the moment. Right now, businesses are probably more focused on the immediate needs of filling vacancies just now rather than necessarily looking at what changes they need to the apprenticeship learning, but I would be very happy to come back with some more detail on that. Based on our earlier conversation, those things run together, don't they? To attract people into an industry, the idea of offering them the career prospect that comes with apprenticeship would be a powerful incentive to take a second look at hospitality as a career. I think that those things are very closely linked. I think that we would be very interested to know what specific policy changes members of UK hospitality would like to see in Scotland so that members felt that they were getting value for money with their apprenticeship levy. I am wondering whether they would like to see more transparency and how their specific contributions will return to them in terms of investing in their apprentices. I think that they would. That would certainly enable them to understand what exactly they are getting in return for paying the levy. I think that that is a pretty basic point. They would like to see what they get for the money that they pay in. Currently, it is fair to say that they cannot discern exactly where that money goes. Is that a correct statement on my part? That is correct. It is very hard for them to be determined how that comes back in any kind of return. You already began to give us an answer in response to Ross Greer's questions, but what other policy changes would your members like to see specifically around value for money apprenticeship levy? I think that everyone knows that you have to invest in people. I do not think that there is a contention around that. What would they like to see in policy changes that would reflect value for money for their apprenticeship levy? At the moment, we have the situation where apprenticeship levy players have been paying 50,000 pounds to the flexible workforce development and finding that can be used on and through their local college. There has been some changes recently to allow private training providers to get involved in that process if colleges do not work with that training. For example, training in the operational plant in the machinery, many local colleges will not offer that specific training, so private providers are needed. I think that we are looking again at the rules to allow private providers to get involved in the flexible workforce development fund. At its core, we have an apprenticeship levy in Scotland that is not then going to fund apprenticeship opportunities in Scotland. We looked at that apprenticeship employer grant from earlier this year that had a massive positive effect in Scotland and particularly within the construction industry. If we did look at using some of that money, I realise that it is not a bot in the spirit, but if we did look at some of that money allocated towards incentivising employers to recruit apprentices, that would be hugely beneficial, as well as retaining some of the elements about off-scamming and retraining and all-increasing of private involvement in that process. To Paul and you, Leon, we welcome any further evidence that you wish to submit to us about specifics from your members in relation to the question that I am asking at the minute, especially in terms of policy changes that would really generate value around this apprenticeship levy that your members are paying into. Colleges have been mentioned quite a few times this morning, and I am certainly very aware, and I am sure that my colleagues are as well, the excellent work that is done in the college sector in support of apprenticeships. The one area that I always have a concern about is how committed our universities are to supporting apprenticeships, because I have a question in my head about that, to be honest. What is your reflection on that, Leon? What is your engagement with universities as a sector-like? Do you get much comeback from the universities? What kind of things are you talking to them about and what kinds of things are they doing for you? Probably less engagement with universities than with colleges. Obviously, universities are providing excellent courses for people coming through doing tourism events and hospitality-related courses. Again, that will be one where there is probably quite a lot of engagement among member businesses directly with universities in their specific areas, where they are able to partner up and look at work opportunities for students on those courses and those students leaving those courses. However, it is not a sector that I have a lot of experience of engagement with. Some of the evidence that we have received, including evidence in connection with the next panel that we are about to meet, talks about the importance to the two different sectors of graduate apprenticeships, where clearly university could play a very important part. In your sector, Leon, is there a demand for graduate apprenticeships? Certainly a demand for graduates to come in and take roles in hospitality. A lot of graduates will leave and will be moving in to start their careers within hospitality, and businesses will be working to offer the best opportunities. What about undergraduates who are going to become graduate apprentices? You can do an apprenticeship without any direct connection with a higher educational partner. Is there a demand in hospitality for the kind of relationship that I envisage that ought to exist between businesses and universities? Yes, absolutely. There will be businesses that have already established those relationships with universities. Can I ask the same questions to Paul? Do you have any comments? Yes, I think I would really just echo Leon's comments. Our relationships are probably closer with the college sector and the university sector. We do, of course, have graduate apprenticeship opportunities within the construction industry, such as construction management, surveying and estimating, and they have been a welcome addition. The numbers are growing steadily, and they have only introduced that in recent years. I think that there is an opportunity for improvement there, but it certainly stands out that our relationships are closer with the college sector. Okay, well thank you very much. Yes, sorry, I beg your pardon. Stephanie McAllan would like to come in. Thank you, convener. I don't know if you can see me, because I can't. All right, okay. There we go. It's a question for Paul. I'm actually working off that after this meeting this morning, I'm heading over to Belsal to meet Dan Wiggy, the managing director at DMG Roofing. They're opening up an academy of roofing, which I thought was a really, really interesting one. They've got an older workforce and they're looking to invest in younger people. Dan did actually win Britain's top trades person as well, but I know that he's doing some excellent work promoting the value of apprenticeships, having the qualifications and skills as a trade person there. He's connected with SDS and careers advisors for over 60 schools. He's also often people's work experience tasters, which is something that really can capture young people's interests there, and it will be bag of nails and materials, so the real McCoy, if you like there, to try and attract young people and bring them forward. What I'm wondering, Paul, is what can the Scottish Government do to help support those kind of stronger links with school and education that really inspire young people to consider skill trades in a career that's full of opportunities for them? First of all, DMG are members of ours, so I'm pleased to pass on my congratulations to Darren and to everybody who can say I'm doing the development of their apprenticeship academy. There is a lot of existing work at the minute in terms of going into schools. Some of that is co-ordinated through PYW. For example, there is a built-your-future campaign, which is a collection of online videos and interactive activities that school pupils can undertake online. We do work closely with CITB to train employers to go into schools to deliver clear sessions, activities, guidance and surveillance. As I say, I don't want to focus on this issue too much, but I do feel that, on balance, the issues that we have in construction are not a lack of demand from young people. Many youngsters are still really valued at a construction apprenticeship. We undoubtedly have problems in relation to diversity, and there are some things with the standard of the candidates. It's also not a blanket picture across the whole of Scotland. There are those rural issues as well. For us, it's about ensuring that those apprenticeship conditions are right for the employer to encourage the employer to take these young people on. We have lots of young people who are involved in pre-bought qualifications, and it will be progression to get on in the world in Scotland. In fact, there are more candidates doing pre-bought qualifications and construction crafts than there are opportunities each year offered to become an apprentice, which doesn't seem right to me and to the industry. We need to look at the issues in China and Python. I want to take this opportunity to turn to the theme of industry engagement. This is an area where I think greater involvement with industry with employers, generations, trade unions and apprentices is collectively related to trying to address this problem, because the same issues in the case of pre-bought level are faced at apprenticeship level, and it all stems from the slack of engagement with industry. We used to have in our sector the apprentice administration bodies, which provided a new platform for formal industry engagement. Very likely to be done in relation to apprenticeships in Scotland, but without the express consent of the industry. We certainly didn't face the issues that we did when we had that model in place that we are facing now. Perhaps, if the given number is out, I can make the discussion a bit more detailed on that specific issue. We have talked a lot about schools, colleges and so on. That is an area that we will continue to keep working very closely with our members on to keep those channels of communication open and look at ways of developing new ones. Stephanie, are you content at this point? Yes, that's great. Thank you very much, Paul and Leon. Wealth. Indeed, I echo what Stephanie just said. Thank you very much to Leon Thomson and Paul Mitchell. That concludes our time with you today. It has been very valuable. Those offers that you have made of additional information and input to the committee are very warmly welcomed and we look forward to receiving them. Can I thank you again and wish you a very pleasant day for the remainder of the day? Thank you. We will now suspend for a couple of minutes to allow for a change of witnesses. Welcome back and welcome to all those on our second panel. We have a very rich selection of people on the second panel. We have Professor Mark Logan, Professor in practice School of Computing Science at Glasgow University, Dr Natalie Cool, Head of Cyber Security at the School of Design and Informatics at Abertau University and Karen Meehan, who is Chief Executive Officer of ScotlandIS and Nicola Taylor, who is Head of Operations and Skills at ScotlandIS. Thank you all for your time today. It is very much appreciated. We are going to go straight into the questioning with the Deputy Convener, Cokab Stewart. Hi, good morning everyone. I read the submission by ScotlandIS and in that I note that it says 80 per cent of future jobs will require STEM skills and then it goes on about the gender imbalance there. I just wanted to sort of like then go on to the fact that it mentions about staffing and getting computer teachers, computer science or digital skills teachers. I know as a practitioner in the field that schools do a lot of good work on that already. Clearly, that seems to be something that is not transferring through and I just wondered if you could shed any light on that that could enable us to make recommendations on what could be done better. Can I put that question to Karen Meehan, please, first of all, and then if anyone else wants to chip in, that would be great. Thank you for that. In some research done of the 356 local authority high schools, Education Scotland have done some research and of the 301 who have come back to that, there are 36 of those schools who don't have a computer science teacher or function within that school, which means that there are 36 schools who don't have access to the subject or certainly enough access to the subject. Of those 36 schools, 18 of them are in remote or very remote areas. We know that there is a lack in computer science teachers and we know that there needs to be a way to have more into schools to allow our young people to access those skills and knowledge. There are a couple of things that industry is doing, a couple of things that our skills board is doing, looking at how we create a pipeline of computer science teachers into our schools. We have to balance that with the fact that we have a huge skills gap in the industry, so when we are looking at the graduates coming out of university and we are looking at the apprenticeship models, we are also looking at how we backfill some of that skills gap. It is a two-pronged issue that we have. The Scottish Government has committed substantial sums of money to teacher recruitment. Is it just a question of money or is it something else? Why is it that people do not want to be or there is a lack of? What is that? There are probably two parts. Obviously, you must want to be a teacher to teach. In some of the medical degrees that you can undertake, you can take a year out to learn another degree. A lot of that is being encouraged to do teaching. For some of our graduates, they have not looked at teaching as a potential career path. They have not gone and sought that experience or pathway. When we look at some of the medical profession, we are looking at it as a sector. Is there something that we can do with our graduates to give them access to that as a potential pathway? We have computer science teachers who have done their undergrad of going in to teach what they want to do, that is the topic that they want to teach. However, not everyone knows if they want to, because they have not experienced it. We need to find a way to open up the opportunity for those graduates in our computer science degrees throughout Scotland to look at teaching a potential career path for me now that I have the skills. We are doing some research on that with our digital skills advisory board. What does that look like? Is that an opportunity? We appreciate that it would be an extra year on to an already four-year degree. If it was to come back from universities and industry, that would be a good way forward. There would be a requirement for some kind of funding through Scottish Government to continue that extra year of education within our higher education institution. Can I bring in Professor Mark Logan on that, please? I'm sorry, Professor. I can't quite hear you there. Professor Mark Logan, would you mind if I could move on to Dr Cool and then we'll come back to you so that we can sort out your sound. Thank you for your patience. Hello. I was really just wanting to echo what Karen said. Certainly, in my experience, I was chatting to some of our fourth-year computing students a couple of weeks ago. We've been helping us in the lab doing some teaching with first-year students and they've been absolutely fantastic at it. They're great at breaking down problems and explaining them to the first-year students, but they had absolutely no idea that their course made them eligible to go and do a year's teacher training. I wonder if there's more that the universities who offer that can do to help to signpost that to universities across Scotland, whether it's about making sure that career departments and universities are able to push out that those courses exist and that all students on computing degrees would be eligible to apply. I think that that would be really useful. That's a really important point. Thank you, Natalie. I don't know if we're ready to go back to Mark yet. We could try again. No, we're not ready to go back to Mark. I suppose that I'm just sort of trying to delve under it, getting a workforce. Obviously, every workforce is underrepresented by women, ethnic minorities. What do you think could be done further to reach out into communities who maybe even more compounded don't consider computer science or digital tech skills as a career? Is it a case of within the educational professions? Is it at schools? Is it a Government campaign? Any ideas on that would be really welcome. Nicola, you've not had a chance to say anything, so if you'd like to come in here. Thank you. We want to set an element of everything that you've mentioned there. We need to start at the very beginning in our schools and allow, particularly girls, a more of an opportunity to see the types of things that are available in our sector. We're running a critical friends programme just now in the mantra behind it is you can't be what you can't see. It's about exposing people to the positive role models in the industry and allowing them to see the types of things that are out there for them. I definitely think that there's an awareness campaign that needs to be done on a larger level as well. New opportunities such as the Digital Start Fund, which is still Development Scotland, are running, which allows you access into areas of deprivation, for example, which is a great way for us to be able to access demographics that we wouldn't normally look to target. What we've established by running some of those initiatives is that there is an untapped wealth of talent within those areas. We've had some success, particularly with a homeless chap who was able to undertake training at a very junior entry level through the Digital Start Fund. As a result of that, we've been able to secure him employment on the Isle of Skye in the sector. That's great. That's a really fascinating example. That's super. Is Mark Logan back on yet? If he is, just somebody let me know. Is there anyone else in the panel that wishes to comment in on that, but I think that Nicola did give quite a comprehensive answer to that. Oh, I think that we're okay. Can we have an update on Mark Logan's comms? Can we bring him in, or is he coming back in? He's coming back in, okay. He's just rejoined. Mark, do you want to test your sound? Can we make out what you're saying? Hi there. Can you hear me? We can. That's much clearer. So, Cocac, would you like to resume your questioning on? I'm trying to. We sort of moved on to try and get underneath the skin of it. I think my question was originally about the shortage of teachers in computer science and digital skills and the fact that the Scottish Government has committed substantial funds. So, I'm interested in the impact of that. Is it just about money or is it about other things? Why are people not coming forward to be computer teachers? Yeah, I think it's more than money. I think it starts with our historical failure to recognise the importance of computing science to the economy. Do you think about a tech sector? It's one of the fastest growing parts of our economy. It has about 13,000 unfilled vacancies a year, and that's probably an underestimate. The main supply line into that is essentially children that are going to become software engineers, and all the other jobs, like product managers, marketeers, et cetera, are all a function of how many software engineers are in tech companies. So, it's very important that we have a sufficient flow of young folks that want to go into that profession. If you look at how computing science is regarded in Scotland in the education system at school level, it's very far from being a peer of the other stem subjects. In fact, it's very far from being a peer of geography or history and so on and so forth. It's essentially a third tier subject, and in the early years of secondary school, it vies for syllabus time with home economics and physical education. Now, because of that neglect, it's not a particularly attractive career prospect, it hasn't got a great brand. In fact, teachers have been leaving the profession. We had about 20 per cent more teachers 15 years ago doing computing science than we do now, and there's also a reduction in the number of children studying the subject. At a higher level alone, for example, we used to have about 8,000 annually, but now we've got about 5,000 annually. The subject is not just static, it's declining. I think that the reason specifically that we are not addressing the computing teacher recruitment issue is that we have put up reasons for why you can't hire a computing graduate, so we shouldn't bother trying. That reason is usually while computing science graduates can earn a lot of money in industry, so there's no point going after them. When we talk about increasing teacher recruitment, that's true, but we don't have a strategy yet for how to tailor our efforts to attract people who want to become computing science teachers. That's one of the many issues that we have in this space. The root issue is that we haven't historically agreed that the subject matters. We don't believe the subject's crisis, because it doesn't matter how could it be a crisis. Therefore, we haven't marshaled the action to address those things until recently, and we can talk later about what we're starting to do there. Just if I can also comment on the gender point, I apologise for missing some of their comments. The reason why we have a gender problem in computing in conjunction with many other societies is that we have taken an extreme gender imbalance and considered it normal and acceptable, and that pervades our society. The way that we should look at this is that half of our best people are essentially excluded from an industry that we vitally depend on economically. It's not enough to just look at ways in which we can get girls engaged in primary school, which we need to do. That's necessary, but it's not sufficient. We also have to recognise that when those girls look upwards, there are a few exemplars. Therefore, we've got to do more as a country on denormalising gender ghettoisation in the tech industry, which is a pair that I prefer. In the same way as we denormalised drunk driving some time back, we've got to use the same techniques, and we could discuss that further. However, my point here is that it won't be enough to have initiatives to get girls engaged if the industry as a whole has normalised the appalling gender device. I'm happy to stop there, convener, thank you. Professor Logan, Mark Logan, you produced the Logan review. You are an authority in these areas. Part of the Logan review is suggested that computing science is actually a boring subject. The syllabus is not very exciting. You indicated in your review that the teachers tended to be generalists, and therefore there was an effect. I'll use the term, and it might be objectionable to some people, so I'm willing to be corrected, but a dumbing down in computer science so that there was less about some of the more exciting aspects of computing science that required specialist knowledge and much more about the general. How do we fix this then, or how are we going about fixing this, and what can we do differently? Yes, I think that there's a number of things we can do, and I do think that this problem is fixable, and I'd be happy to update the committee in my comments on what's now starting to happen in this area as part of my answer. Just to cover the issues that you just mentioned from the ecosystem review report, you can essentially think of this as a vicious circle, or two vicious circles operating, and that's what we have to arrest. The first one is that, as pupil numbers fall, classes don't get run, pupils can't hire teachers, which in turn creates the impression that not so many teachers are needed, which in turn results in less pupils being involved. That's one mechanism that's running, and the only way to address that is by very significantly fixing the recruitment issue both in terms of attraction and retention, because both of those issues are significant. The other issue that's referred to in your comments is a quality issue now. I think that Karen certainly mentions in her opening comments, and others may have done as well when I dropped off, that in many of our schools don't have any computing science being taught, but in many of our schools, and no one really knows how many, it's being taught by non-specialists, by all credit to them, but well-intentioned, hard-working business studies teachers, psychology teachers, et cetera. Outside I'll note that we wouldn't tolerate that with mathematics or physics, but we'd tolerate it in computing science if it's a third-tier subject. What that has the effect of doing is requiring the syllabus. I used the term in my report. I hope it doesn't offend, but then again I hope it gets the tension that it needs of a dumbing bound of the syllabus. Non-specialists can't teach object-oriented programming, for example, so we have them in the syllabus, things like GDPR. That's interesting to software engineers at a professional level, not what we should be teaching our children. What we should be teaching them is the magic of getting computers to do stuff, and that requires basic competence in our teaching profession in teaching programming. That competence is patchy, let's say, so the syllabus has to reflect that. What can we do about that? I propose a number of things. The first thing is that we need to launch an active recruitment campaign that doesn't accept that we can't recruit expensive computing science graduates. I teach computing science undergraduates at 4th year, and I can tell you that a fair percentage of them don't want to become software engineers. They want to do something else with their degree, so there's a fertile field to hunt in if only we would approach them. Secondly, most science and engineering undergraduates are taught programming, so we could be approaching them from a recruitment perspective, for example. We could look into that more, but that's a couple of examples. The second thing that we need to do is to embark on a nationwide, intensive, on-going up-skilling campaign for our computing science teachers. That is something that computing science particularly needs, because unlike, say, physics or mathematics, the subject changes more rapidly. A teacher who graduated 12 years ago has never experienced that development, and those are the sort of projects that the kids want to be doing, because that's what they think of as computing. Such a programme needs to be put in place. I believe that it could be put in place very quickly. The third thing that we need to do is that there's a morale problem amongst computing science teachers, because they know that their profession is dying, and teachers don't feel that they're listening to them. I've spoken to a lot of teachers, and that's what I hear. The third thing that we need to do, and we are doing this, is to set up a teacher-led body, recruit a couple of teachers full-time to it, to procure, curate and promote best practice computing science teaching across Scotland. That's the third thing that we can do. Fourthly, we should be extending computing science teaching far more intensively into primary level, so we do engage pupils earlier. Many schools are teaching computing science only from third year, if at all. That's too late. I think that we also need to be educating the country, parents, pupils and so on, that this subject leads to great career options and is a very interesting subject. Other things that we should be doing beyond that are what I would call the basic beginnings. Recently, as a result of the ecosystem review, the education skills cabinet secretary has convened a senior steering group of the CEOs of all the stakeholders, such as SDS, SFC, Education Scotland and so on, including myself, to take those areas that I just mentioned and others and coordinate across the various stakeholders to start to get progress in those areas. That's an encouraging development. When was that group convened and have they met yet? When is the first meeting, if it's not yet being held? It was convened. Actually, the first meeting was just in the last three weeks. It happened. Since then, we have identified the first area that we're going to work on and we've identified a front-line team that will work on those issues in a collaborative manner. The reason that group is needed is because nobody owns that problem. Everybody owns a bit of education, a bit of computing science, so nobody owns it. In my experiences in trying to address those issues, the first time round, over the last year, was a kind of attitude of, that is a problem. Good luck with that. Let us know when you've managed to get other people to agree that it's a problem. I call it the Wizard of the Boss broomstick problem, fetching the broomstick and everything talk. The senior group's job is to overcome that mentality and to work collaboratively in direct or various agencies to affect change here. I'm very encouraged that that group's been formed in the last month. I'm going to bring in Michael Marra and then Stephanie Callaghan and then we'll work our way around the table because everyone wants in on this. Is this a hot topic? A supplementary on this, if that's okay, can be there. I'll come back to Michael. I'm heartened by Professor Logan's comments in terms of a very practical shopping list of things that could happen now. I think that there's lots of nodding heads if you might not be able to see them, Professor Logan. That's the kind of thing that we want to hear. We had Shirley-Anne Somerville here on 6 October and she told us that some meetings were happening, but she didn't feel that there was a practical list of things that were taking place. We're two years on, I think, from the publication of the report that you authored. I'm detecting a certain frustration in terms of pace of change, in terms of bringing together those organisations. Is there more that we can be doing to this specific issue to push pace? What could we do usefully? In August last year, but you're right that my first foray into the space was frustrating because I think the issues where it wasn't considered an important issue in most of the agencies are certainly not in the ones that had most influence on it and therefore it wasn't considered worthy of inordinate action. Also it was considered to be just a difficult thing to address because of multifunctional ownership. I think that I'm very encouraged genuinely that under Shirley-Anne Somerville's sponsorship we have this group set up and we've had very positive and energetic commitment from the various leaders of those agencies and groups to address this issue. I think that we are starting to dress in order. Is this important? Yes. Is it urgent that we take action? Yes, because we are declining when our competitors in Europe are strengthening in those areas. Our equivalent economies, equivalent-sized countries like Estonia, Finland, Israel, are miles ahead and getting further ahead in Scotland in this issue. I'm encouraged that that's well recognised and now in action is required. To your question, Michael, about what else can we do, I think that it's very important that we keep our attention span on this issue because this is going to be a multi-year fix. I think that what committees such as this can do is be helpful in reminding the various actors on this stage that yes, it's important and yes, it's urgent because I fear that with the cut and thrust of life and education is a very complicated area generally that this will start to fall back. Right now, I'd summarise it as what we need to do as a country is elevate computing science to be a peer of the other sciences and as long as we haven't done that, there's work to be done and I'd very much welcome support in keeping that goal from the centre. From Stephanie Callaghan, or maybe not. Thank you, convener. Thank you to the panel for coming along today. A question for Professor Logan, just to round about this stuff here. I actually asked a question in the Parliament of Shirley-Anne Somerville as well, just noting that Skills Development Scotland and the General Teaching Council for Scotland have noted the value of bringing computer experts into the classroom and actually upskilling teachers and pupils together on issues like cyber security, etc. I know that a number of partners are already working with schools to introduce industry skills. The Skills Development Scotland is quite heavily involved in supporting that work and it's established a framework that brings agencies together to help them to tackle that challenge. What I'm wondering, Professor Logan, is that an area that the working group, the senior steering group, will be focusing on or that they should be focusing on going forward? First of all, I agree that it's a very important aspect to engage industry in the classroom for a number of reasons. One is that it gives a concrete reason to learn the subject or it gives pupils a sense of what is the future meaning of idea interested in the subject. Secondly, it brings support and another type of upskilling to our teachers, which I think is very much appreciated. The reason that I didn't mention in our earlier list there is because there's already some really good things happening here. For example, you may have Scotland IS on the session this morning and Scotland IS is running an excellent programme called Critical Friends, which brings industry folks into schools and pairs them. SDS is also a team that is starting to work very well and I understand that both organisations are discussing how to work together rather than compete on those teams, which is great to see. My concern previously is that we have a displacement mentality on this issue historically. People see the hard things as hiring more teachers, keeping teachers, making the subject more interesting by introducing more project work and more extra critical work. No-one really bothered to fix those things. They did the easy thing in relative terms, which is to get industry engaged. It's a very important element, but it's necessary and useful, but it's not sufficient. If we only did that, we would make very little progress here. We do the industry work, which is fantastic and I very much support it. In conjunction with those other things, we're getting somewhere, so that's the context for it. I'm going to bring in Karen Meehan, a dimension of a digital, critical friend. Maybe, Karen, you would like to make some comments of your own in the area of questioning that Mark has been responding to. No, absolutely. Thank you so much. Mark has said that it's bringing industry and international schools to bring computing science opportunities to the forefront for our young people, but it's also there to help up skill some of our teachers and support them, because we appreciate that, like I said earlier, they do their degree, they go into teaching and most of them haven't actually had access to industry, so it brings in that industry-based practice to them. Again, they can't be what they can't see, as Nicola had said, so we're looking to have those key figures, practitioners, not business leaders, the actual computer scientists, the software engineers, the data scientists into our schools to highlight the subject. We've had some success with that already. We just started a programme in August, rolling it out in Glasgow. Like Mark had said, it was in a school that did not have a computer science function, so it was being taught through a business module. They utilised the critical friend programme for that business model and now a number of pupils in that class are looking to take computer science in their third year of school. What industry can't do—as Mark said, it's not one thing that will fix everything—there are lots of initiatives that need to marry up for the bigger fix. What the critical friend is doing just now is that we're using the industry to stimulate the curriculum because they can't change it. It's ways of making the curriculum exciting for teachers to teach, but it's also exciting for our young people to learn whilst in school. When we look at industries, Mark said that we have more than 13,000 jobs that are unfilled in this sector during the pandemic. Given the digital transformation that's happened during the pandemic, that number is only set to rise. I know that SDS is doing some research on that just now. Our sector is coming to us as the industry trade body to say that we need better coding skills, we need fundamental computing science, software engineering skills that we can then invest in harness and nurture whilst in industry. We need to make sure that we're providing that talent pipeline, and that's got to start at schools. It works all the way through, but it absolutely has to start at schools. There's another piece around this upskilling of our current workforce. I know that there are some graduates who are saying that there's a huge skills gap, and there are some graduates who are not in our industry who have not been employed in there. That's because, for some of our SMEs, they've got this kind of mid-level practitioner software engineer that they need to upskill to senior dev level. Some of that is just time in the sector, and we need to find a way to fast track that, because that's causing a bottleneck for our junior practitioners coming into the sector. If there are three things we need to fix in this education, we need to be promoting to our young people and their families and the people who are influencers in their life what our sector is like, where the opportunities are for our young people and what it's really like to work in a sector. What does an ethical hacker do? What does a tester do? We're not getting those messages across, and we're not getting across in the first and second year, and we're expecting them to take this as a core subject, third, fourth and fifth here and on to further and higher education. We absolutely need to get that part right. We get that right, we get the teacher piece right, and I know that we won't fix it all today, but collectively there has to be a bigger fundamental shift in fix for this. Do you have any concerns about the supply of the kinds of teachers that Mark Logan has been describing that are not generalists, that are not fill-ins, but are actually specialists that can teach coding and all the other things that are exciting about computing science that currently are not being covered? Are you confident that there would be a supply of people in your sector, who are broadly in your sector, who would be willing to commit themselves to a career in teaching, if all the other conditions that Mark Logan and you've been describing were met? Well, I think that's, you know, like I said earlier, teaching is a passion until you've tried it, so there's a huge piece of work around, I suppose, promoting that opportunity. There are a number of graduates and Natalie's already mentioned, Mark's already speaking about the undergrads that they're teaching, who don't want to necessarily come into the sector, but we need to be signposting them as to what the other opportunities there are for them with their computing science degree should it be that they don't want to come into the sector and work as software developers or, you know, computing scientists. That's a piece of, I suppose, work that, collectively, we have to do. And, you know, what Digital Critical Friends brings is some of those specialisms to teachers that are currently in our education sector just now. So, you know, I agree with Mark, Critical Friends programme, we think, is a wonderful programme. We're seeing progress. We're in 160 schools or so across Scotland, certainly by the turn of the year. We're seeing, you know, the case studies that we were getting from schools and teachers and industry, because, ultimately, what they're looking to do is develop that talent pipeline because, you know, and as part of the stair review, we have the tech scaler programme, which is great. The support for the SMA community is great, but when we help them to grow and scale their business, where are we finding the talent to backfill that? And that's, you know, it's all part, it's closing off that circle that, as a collective, we need to look at. Evidence had a lot in it about the gender imbalance, the gender ghettoisation of the sector that Mark Logan referred to. The Digital Critical Friends, how many of them are there, and how many of them are women? So, of the Digital Critical Friends, we will be in 160 schools at the moment. We are recruiting for another two areas. So, we've probably got in the region of, maybe, just over 100 Digital Critical Friends from industry. I would say, like, where 20, 30 of them are female Critical Friends. So, it's a good chunk that the problem hasn't been sorted. There is more that we need to do as a sector, but I can have a look at those figures and send them on to the committee, the exact figures of females. It would be very helpful because, obviously, we want to do everything we can to help and encourage in this area, because girls need to have role models, and you're right to focus on it. Ross Greer. I'm aware from a couple of studies that have been presented to this Parliament in evidence before that negative gender stereotypes, particularly around STEM and computing, are generally pretty embedded by the age of seven or eight. One of the areas that is tricky, but we need to focus on, is engagement with early years and primary schools. I've been interested in the panel's thoughts on the extent to which engagement is actually happening, whether business in particular, but also embedded within the education system itself, whether that engagement is actually happening with early years and particularly with the primary one to three early primary school age group. Maybe I'd start with Karen on that one, if that's okay. Thanks. There are various programmes in place, so you have SMART STEMs, which focuses on the primary to very early secondary, again, pulling out or promoting the sector and the skills requirements. We've been a STEM ambassador with them in Scotland this for a number of years now. We also have the digital extra fund, which is a charity that Scotland is and SDS set up four years ago, which, again, is supported by industry financially to roll out funds to organisations and schools and community groups to ensure that all of our children, regardless of their location or their economic background, have access to coding activity. This has been supported by industry. They are the ones who are putting money in the pot, put to be distributed to various schools and community groups. There are things going on, and there's not enough. Some of the research that we've done a couple of years ago, when we were allowed to speak to our young people and our primary kids when we were in the SMART STEMs programme, was asking them why they are not looking at digital or what is something that is putting them off that potential career path. Fundamentally, the results that came back were no. I want to learn, but we only have one computer in the classroom, or we don't get the teacher who doesn't do it every week or every month or every quarter, and they want to sit and make apps to help them and their classmates with their maths. The enthusiasm is absolutely there, but if we don't harness it at that young age, by the time we get to first and second year of school and we're teaching a Microsoft office and portraying that as computer science, we're asking them to take it in higher education and then into industry. By that point, we've lost them, so this needs to go through the whole of our school years. I agree with Mark. It needs to be highlighted as a core subject. Every young person who will leave school from this day onwards will require some form of digital skills for any role that they are going to do. We are teaching our young people and our children, but educating them for jobs of the future. We don't know what they are. Back in 2009, when we first highlighted the skills gap, we didn't have data scientists who knew that it wasn't an opportunity and no-one knew that the position was there or that it was going to come. What are we going to be looking for in 10 years' time and what we don't want as a sector to be certain committees like this in 10 years' time with the same issues? We need to fix this, so I agree with Mark. It's fundamental and it needs to be fixed now. The industry needs it to be fixed now. I'm very conscious of the time and there's another question that I'd like to ask of Mark specifically. Would anyone else like to come in on the issue of engaging girls in particular at that very early primary school age cycle trick? We can't actually see if anyone else is gesturing to come in. If anyone else is coming in, just start talking otherwise. Mark, you mentioned that the challenges of trying to keep the computing curriculum up to date, which has been 15 years now since I started high school, but I remember that. Even at that point, it was quite clear that the curriculum was quite dramatically at a date compared to the average level of digital literacy that an 11 or 12-year-old had. Part of the challenge there is that the digital divide that the pandemic has highlighted. It was always there, but the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated. If we are to keep the curriculum up to date so that young people aren't bored in computing, how has that managed? If you are a computing teacher who has a class of 20, 25 young people, you could potentially have 20 of them who have computers at schools, got their own iPads, got a smart phone. They have a pretty high level of basic digital literacy, but you could have a handful or more who don't have a computer at home, who have never owned their own smart phone or tablet, etc. How do we manage to keep the curriculum up to date so that young people aren't bored being taught to do something that they learned years ago but managing to keep every young person in the room engaged when there could actually be quite a wide spectrum of digital literacy but access to digital devices in their own home as well? We need to ensure that there's not also a huge divide in the equipment available in our schools across Scotland and right now there is. The first thing to say on the curriculum is that the curriculum is not homogeneous. There's an element of the curriculum that is basic, logical, computing pedagogy that doesn't change and that should be at the core of what we teach. It's not today because of the skills issues that we talked about earlier on in teaching it, but that doesn't change very often. What changes is the projects that you build, the environment that you build, demonstrate those basic fundamentals? I think that we're going to be very careful when we talk about changing the curriculum because at some date I've been looking at shows that every time we change the curriculum we lose teachers from the profession. The reason for that is because they're already apprehensive about their knowledge and if you bring in a new concept, I've got to absorb that and learn how to teach it. This is too hard, I'm off. There's an element of that and we've had a lot of curriculum change over the years and we've lost a lot of teachers over the years at the same time. I don't know that they're causative, but I suspect that there's an element of that. I'm advocating instead that we take things out of the curriculum, we take out that exam filler, that stuff that you put in there because you can ask questions on it, GDPR for example. Instead, we create space for projects and we ensure that our children have schools that are equipped with the sufficient kit that they can do those projects and we ensure that schools have extra-curricular programming clubs where they can continue to work on those projects if they want to do that. I think that those are relatively easy things to do and cost a huge amount of money to address, but that makes an enormous difference to the problem. If I can make one comment on your early question about gender, industry often waits for people to fix this problem and I think that that is the problem because industry is fogged as much as everyone else is fogged. If you think about a female director in a company, a tech director, she looks up at the board and how many women does she see on that board that is a VP of engineering level, not very many. At the Scourage is women from applying for that because it's a hostile environment and often it is lots of subtle ways. Let's look at the mid-ranking engineer who looks up and doesn't see many engineering directors from women. That again sends a message. Let's look at that young graduate who is thinking about becoming a programmer but she doesn't see many leaders and senior folks in those positions, so she doesn't consider that a career that's for her. Then you look at children's school considering doing computing science degree, same thing. You work it back and that chain of a lack of exemplars means that even if you engage young girls at primary level in computing science, the society is telling them that it's a hostile environment. That's the thing that we've got to fix. We've got to fix that context. I'm fed up hearing industry people complaining like myself. I understood this issue better about how we'd hire more women if we could get more kids interested at school level with their girls. At the same time, it's creating an environment that's essentially more difficult to progress in as a woman. We've got to address that as much as we've got to address what's happening at schools. Thanks, I'll leave it there, convener. Thank you very much, Ross. And for our final set of questions, Michael Marra. Can I just before... I think Mark Logan, we maybe only have you until about 12 o'clock. Is that right? I've passed and I apologise, but I can go for another 10 minutes. Okay, that's very kind of you. Right, Michael Marra. That's great. Thanks, convener. I wanted to first direct my questions to Dr Cool. We've been talking about female leaders in the sector and we've got one here, so I wanted to ask some questions. I suppose, in the first instance, my understanding of your own role, Dr Cool, is that you would perhaps be at the interface of both the employers preparing graduates to go to work with companies but also as one of the consumers of the exam system and people coming through. I wonder if you can maybe start giving your reflection on the previous discussion just in terms of what's coming out of our schools and whether you feel people are being prepared for what you need to do in order to get them into those employment opportunities. Is this specifically about gender or just more broadly in terms of... More broadly about the system and skills. If we park the gender issue, we've covered it quite comprehensively so far. I echo what Mark was saying about computing science being perceived as a really boring subject area and I think that it really is turning off so many kids. One of the challenges that I see with this, I've done a fair amount of outreach work through my role with local schools and I've walked into a number of computing classrooms and found that the resources that they've got there are really just not fit for purpose. I've been in classrooms where it's taken the kids 20 minutes just to log in and ultimately that is then impacting on their perception of the subject area and it's then being seen as boring, it doesn't work, this is not an environment where I feel invigorated and stimulated. One of the other things that I think computing teachers, even specialists to computing teachers, really struggle with is that they don't have admin rights, they don't have proper control over their own classrooms. I know myself teaching at university how catastrophic it can be if there's a software update that's being rolled out overnight and all of a sudden my practical call doesn't work. I think that IT staff support is available to teachers, but it's shared across an authority. If a teacher has a problem in a classroom, they can't get that issue resolved during that class. It really puts a lot of teachers off teaching those more exciting aspects of computing because they're so practical and it really depends on the technology being up-to-date and working effectively for them and it just isn't there, it's not happening in our schools. I think that that's really useful in terms of the broader practical issues. We focused, I think, in a very useful conversation on that 23 per cent decline in the number of computing teachers and we recognised something has to be done in that area, but that broader infrastructure, both human infrastructure in terms of support staff and around it is particularly useful. I'm conscious of the SQA role in that. A lot of characterisation of that is a boring subject. One head teacher said to me very recently that this had been positions where higher computing had become quite a technical, boring, accessible place and rather than giving a sense of the inspiration and the possibility, is that a characterisation that you would agree with and recognise? Yeah, yeah, I think I would and again I agree with Mark's take on this that perhaps assessing the subject predominantly through exams again just kind of promotes and encourages people to teach to exam questions rather than really giving teachers that flexibility to introduce those kind of exciting projects where the kids can then develop that skills and get that kind of spark of innovation in terms of, wow, this could have implications for so many different things. Certainly it was a comment that Leon Thomson mentioned earlier that they see with the hospitality industry that the young people really don't understand the breadth of career opportunities that exist in hospitality. Their understanding of that subject area is very much limited to what they see around them in society. They'll go to restaurants, they'll understand front-of-house staff, chefs in the kitchen, but they don't appreciate the breadth of roles there and I really see that in particular with computing. I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a six-year boy that I know was a friend of the family who's really passionate about studying computing at university, but even though he's already got that passion, he had no idea that the breadth of careers that exist there and computing's application in so many other subject areas. I think that being able to help young people better understand the breadth of roles is also really key to addressing the gender balance. We see all the stereotypes out there around computing, it's geeky, we see the IT crowd, it's all about people being stuck in an office with no social skills and they just enjoy bashing away at a keyboard. A lot of girls would perhaps be more interested in the subject area if they could see, okay, I can study this and then I can go and get a job that's helping with health informatics, that's perhaps looking at cancer treatments, that's really going to make an impact and there are genuinely rewarding careers here and it's not just about people with no social skills. I think that they really don't understand how rewarding job opportunities in computing can actually be and I really don't think that the curriculum helps kids to see all of those rewarding careers. Sorry, I'm just kind of talking now, but certainly what Karen was saying, the critical friend as well I think is really crucial to addressing that. Thanks for that and my final question relates to the your own institution. I remember recall speaking to a lecturer who had expressed frustration that the lack of young people taking higher computing had meant that for some of your core courses you could no longer use it as a compulsory subject and therefore a lot of the teaching in first year was what would have been perhaps in through some of those areas. Is that something that you see in common across other institutions that you're aware of as well as your own? Yeah, absolutely, I think it was maybe 10 years ago now, maybe not as long as that, maybe eight years ago now, so six are, so all of the institutions under six are, we agree that we would not have higher computing as an entry requirement because it would then be a barrier that all of these children who just don't have that opportunity at school to study the subject area. Okay, thank you, convener. Thank you. That's cool. A sobering comment to end our session on what's been an excellent session, and all of you have brought a lot to what we had actually wish we could have longer with this particular group of witnesses. I would particularly hope we could have you all back again, especially to talk about entrepreneurship in this context because that was an area highlighted by the Logan review and it deserves further scrutiny by us, but can I thank Professor Mark Logan, Dr Natalie Coole, Karen Meehan and Nicola Taylor for joining us this morning? Your time has been very valuable from your point of view and it's been very well used from our point of view, so thank you for being with us. The public part of today's meeting is now at an end. I will now suspend the meeting and I ask members to reconvene on Microsoft Teams, which will allow us to consider our final agenda items in private. Thank you again to our witnesses and have a very good day.