 Thank you. That concludes Topical Questions. The next item of business is a statement by Kate Forbes on transforming Scotland's tech sector. The Cabinet Secretary will take questions at the end of her statement. I call it on Kate Forbes, Up to 10 Minutes, Cabinet Secretary. Presiding Officer, in August 2020 the government published the Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review. Mae'n amlwg hwylwch am ysgolodd yng Nghymru yn ystodol yn teimlo'r gwerthfawr. Mae'n fath yng Nghymru yn ystodol, byddwn i Mark Logan, yng Nghymru Fifei Oherdofnol Gweithgareddol, yn ein ffórlwn i'r cyfnod i'r cyfnod o'r olaf o £1b. Yr Eisteddfodd yn ysgolodd yn ysgolodd yn cyfnodd, mae'n cyfnod â'r ysgolodd yn ysgolodd, …an exciting route map for how the government and private sector… …in work together to build Scotland into a global leader. Today, I'd like to provide an update on progress against that route map. Backed up by £45m of Scottish Government investment… …and how it's building a sense of momentum and excitement in Scottish tech. That sense of momentum is being felt in London where tomorrow… The First Minister will open the EIE, London Innovation and Investment Showcase, an event aimed at strengthening the gateway to global investment and finance for Scotland's most innovative companies. It's being felt in Silicon Valley, where a government funded cohort of 20 Scottish startups arrived last week, and a curated visit arranged by Startup Ground, the world's largest community for startups, founders and innovators. It's being felt at home in Glasgow, where next week we're co-funding the first Glasgow tech fest at the University of Strathclyde, bringing together founders, businesses and the Scottish tech ecosystem in the city to help the sector grow and flourish. These aren't isolated examples, they're all connected because they are happening thanks to our Scottish tech ecosystem fund, recommended by the Logan review to make strategic investments in what ecosystem builders call social infrastructure, creating the best possible network and environment for founders and startups to succeed. 34 awards totaling more than £1 million have been given by the fund, delivering an exciting and diverse range of meet-ups, events and projects like the three I've just mentioned. At work hasn't gendered a distinct buzz around Scottish tech, but there's an even greater buzz about what is still to come. Last October, we invited suppliers to tender for a contract to establish a national network of five tech-scalar hubs in Glasgow, in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Inverness. These hubs will provide Scottish companies with commercial education sourced from the best providers in the world. This education will be complemented with physical co-location, first-rate mentoring and vibrant peer communities. Through state-of-the-art remote technologies, all of that will be available virtually in every single community in Scotland. These tech scalars are a game changer. They'll deliver for Scotland one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive state-funded environments for the creation and the scaling of start-ups available anywhere in Europe. They'll put Scotland on the global start-up map and will promote their services relentlessly to attract the world's most talented founders to establish their businesses in Scotland. The tender exercise is almost complete and I expect to announce the winning bid in early summer. Building momentum is one thing, but sustaining it over a period of generational change requires deeper, longer-term investment. Professor Logan's route map recognises that, calling for far-reaching changes to the teaching of computing science in Scotland, raising it to a level where it's considered just as important as physics or maths. Here, again, we've made significant strides towards delivery. In partnership with the University of Glasgow, we've established a new organisation, Scottish Teachers Advanced in Computing Science, or STACS, for short. STACS is led by two teachers, an inspiring young woman named Tony Hitsgallian, founder of the coding club charity Dress Code, and a deeply experienced former head of department named Brendan McCart. They are supported by the University of Glasgow's Professor Quinton Cutts, one of the UK's leading experts in computing science pedagogy. Together, they will act as critical friends, driving improvements in equipment, teacher training, the curation of best practice. Working with Tony and Brendan, we've invested over £1 million to add to schools' existing stocks of computing hardware, putting more kit into classrooms and into the hands of teachers and pupils. We're designing a new plan for professional skills development in computing science to build teachers' confidence and help them to keep pace with rapid change. Later this year, we will pilot this plan in partnership with one of our local authorities before a national roll-out. Our ambitions for tech do not end in schools. Last year, we invested £1 million in the digital stock fund, a programme that supports people on benefits or low income to undertake courses with providers such as CodeClan, giving people the skills that they need for a well-paid career in tech. We invested a further £500,000 in the digital skills pipeline, a bespoke set of modular courses running from beginner level all the way through to advanced coding. We provided grant funding of £150,000 to Code Your Future, a truly exceptional organisation that supports refugees with the skills and the networks necessary to progress in education and employment. Together, those programmes have supported around 600 people to re-scale and re-energise their career. This Government is delivering on its promise to transform tech in Scotland, and in doing so, we're dismantling long-standing barriers to entry and opportunity in the sector. Here, we will benefit from the whole system review of female-led enterprise in Scotland, which has asked Anna Stewart, the founder of iDesign Group PLC, to carry out. Anna has invited Mark Logan to contribute to the development of that report. It is clear that there is much to be done. In today's country, female founders get less than a penny out of every pound of venture capital invested. That position is quite clearly intolerable, and that's why the Scottish National Investment Bank has agreed to support the all-female investor group investing women angels to establish a new investment fund focused exclusively on women and minority founders based in Scotland. That makes Scotland one of very few European nations with a bespoke investment fund focused on stimulating the growth of female-led companies, and it delivers yet another of Mark Logan's recommendations. This year, we will pursue delivery of another exciting suite of recommendations. We will build a national network of coding clubs, ensuring that young people and children enjoy equity of access to extracurricular learning irrespective of where they come from, and we will create an investor discoverability platform increasing the visibility of Scottish companies to global investors. Just last month, we published the National Strategy for Economic Transformation. That strategy extends Mark Logan's thinking from the tech domain to all forms of high-growth entrepreneurship. On education and talent, there is strong evidence that the creative, commercial and leadership skills necessary to start and scale a business or teachable. We will embed project-based entrepreneurial learning into school and the post-16 education curricula in partnership with industry. We will create a new start-up apprenticeship, an eventive way of exposing new talent to start-up community and creating a potentially rich source of future founders, and we will embed entrepreneurship in the young person's guarantee cultivating the business leaders of tomorrow by exposing them to first-rate start-up techniques and experiences. As I come to a close on entrepreneurial infrastructure, the tech scalers are just the beginning. Over time, we will shift their focus from tech to all high-growth companies irrespective of their sector. We will complement those with a network of what we are calling pre-scalers, smaller community-based hubs that will stimulate the very earliest stages of high-growth entrepreneurship. I perspective founders to conceive new ideas to start companies, to design and to develop projects and to support early tests of market traction. As our ecosystem matures and more consistently generates success, we will seek to partner with prestigious commercial accelerated programmes, ensuring that the ambitions of our very best companies can be realised in Scotland. Together, these reports commit the Government to the most radical reforms of the Scottish entrepreneurial ecosystem since devolution. Our ambition is nothing less than to establish Scotland as one of the leading start-up economies in Europe. It is worth remembering that it was a Scottish start-up that led the world to the last economic revolution that transformed global living standards and lifted millions of people out of poverty. In our current context, Brexit, the climate emergency and uncertain post-pandemic world, the challenges that are facing us today are just as grave. There have never been limits to the problems that our people can solve, and it is time for Scottish start-ups to get to work, and the Government stands full square behind them. The cabinet secretary will now take questions on the issues raised in her statement. I intend to allow around 20 minutes for questions after which we will move on to the next item of business. I would be grateful if members who wish to ask a question were to press their request-to-speak buttons now. I thank the cabinet secretary for prior sight, and I think that the Parliament will be pleased to have some more information about the STACS initiative. I draw the cabinet secretary's attention to the following. In 2008, there were 766 teachers of computing science, and 18 months ago, the number had fallen to 595. In 2001, 28,000 pupils in Scotland were studying computing science. By 2020, it was 9,800. The number of schools offering the subject as a result of the subject choice issue fell from 2,500 down to 425. If the initiative is to take place and to be successful, I ask what is being done by the SNP to address the subject choice issue. I thank Liz Smith for that question. I think that she identifies in part—although unpacking the numbers is really important—the critical importance of the pipeline of talent coming through our schools in order to serve the start-up community so that the next generation becomes the start-ups. One of the areas in the recommendations that we have made the greatest progress on, arguably, is around STACS and ensuring that there is greater choice for young people, both as part of their formal subject choices but also in terms of their informal and extracurricular activity. Clearly, that starts with teachers. Liz Smith will know that we have offered a bursary of up to £20,000 for career changers to try to attract more teachers into teach stem subjects, and the highest demand for teachers needs to be computing. She asked for a bit more detail about STACS. STACS is a teacher-led organisation, so it starts with teachers, and it is trying to provide support and expertise for computing science teachers across Scotland so that they can teach as effectively as possible and promote skills among teachers to be able to meet the needs among young people. As I said, because it is led by teachers, they understand what the challenges are. Part of that—this is where I will close—is promoting computing science subject choice and a career option for pupils. We need to make sure that there are enough teachers there to meet the demand. We also need to create the demand in the first place, and more work needs to be done to create that demand, which is what STACS is also planning on doing or is already doing. That includes exploratory career sessions with teachers, parents and students to try and support more students to pick it up as a subject, because what we have seen is too many students choosing not to pursue it, not just because of a lack of choices, as Liz Smith says, but also because there just isn't the demand. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. I thank the cabinet secretary for a prior site of the statement. I begin by welcoming the initiative set out in the statement. It is important that we take our tech startups and turn them into growth organisations, and this is a positive step forward. To go further on Liz Smith's line of questioning, not only did the number of teachers fall by around a quarter in the period from 2008 to 2020, but the number of people entering for higher qualifications dropped from just over 4,200 to 3,200 in the same period, again a fall by a quarter. The cabinet secretary is right to identify that need for a pipeline of talent, but if young people are not studying for higher education and we do not have teachers to teach them, what progress can we make? We should not concede that we need to make progress on those fundamentals to make progress on that. I also ask about tech uptake among small and medium-sized enterprises. While tech startups are important, the recent report by the Productivity Institute, the paper on the Scottish Productivity Challenge, identified a poor uptake of technology by SMEs as being a core reason for Scotland's lagging productivity growth. What steps is the Scottish Government taking to address that vital issue? Two very important questions. If I start with the education point, and again, I am not disagreeing with the importance of getting it right in terms of that pipeline of talent, what the statement was designed to do is demonstrate the momentum and the progress that has actually been made since that recommendation was published in 2020. One of the first things that we did was establish a steering group, led by Mark Logan and Shirley-Anne Somerville, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills. Prior to that, he was engaging with the Deputy First Minister who had responsibility for education. They have a steering group with the most senior leaders from education and skills agencies across Scotland to progress changes in computing science in schools. That has resulted in stacks, which I can go into more detail about, but it has also resulted in some critical changes elsewhere. We have provided more than £1 million for additional computing science hardware and software to improve the provision in schools. We have also provided funding to digital extra. Through their grant award programme, they aim to inspire young people to learn digital technology skills through high-quality, exciting and extracurricular activities. One of the risks is that we only think that we can pursue a career in a tech startup. Have you done computing science? It is absolutely vitally important that there will be young people who have never considered doing computing science who need access to those digital skills and trying to encourage them to want to study technology and technology-related disciplines, and ultimately pursue a career that is hugely important. Daniel Johnson picks up on another very important point, which is around those sectors that are not specifically deemed as technology, but in a day and age where every sector is ultimately a tech sector. One of the changes that we have seen emerging from Covid is that, prior to Covid, it was perhaps harder to make the case for SMEs investing in digital capabilities, both in the skills of their workforce as well as the facilities that they use. Covid has changed that significantly. We have certainly seen significant uptake of, for example, the digital boost, which is why the commitment to invest £100 million in digital technology given SMEs access to digital technology fully matters. We reopened the £25 million digital boost fund in the first 100 days of this Government, recognising the importance, as Daniel Johnson referred to. That is more popular than it ever was. Not because the digital boost programme has changed, but because the uptake is significantly higher, the appetite is there, and we will build on that to not just provide the funding but to provide the expertise and, ultimately, this is probably one of the biggest game changers when it comes to productivity. I refer members to my register of interests, a member of the British Computer Society. I thank the cabinet secretary for the statement and particularly the emphasis on women and entrepreneurial endeavours in this area. We know from the Ross Society of Edinburgh's Tapping Alert talents report that many women have left the tech sector and other STEM areas, so what opportunities will there be for people, but particularly women, to retrain in the tech sector? It is another excellent question. Retraining was a key theme in the elements of my statement. To ensure that when we are trying to bring more women into the sector, we provide routes for them to either return to work or to change their careers. CodeClan obviously does an important work when it comes to retraining and reskilling, but one of the key areas in all of this is around the digital fund that I referred to in my statement, which specifically targets those that are furthest from the job market, the digital start fund, particularly targets them to undertake intensive courses with providers such as CodeClan to give them the skills that they need for a well-paid career and tech. CodeClan, as one example, is absolutely brilliant at helping people where they are. Having visited a few times, I am sure that Clare Adamson is familiar with it and may want to visit herself, they are excellent at helping to provide that wraparound support for individuals that are returning to the job market or changing careers. Ultimately, in a sector where there is a real challenge in accessing talent and where the number of women is still disproportionately low, we can solve two challenges by expanding the number of talented individuals in the sector and ensuring that we increase the number of women in the sector. That is probably one again of the number one commitment as part of implementing the stair recommendations. Thank you. Scotland has spent many years lagging behind in STEM and entrepreneurship education in its vital that this is belatedly addressed. As we saw on the technology side during the pandemic, the issuing of laptops for school children across Scotland was plagued with delays and obfuscations, as has been the promise to provide internet-ready devices for young people in Scotland since the election. We have an education and apprenticeship system that has been bruised by two years of Covid and will take time to recover. When she speaks about new start-up apprenticeships and entrepreneurial learning in schools, when precisely will these be delivered? Cabinet Secretary. Well, they are already being delivered. Grace is not, we are obviously keen to expand and to grow them, but in terms of the apprenticeship model that has already been adapted. For example, we have far more young people choosing to do a cyber apprenticeship than before. Many of them are choosing to work and study simultaneously and there are a number of tech businesses that are taking advantage of the apprenticeship model already. In terms of expanding, for example, the young persons guarantee, work has started on that. We are pleased to be working with Young Enterprise Scotland to look at how we can do this as effectively as possible through the young persons guarantee so that there are a number of routes for young people into the tech sector. Although a lot of that has started, we are building on that progress and expanding it. The key thing about the national strategy for economic transformation is that it takes a lot of the most successful interventions in the tech sector and tech entrepreneurship and expands it across the entrepreneurship domain so that it is not just unique to the tech sector. I thank the cabinet secretary for stating and celebrating the ambition contained within it, particularly the actions regarding women. If I could, I would like to ask a question specific to my constituency of Falkirk East and it concerns data flows as a critical enabling technology. Indeed, only recently the US President Joe Biden and the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a joint declaration on co-operation regarding their value. Germany is leading within Europe and the German Government has mandated Obashe, a pioneering firm, as the method to map and model their Government data flows. Will the minister meet with me and Obashe senior management at their site in Stenhouse Muir to learn about how Scotland and the Scottish Government could be utilising and world-leading with this critical new technology? I thank Michelle Thompson for bringing that to my attention and it's great to see what is being done in her constituency of Falkirk East. I'm particularly keen in looking at how we use data more effectively and how we support businesses working in that field of data. I'll be very happy to get further information from her and to consider how we can support that work, including by meeting with the relevant business. Mark Logan's company Sky Scanner was sold to Sea Trip of China for £1.4 billion in 2016. I don't think that that's necessarily a success story for the Scottish economy. I think that that reveals a major strategic weakness in companies of high-scale potential being lost to overseas ownership. So what measures might the Scottish Government consider to protect Scottish startups through that critical growth phase? Would they consider direct measures, such as Government taking golden shares in companies to shield them from predatory overseas takeovers, or perhaps as Mark Logan himself has identified a strategic weakness in coaching a critical mass of senior executive leadership in Scotland? I have the confidence to keep their headquarters in Scotland through an initial public offering of shares rather than selling it to an overseas multinational. There are a number of recommendations that are progressing specifically around investment and investment funding to avoid the situation whereby for a Scottish startup to expand, to grow, to develop, they need to access funding elsewhere. I don't think that anyone would dispute that Sky Scanner has been a success. Some of the recommendations looked at, for example, establishing a series A fund in a partnership between the Scottish Government, Scottish VCs and external investors looked at investment vehicles specifically for certain groups, like female founders. It looked at the need to identify where grant support is effective and where it's ineffective. It looked at Scottish VCs partnering with the Scottish Government on a number of joint initiatives, including maintaining and publicising a line database of all angels and all startups in Scotland. There is the bigger issue at stake here, which is ultimately that keeping businesses in Scotland is about delivering an environment in which they want to continue doing business. We can put in place a number of these interventions, and I've just rattled through a few of the recommendations very quickly, not all of them will necessarily be relevant to the example that he signs. Ultimately, it's about building up the wider ecosystem, the wider infrastructure, the wider environment that at every stage of a startup and then at scale of a growth, there is access to either investment funding or talent or whatever it is that will either stop them from growing in Scotland or enable them to continue to be headquartered in Scotland. I appreciate the cabinet secretary's desire to provide comprehensive responses, but there are many members who would like to put a question this afternoon, so I would be grateful if they could be made more concise. I call Willie Coffey to be followed by Liam McArthur. I ask the cabinet secretary how she will ensure that there are equal opportunities and access for children in our more deprived communities to benefit from technology education and whether we can provide additional resources where they may be required. The point that Willie Coffey references is one of the key themes coming through the national strategy for economic transformation that talks about apprenticeships, but it very specifically talks about apprenticeships for those underrepresented groups. Those underrepresented groups might be along the lines of gender, income inequality, ethnicity, focusing on expanding the pool and creating that equity of access. Our priority is to roll out apprenticeships specifically among those underrepresented groups. I warmly welcome the announcement by the cabinet secretary of new investment in building Scotland's tech sector, although the measure of success will not be in the number of start-ups but those that kick on for the longer term. Fundamental to supporting this sector and future start-ups is ensuring that we have the necessary digital infrastructure, yet we know that many parts of Scotland are being left badly behind through delayed superfast broadband roll-out, particularly in island and rural areas. What confidence can the cabinet secretary give this chamber that the ambitions that she has quite reasonably set out will be met with delivery on the ground over the next decade? It is a fair question if we care about equity of access. The point that I would make right now is that we still have much to do with the 95 per cent of access to broadband that already exists. Quite clearly, the R100 programme needs to ensure that every property has access to broadband, which we will progress and ensure that it is delivered despite the fact that it is a reserved area and that we are sticking in the breach to do that. He is right to say that there are two sides of the same coin, but ultimately that work is progressing. I know that many communities, not least the ones that Liam McArthur represents, would like to see us go faster, further and deeper into their communities. We will do what we can and the R100 programme is continuing to try to meet that shortfall where it exists. It is important to be clear that developing the tech sector is not just about IT and apps, but the tech is a foundation of sectors such as the aerospace industry, which the export plan identifies as growth areas in Scotland. Presswick airport is an integral to thousands of jobs in the aerospace industry in my constituency. Can I ask the minister what role Presswick airport and Presswick spaceport will play in meeting our ambitious goals? The member rightly points out that every community, every business and every key national asset, like Presswick airport, is part of that ambition to be a world leading tech nation. A lot of those communities, particularly under the Ayrshire growth deal, are already making significant steps. I have been in contact with a number of individuals from those communities, particularly around the HALE project and so on, to try and see how we can integrate our plan for tech scalers with work that is already on-going. It would be dangerous to suggest that the work that I have just outlined is the first of its kind. That is about bringing together a lot of the great work that is already going on in the Scottish ecosystem and providing support, including to the member's businesses in her constituency. I thank the cabinet secretary for her statement, which I welcome. There is much to commend in it. I would like to ask about support for digital solutions to social and environmental problems. The sharing economy for good can play a key role in designing new solutions for certain challenges that we face, not all of which have commercial or commodifiable elements. They will therefore need on-going investment or support, especially if they are rapid growth trajectories predicted. What support will be available for the mission and challenge approach for designing new solutions and for the sharing economy for good more generally? Is it a really important question? Tech for good has grown significantly in recent years. We want to provide that support to social enterprises and others. That is not just about the private sector working to create wealth. That is about solving a lot of the biggest issues that we face. The tech for good sector is critical in that regard. Working with those social enterprises and charities and others to embrace the opportunities that technology presents, it is really important to us. Fiona Hyslop to be followed by Tess White. Can the cabinet secretary set out further what steps have been taken to ensure that women's tech business plays a full and leading part in transforming Scotland's tech sector? The tech ecosystem fund has been supporting multiple events run by and for women, with more than £160,000 of funding given to Women's Enterprise Scotland, female founders squad, mint ventures and other organisations that are providing learning and pure networking opportunities and helping to overcome some of the challenges faced by women in tech. There is a clear gender gap in business participation in Scotland. Closing that gap and locking the full economic potential of women in enterprise will have a transformative impact on Scotland's economic performance. We certainly have, as part of our commitment to fund £50 million worth of support towards women in enterprise, will be considering how we better close that gap. That is where Anna Stewart's work is so critical when it comes to the independent short-life review of the support landscape for women. What does success look like? Success looks like 50 per cent of women female businesses. It looks like equal participation and equal sharing of the opportunities among women and men when it comes to technology. The Logan review highlights that, on average, 84 per cent of students studying higher computing science are male in any given year. What action is the Scottish Government taking to address the chronic gender imbalance in computing science at school level, which has resulted in a huge loss of talent from the workforce pipeline for tech startups? There are clear recommendations to contend with that. Some of the recommendations I have already referred to in previous answers are around overcoming gender stereotyping in early years. That is where young women such as Tony Scullion's work is so critical, because being able to provide that extracurricular activity that creates equity of access to opportunities to learn is so important. Alongside being role models, seeing female founders celebrating female computing science teachers is critical to all that. Education Scotland has a dedicated team that is working with schools and early learning centres specifically to try to deal with that early gender stereotyping and to ensure that that carries on throughout primary school and high school and ultimately into the university years. There are specific interventions that I can refer to in terms of the work that Education Scotland is doing, Tony Scullion is doing, the extracurricular activity, but I think that there is a bigger issue around the visibility of successful women in technology and successful female entrepreneurs to inspire young women to see themselves in that role in the future. The issue of poor cyber security has been raised recently with several high profile breaches. Does the cabinet secretary tell us that the Scottish Government has any plans to develop and promote this side of the tech industry? Many young people who have perhaps no official qualifications are the ones with a great ability with computers and may be the ideal recruits to this developing sector. Is that another good question? Yes, that is the short answer. One of the points that we are keen to avoid is having to retrofit cyber security to digitalisation. As we roll out and as we are keen to see more SMEs embracing the opportunity of technology, that needs to go hand in hand with cyber security. We have been providing financial support in the past, vouchers in the past to help SMEs doing that. The second part is about introducing the fundamentals of cyber skills from the earliest years onwards. There is a pipeline of talent in this area as well. There are examples of where that has been done successfully. The last point that I would make is about that inspiring of young people through extracurricular clubs and so on. We have got cyber discovery and cyber first programmes so that we are not seeing cyber as an afterthought. I have already referred to some of the cyber apprenticeships that are always hand in hand with promoting good practice and best practice across the public sector, private sector and third sectors. That concludes the ministerial statement on transforming Scotland's tech sector. There will be a brief pause before the next item of business.