 I welcome everyone to the 33rd meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017. Can I please remind everyone present to turn on mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting? Apologies have been received from Oliver Mundell. Michelle Ballantyne will substitute today for Oliver. Welcome again, Michelle. The first item of business is the decision on whether to take agenda items 3 and 4 in private and is everyone content that agenda items 3 and 4 will be taken in private? The next item of business is the draft budget for 2018-19. Today, we hear from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills and Government officials, and I welcome John Swinney, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills. Aileen McEchnie, director for advanced learning and science, and Michael Chalmers, director for children, director of children and families in the Scottish Government. Thank you for coming along today. I understand, Cabinet Secretary, that you would like to make a short opening statement. Thank you for the opportunity to make an opening statement on the 2018-19 draft budget. Despite the ever-challenging approach that the United Kingdom Government takes to public spending, education spending remains a top priority of this Government, the draft budget that we have delivered ensures that the focus remains on this commitment. We will provide £243 million in funding to support the near doubling of funded early learning and childcare, to support the next phase of ALC progress towards 2020, we are providing additional £54.3 million in revenue, which will be predominantly used to support the expansion in the workforce and the upskilling of the existing early learning and childcare workforce, and £150 million in capital funding to support the next phase of infrastructure investment. £52.2 million of the additional revenue in 2018-19 will be allocated to local authorities, and all of the £150 million of capital will be allocated to local authorities. We are working to close the attainment gap through increased targeted investment in schools, and this budget will allocate £179 million to the Scottish attainment fund, including £120 million in pupil equity funding to be spent at the discretion of head teachers on closing the attainment gap, with over 2,300 schools receiving pupil equity funding. We will continue to push ahead with our education reforms, with £4 million allocated in 2018-19 to empower teachers, parents and communities to deliver excellence and equity for our children, and we will also deliver funding to support the range of work across the breadth of curriculum for excellence. In the next financial year, we will continue to protect the principle of free tuition and widening access to university for young people from the most deprived communities. That is an overall real-terms increase in the higher education budget of 1.9 per cent when resource capital and financial transactions are combined. This very positive settlement will allow us to provide a cash-terms increase for teaching support and maintain world-leading research innovation in our universities, whilst ensuring further progress and widening access. We will continue to ensure that access to university should be based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay, and to support this, we have invested more than £1 billion per year in higher education since 2012-13, and that currently includes £51 million a year to support approximately 7,000 places for access students and those progressing from college. We will increase investment in our colleges, helping them to improve the life chances of our citizens and generate the skilled workforce needed for economic growth. To achieve that, we will increase overall college funding resource and capital by £66.2 million to £664.9 million, an increase of 9.4 per cent over the year. We have increased investment to provide additional funding to support harmonisation of pay and terms of conditions across the sector, and college capital funding will increase by £29.3 million compared to 2017-18. Skills Development Scotland will receive additional £13.7 million in 2018-19 to further expand modern apprenticeship starts to 30,000 a year by 2020, which will include new graduate-level opportunities. I look forward to addressing the committee's questions. Before I invite questions from members of the committee, I would like to start the question by asking you about additional support for learning. The 2018-19 budget makes a commitment to continue to implement the door-and-review through £10 million in funding for organisations that provide support for children and young people with additional support needs. Can you tell the committee what specific outcomes you intend to achieve with this funding, and how will it be evaluated to ensure value for money that is delivered? What we need to ensure is the commitment that is implicit in legislation, that the needs of all young people are met by the education system is a crucial test of the effective utilisation of the resources that you have raised, convener. What the Government does in partnership with the various institutions that provide the support directly under the auspices of the door-and-review is to ensure that young people are able to fulfil their potential within the education system. That is assessed by a whole variety of different considerations. Some of them will be around the achievement of CFE levels, others will be about ensuring the strengthening of capacities of young people, where those capacities can be particularly enhanced by their interaction with the education system. Fundamentally, we are looking to ensure that that test of ensuring that the potential of every child is fulfilled will be the test that is applied to the utilisation of those resources. The Scottish Children's Service Coalition said that there must be clearer guidance from the Scottish Government to local authorities to ensure consistent and meaningful identification and recording of children and people with ASN, because of the significant variation in local authorities in the number of people that is identified. What sort of work has been done to make sure that there is that level of recording being done? Obviously, there has been a significant change in the level of recording of young people with additional support needs over the course of the past six years or so. That has been a consequence of guidance that has been put in place, driven by legislative change, to ensure that the needs of young people are more effectively identified and recognised. Obviously, the steps that are taken through the guidance that is put in place about mainstreaming, for example, provide some of the templates about how we need to meet the needs of young people with additional support needs. However, the fact that there has been such a significant increase in the identification of needs suggests to me that local authorities are taking a much more rigorous and comprehensive view of those needs and ensuring that they are captured. What follows from that is the importance of ensuring that those needs are met as a result. Just to follow up the convener's point about identification. I understand absolutely what you are saying, Cabinet Secretary, about guidance on local authorities more rigorously ensuring identification, but you did not quite address the issue of inconsistency. If I was to put it this way, in Westin Bartonshire there are roughly five times as many children in school with identified additional support needs as in North Lanarkshire. Those are two local authorities with very similar demographics, children with very similar backgrounds, but with huge inconsistency in identified additional support needs. Are you at all concerned that it is challenging to effectively allocate additional support needs funding when there is such considerable inconsistency? I think that there are two different issues at play here. One is about the identification of the needs of young people and to ensure that they are fulfilled by their interaction with the education system. The guidance that we provide around mainstreaming helps to structure that judgment that is made educationally, child by child, about what is the appropriate educational setting for them to be educated. There is that assessment framework that I think helps in that respect. There is then the disparity argument that Mr Greer fairly raises about the comparison of the Westin Bartonshire and North Lanarkshire examples at the extremes. I suppose that we get in here to the nub of some of the debate about what is the proper role for the central Government in relation to the judgments of individual local authorities. It is up to local authorities to follow that mainstreaming guidance and assessment guidance. If it is resulted in Westin Bartonshire coming to this conclusion and North Lanarkshire coming to that conclusion, those are distinctive decisions made by individual local authorities. Parliament regularly expresses its view that local authorities should be allowed to get on with things, free from central government interference, but Mr Greer raises a fair point about the disparity that is there. The opportunity for us to assess that is through inspection of local authorities for educational purposes. As Mr Greer will know, we have recommenced inspections of individual local authorities to assess their performance in meeting the educational needs of young people. Through the means of that inspection, we have the opportunity to probe some of that disparity that has been raised in the question. Recently, I have raised issues around school inspection regimes and how much importance they place on additional support needs. Looking at the money that is allocated directly from central government in the budget announcement, Mr Mackay announced a £10 million fund for additional support needs. My understanding is that that was to go directly to charities who support young people with ASN. Will you be able to develop further on that and explain how that money will be allocated? We are given consideration to all of these issues to make sure that we are able to satisfy ourselves that the needs of young people can be met in this respect. We will, of course, be happy to share information about that as we develop our thinking. Is the Government at all concerned that the funding cuts that have quite directly affected additional support needs provisions around 500 ASN teachers, roughly the same number of assistants, is damaging the level of support for the principle of mainstreaming? Concerns are raised around that. They are not, in fact, around the principle of mainstreaming, but they come as a result of 10 years of budget cuts, meaning that, whilst a child with additional support needs can be in a mainstream school, they are often not included because those support services are not there. Without that funding going back into local authority budgets, the effectiveness and success of that policy area could potentially be undermined. The principle of mainstreaming, and this is at the heart of the guidance that the Government has recently issued in this respect, is that we have to make a judgment about the correct educational setting to meet the needs of young people. In some circumstances, that will not be in a mainstream option, and that is absolutely the correct judgment to be arrived at. If we are deploying the principle of mainstreaming, then there has to be effective support in place to make sure that young people can have their needs met. When I look at the statistical information that is available on this, the most recent data that I have available for 2015-16 shows that local authorities spent just over £4.9 billion on education in Scotland. Of that, £584 million, 12 per cent of total educational spend, was on additional support for learning. That was, in fact, an increase of £5 million on 2014-15, which is a 2.7 per cent increase in cash terms compared with 2014-15 and a 1.9 per cent increase in real terms. I appreciate that this data is not for the most recent financial years, but it is the most recent that is available to me. I cite that data because it is important that we recognise that, within the judgments that have been made by local authorities, the fundamental answer to Mr Greer's question has to be demonstrated by the resources that are put in place. On the most recent data that I have available to me, it appears that local authorities are providing that support. I certainly see, as I am out and about in the education system, the manifestation of that support. It is obviously something that we have to keep under active review because it is all very well having a principle of mainstreaming, but if it does not actually deliver on the educational promise to young people who have additional needs and to the young people who do not have additional needs but who need their colleagues and compatriots to be properly supported so that their education can prosper, we need to be attentive to some of those issues. Thank you very much, Michelle. Yes, good morning, cabinet secretary. Can I just pick up on some of that? I have the same figure as you in terms of spending 12 per cent, but you are saying that it identifies that the schools are actually delivering services adequate or you imply that it would be adequate, but the rest of the numbers are worrying as well. The number of teachers with additional support for learning as their main subject has fallen by nearly 15 per cent. ASN teacher numbers have fallen and we have got educational psychologists down by 10 per cent. What conversations have you been having directly with the teaching unions and the schools around the strains around supporting children with additional support for learning? Certainly the challenges of ensuring the needs of young people with additional support needs are met within our schools is something that I regularly discuss with individual teachers, schools, teaching unions and also with local authorities, because it is a challenging environment and it has to be well supported. I am very happy to look in greater depth at some of the detail that Michelle Ballantyne raises and I am familiar with that data. Because of the mainstreaming principle, there will be more teachers who are habitually interacting with young people with additional support needs than those who will just be categorised as additional support for learning teachers. One of the issues that the committee has raised with me in the past has been about the effectiveness of initial teacher education taking due account of the needs of mainstreaming. If we apply the principle of mainstreaming, we have to apply that right the way through the system so that every teacher, whoever they are, has an understanding of some of the challenges that have to be met. As we look at some of that detail, we have to look with care at whether or not the fact that we apply the mainstreaming principle does not drive the changes in the teacher numbers that Michelle Ballantyne has raised on those specific categorisations, given the fact that we have a rising number of teachers within the context of a rising number of teachers within the teaching profession. I am very happy to look in more detail at some of those issues as we explore the central point that Ross Greer has raised with me, which is about whether or not the needs of young people are being effectively met within the system. In terms of looking at it, does the cabinet secretary accept that the mainstreaming principle while welcome means that, in a classroom, a teacher's time can be very absorbed by a number of the pupils within the classroom and that the absence of a teaching assistant or an additional support needs assistant can be detrimental to the classroom overall? With a 73% increase in children identified as having additional needs, what kind of thoughts does the cabinet secretary have around how teachers are going to manage their stress levels because the lack of resource within the classroom is going to create increasing stress levels for teachers? There are two points in that. One is the fact that I acknowledge that this is a stressful environment and that our demands are placed on teachers. I acknowledge that and that is why it is important that we properly and effectively support the teaching profession in the respect. The second point is about the careful judgment that has to be arrived at about the correct educational setting for young people because, as I have said to Mr Greer, mainstreaming will not work for everybody and it is not appropriate to work for everybody. Careful judgments need to be made to ensure that the educational needs of all children can be met by a young person with additional needs to be placed in a classroom. Where that can't be done, then that young person should be educated in a distinctive environment, but where it is planned to do that, we have to make sure that there is the proper and effective support in place. If we look at the numbers of staff supporting pupils with additional support needs, we have seen a rise between 2015 and 2016. We have obviously seen a rise in the number of teachers in general. We are seeing a pattern of the resources that have been put in place to ensure that the principle of mainstreaming can be delivered effectively. George, you want to do the supplementary. I just want to go on about what Ross Greer was talking about with regard to the disparity within areas. I am a very practical individual and I try to look for solutions where possible. Would there not be a case that the proposed regional collaboratives could be quite helpful in ASN in particular with the idea of getting the right resource in the right area and the right time to ensure that areas are working together to make that work now? That is just me sitting here listening to the debate today and coming up with that solution, but please do not be shy if I am talking completely nonsense, cabinet secretary. Tell me. Do we not believe that that would be a role for the regional collaboratives in that? It is quite clear that the opportunity in regional collaboratives is part of the purpose of their establishment to encourage the sharing of good practice and good performance. The approaches that can best be taken, if we take the example that Mr Greer cited between West and Bartonshire and North Lanarkshire, are authorities within the West partnership, so there is obviously the opportunity for some collaborative learning to be undertaken within the regional arrangements. I think that there is that opportunity that can be taken forward. I think that there is also the opportunity to have a broader discussion around how we most effectively meet the needs of young people, because I think that we will all be familiar with how where mainstreaming works has a profound impact on the young people affected. I come to this discussion from the point of view of being an admirer of mainstreaming principle, because I have seen many good examples of it being successful. However, I am not duey-eyed sufficiently to take the view that it is going to work in all circumstances, and we have therefore got to make a pragmatic judgment, child by child, about how the support can be put in place to meet their needs. Cabinet secretary, you just briefly mentioned initial teacher education. I think that there are probably three broad components at issue here. One is identification. The other is about additional resources that are brought to bear. Finally, it is about the training and expertise of teachers themselves, which, obviously, initial teacher education is part of, but so is on-going, continuing professional development. That is precisely one of the things that we have heard evidence of last year that has suffered in recent years. Do you think that there is a need to look at the resources that are available for continuing professional development, especially for things such as neurodevelopmental disorders, for things such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD and ASD? What are your reflections on the needs to reflect that in the resourcing in our schools? The issues that Mr Johnson raises are all important issues that are part of the wider discussion about the enhancement of professional learning. That is a core function of educational professional in Scotland. There should be, on an on-going basis, an emphasis on professional learning and development. One of the areas that I am taking forward as part of the education reforms is the strengthening of career progression routes, which will enable opportunities to be available to members of the teaching profession to develop different specialisms within their teaching role. As a broad summary, I would say that the opportunities for professional development in teaching largely are to follow an administrative leadership route. I want to broaden that out to establish opportunities for subject leadership and specialism leadership, and some of the issues that Mr Johnson raises would undoubtedly be covered in that respect. I certainly think that there has to be an emphasis on continuous professional development. It is not all just about initial teacher education, and the education system is configured to enable that to be the case. I wonder whether you can indicate what changes you made to your budget as a consequence of the report that we provided on additional support needs. I am concerned that the discussion is quite theoretical. Everything that we have been given in evidence, anecdotally, when we meet teachers and others, when we meet parents and so on, that young people with additional support needs who might, in the past, have had an individual personal support that is shared across a whole class, or that the whole class only gets this person once a week rather than twice, three times or four times a week. We had evidence from Enable and others that young people with learned disabilities. Their definition of mainstream education is maybe half a day a day. I think that everybody shared the concern across the committee about the reality of mainstreaming and the support that is required from specialists in order to allow young people to access education. What confidence do we have that the response to that report is in the budget itself? I think that the points that were made in relation to the funding that is available through local government, which is principally delivering in those areas—I talked to my answer to Mr Greer about the increases that we have seen there, the resources that are in place to respond to the questions that are rising out of the door and review. We also have to look at some of the data that is available to us that looks at the positive destinations that are achieved by young people with additional support needs. The convener started off asking me about the outcomes that are achieved, and we now see a situation in which young people with additional support needs, 87.1 per cent of them, have a positive destination, which is an increase on the situation in 2011-12. There are indications of the strengthening of the achievements of young people as a consequence of their interaction with the education system in which they have additional support needs. Part of the fact is that there are real terms cut to local government budgets, which must put phenomenal pressure on them to deliver any of those things. It is a slight sideways step for me, but I am interested in the definition of a positive destination. I am very concerned that no young people who are in precarious work with no guaranteed hours, no certainty of when their shifts will be, I would be looking to the Scottish Government to assure us that that is not defined as a positive destination. There is a major problem at a UK level with DWP defining jobs that are utterly insecure as being that you have to take those jobs or you are going to be sanctioned or whatever. You may not have done a lot of things yet, but I would be looking for a reassurance from you that you will strip out of positive destinations those highly insecure jobs wherever you would say that the level of exploitation is very high and the lack of security is a major concern. A positive destination will be defined as sustained employment, involvement in a college or a university place. I am very happy, although with my colleague the fair work secretary, Keith Brown, to look at the issues about positive destinations that Johann Lamont raises, because all of us want to see the young people being able to progress into sustainable positive destinations as a consequence of their involvement in the education system. We will, and our efforts and interventions are designed to enable them to do so. I represent North Ayrshire, which is an attainment challenge authority. I have seen and heard about good work that they are doing in the schools and they are having a really positive effect on kids and their families. In Save the Children's submission to the committee, they stressed the need for robust information available to schools about what is effective in closing the attainment gap. The Government produced the Interventions for Equity framework to support schools, and that is a very welcome piece of guidance. However, as we move forward, I wonder if you could outline how you will assess what particular types of interventions are being made, which ones are effective, which are least effective and how that knowledge will be shared across the country, just to ensure that the pupil equity funding is being used in the most appropriate way for everyone? The approach that we have taken is not to be prescriptive about this, and I think that it would be wrong to be prescriptive about this, because there will be a range of different interventions that will be successful in closing the poverty-related attainment gap. As time progresses, evidence will become clearer based on the achievement of CFE levels and the tangible difference in the performance of young people as a consequence of interventions that are taken forward. To cite a local example in Ruth Maguire's area, North Ayrshire Council invested in the establishment of a professional learning academy, which, if my memory serves me right, is in Ockingroove. What the purpose of that intervention was was to strengthen pedagogical experience within schools. From the evidence that I can see, we cite that in the national improvement framework report, where we specifically refer to the strength of the professional learning academy in strengthening professional capability within schools, as being manifested. We will see evidence examples of what is successful. We will also see evidence examples of what is not successful. We have to be tolerant of that, because there will be things that will not work as part of the interventions that we take forward, but the crucial thing is that we must learn from that and make sure that that learning is shared more widely. In terms of the range of different interventions that could be deployed, the Government has entered into a partnership with the Education and Endowment Foundation to identify proven examples internationally of interventions that can be effective. That material is available in the national improvement hub for the teaching profession to access. Obviously, as time goes on, we will continue to refine that. That is not held in aspect. That is a moving collection of interventions that we think will be successful. Of course, we will see the fruits of that in the CFE levels information and in the wider assessment of the closing of the attainment gap. I concluded the consultation with the publication of the national improvement framework report and the monitoring framework for closing the gap just last Tuesday. We have the arrangements in place to share that knowledge. We have the arrangements in place to learn from the experience, and we will obviously be monitoring the effectiveness of particular interventions. Additionality was a fundamental principle of pupil equity funding. How is the Government assessing that schools are using it for additional purposes and notwithstanding the Government's wish to not be prescriptive? Would you intervene if it was not being used for additionality? Where I have felt that additionality was not implicit in the arrangements that were put in place, I have intervened. I would continue to do so if I felt that additionality was not at the heart of the decision-making about pupil equity funding. Just briefly on the guidance, I appreciate that it has only been in place since April, but I wonder what sort of feedback the Government has received so far on the guidance. You said that you are changing it as it is on-going, so I assume. One of the things that we have to be mindful of is about bureaucratic burdens, and I certainly want to minimise those, and I want to encourage a climate of professional development and professional integrity. We will be looking in consultation with COSLA and the Association of Directors of Education and other key stakeholders about some of the lessons that we learn about the implementation of pupil equity funding. If it is too bureaucratic, we will need to tackle that, and I am very prepared to do so. Along those lines, I think about procurement and bureaucratic burden. I appreciate that the guidance for PEF makes it clear that the purchase of resources and equipment must comply with existing procurement procedures that are in place. I have been given an example, not from my own local authority area, but from another, where a headteacher was trying to purchase a relatively small item, but the process for buying it was just quite silly, to be honest. There were very lengthy processes. Do you have any comments on that? If it is a minor issue that has been caught up in a procurement process that appears over the top, I would be very happy to look at that example and to try to reflect some of that pragmatism within the procurement guidance that is available to individual schools. There is a careful balance that has to be constructed between the utilisation deployment of public money and sensible pragmatic judgments about interventions that teachers believe to be valuable and important. I set that in the context of one of the comments that I made earlier on that some of those interventions will not work, and we have to acknowledge that and be tolerant of that point and respect it and learn from it as part of this process. I am certainly prepared to do so, and I have made that clear publicly. I have got a number of people who have wanted to ask a question. Ross, have you got a very short answer? Me, too. Cabinet Secretary, under the attainment funding, 666 additional full-time equivalent teachers or staff have been recruited. Do you know how many of them are on temporary contracts, because that would not seem an ideal way to cause the attainment gap through year-on-year temporary work? I do not think that I have to hand that detail, but I am certainly very happy to provide that information to the committee if we have it. I do not think that I have got it to hand to that degree of detail, but we will come back on that. Cabinet Secretary, one of the words for me is that SIMD figures are used as a way of targeting where the resource goes. In an area like mine, it does get to the right time and place, but the problem is that with the figures in more rural areas and things like that, there tends to be difficulty. We have been talking to some of the academics recently, and Keir Bloomer, I asked him if he kept saying that it was not a blunt sentiment, but I said, what is your idea, Mr Bloomer? I am still waiting for an answer, because he never had one. Is there any way that the Government is looking at different ways to take in across the country how we deal with getting the resource into the right area? The two available mechanisms for me to allocate pupil equity funding, since it is driven exclusively by the identification of the incidents of poverty, is either through the mechanism of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation or by the eligibility for registration for free school meals. The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation essentially identifies groupings of poverty. The free school meal eligibility identifies a much finer instance of poverty within individual communities. I opted for the free school meals approach simply because it gave a greater degree of coverage than the SIMD approach would take. I am, however, aware, and I have heard representations of this from a number of rural authorities about the fact that some of the take-up of free school meals in rural areas in some circumstances is not as high as it would ordinarily be expected to be, because in small communities people are perhaps reluctant to identify themselves as requiring or being eligible for that support. I am very open to how we might take further steps to reflect that in the approach that we take, and I have had a number of conversations with local authorities about how we might do that. Having said all of that, we have not got a mechanism that enables us to do that yet, but I am very much open to that question. Just further than that, my colleague Johann Lamont talks quite a lot about SIMD not just being impacting on the individual or the family, but the reason why it is a useful tool is because it is the area that might well suffer from the knock-on effects of the deprivation that is around there, so therefore it would impact on the schools. When you are looking at other mechanisms of replacing SIMD, would you be thinking of doing something in parallel with it or alongside it? I have absolutely no plans to change anything to do with SIMD. Absolutely none whatsoever. It is not my responsibility to tackle that issue. My only point is to talk about distribution mechanisms. SIMD data underpins much of the framework that I have put in place to assess whether we are or are not closing the poverty-related attainment gap. You are absolutely correct, convener. It provides a very substantial element of the framework that enables us to make judgments about that point, but when it comes to the distribution, if we are trying to absolutely target individuals who are living in circumstances of poverty to use education to try to improve their life chances, we have to go beyond SIMD, which is my point about free school meal entitlement, but also my point to Mr Adam that there is more we could do beyond that to deal with the issue of rurality, but I do not yet have an answer to that question, but it will not in any way affect the use of the prevalence of SIMD. Thank you, cabinet secretary, and that was the answer that I was hoping to get. I wonder if I could just ask on the question of teacher numbers, which has obviously been something that has been very much in the news of late. When we took evidence from various groups about the workforce planning issue, there seemed to be considerable confusion about the model that was being used. Could you explain what you think that model should look like and why you think that it is not working very well just now? The model has to take into account a variety of indicators, which at core will be about pupil numbers, distribution of those pupil numbers, the distribution of the school estate, and that material tends to produce raw numbers about the requirements of the teaching profession. What then has to be added to that is more subjective information about recruitment levels, retention levels and the implications of policy interventions on the education system. That will essentially provide us with a perspective of workforce numbers. It is a combination of different factors, some of them are more statistically provable, like pupil numbers than others, but it is a combination of those different factors. On the question of the latter part of Liz Smith's question, which was, as ever, diplomatically expressed about why it is not working, we have to look at a longer time period in history to come to those conclusions to see why we are where we are. If we go back seven years, we had a problem of teacher unemployment and everybody knows that and Parliament was concerned about that. We had to take action to address the issue of teacher unemployment, which resulted in a number of things. It resulted in, for example, changes to intake into initial teacher education in 2010-11 and 2011-12, and it also influenced changes to the remuneration arrangements for supply teachers, which had an effect on the availability of posts for new probationer teachers, which could be freed up if there were fewer supply teachers who were in post. When we look at the implications of all that, we see, for example, in the loosened data, the highest level of probationer employment, which is 88 per cent, which is welcome. We also see a rising number of intakes into initial teacher education over the course of the past few years, culminating this year with an intake of 3,861 into initial teacher education, higher than in any previous year since 2009-10, and a rising number of teachers in the profession. With the teacher numbers today, in 2017, at the highest level they have been at since 2011. The workforce planning model, with all its different factors, is resulting in us having an increased number of teachers in our schools today than at any stage since 2011. I think that the workforce planning model, if I have one observation to make, which is an anecdotal observation, is that I think that the retention rate of teachers has been lower than we would have expected. To flip that over, I think that more teachers have left the profession than the model would have expected to be the case. A lot of the other interventions that I am making in the system are about trying to reduce workload or about the steps that we have just taken in terms of pay to try to improve remuneration, because I appreciate that it has been very tough for people. Over the course of the past few years, we have affected the willingness of teachers to be in the profession. We have also had to do something about supply remuneration to try to encourage and register teachers who could do a shift in the schools. If I could delicately make a suggestion. Cabinet Secretary, thank you for that. Thank you for the good news there. If I was a parent in Murray or in Edinburgh or in Perthincon Ross, I have to say that I would not be persuaded by that answer at all because they are obviously in scenarios where they do not have sufficient teachers. We heard yesterday that some council may be deciding in primary years that they would only be taught for some of the time. It is a very depressing picture for these parents. What short-term remedy do you have for this situation? It is very serious and I hope that you would acknowledge that. I have given a detailed answer on the workforce planning model, but I am the first to accept that there are challenges about teacher recruitment around the country. Although we have a welcome increase of 543 in the number of teachers this year, I accept that there are still challenges around the country and the first to accept that. On what we have done and what we are doing in relation to that, we have to be open to different ways of proceeding. Let me explain why that is important. In the initial teacher intake expectations for 2017-18, we planned and made provision for the recruitment of 4,058 students to enter through the various established means. We successfully recruited 3,657. Clearly, there are more places available for individuals to enter the teaching profession than we are prepared to do so. I would describe to be the younger cohort, which is school leavers going into an undergraduate course and university students going into the PGDE. We put in place new routes to open up other aspects of the other routes into teaching and a further 204 individuals are coming through those routes. By the reforms that the Government has put in place, we have managed to increase the intake from 3,657 to 3,861. We have got closer to our initial expectation of 4,058 as a consequence of the reforms that we have put in place together. What are you going to do to ensure that the additional teachers that you say are in the system are deployed in the schools that desperately need them just now? What are you going to do to ensure that those schools get those teachers? Fundamentally, that is an issue for individual local authorities to consider. What we are working with our local authority partners to do is to create a teaching pool that can enable teachers to be deployed in different educational situations. My objective is to increase the supply of teachers through that initial teacher education. I have also asked for further proposals about how we can encourage more individuals—what I would describe as career switchers—to move from existing careers, which is what stem bursaries are about, to try to encourage people to make a switch of career into teaching at a later stage in life, because, clearly, there are more places available for younger people than are prepared to come forward. We have got to encourage career switchers to make those transitions. If Smith would forgive me, I will complete the answer. The other step that we are taking is to try to activate more individuals who are currently registered to teach, who could return to the profession and who could contribute through the supply model. I have already acknowledged that one of my frustrations about the length of time that it has taken us to get to an agreement about teachers' pay is that, months ago, changes agreed to supply arrangements that I have not been able to put into practice until the whole agreement was reached, which we reached last week. I am very pleased that we reached it last week, but we reached the agreement about supply arrangements months ago, and I was not able to implement that without the whole agreement being in place. Part of that is to try to increase the flow of individuals. In the particular areas that Liz Smith has talked about—Murray and the Highlands and Islands and, to an extent, Pertha Cairos is relevant in his respect—I have been encouraging the University of the Highlands and Islands to develop more presence on initial teacher education, and they have done so, and I am very much welcome that. However, I think that there is a particular opportunity because of the model of education that the UHI operates on. Individuals can live in their community, get their education in their community and, ideally, once graduated, teach in that community. That is a point that I am encouraging the University of the Highlands and Islands to develop yet further so that we have, in some of the hard work to support locations, teachers who are living in those communities, individuals who are currently living in those communities, who could become teachers by means of their interaction with the University of the Highlands and Islands. My final point, cabinet secretary, would be this. It is a question about whether there is a block in the system that is preventing local authorities from knowing where the pool of potential teachers actually lies. As you say, it is very much up to local authorities to make that decision about who to employ, which is true. Do you think that there is a block in the system that, for some reason, those local authorities are not clear about the potential people who might work in their schools? No, because every registered teacher is registered with a GTCS, and I have asked the GTCS already to make it clear to all non-practicing teachers already, since the SNC-T agreement was reached last week, about the changes to supply cover. We know who the non-register and the non-practicing teachers are, and I do not know that the GTCS is not in our schools, because they are obviously choosing not to do so. Graham Logan, who has been the interim chief inspector of education, said that he got an email from the GTCS saying to him, as a non-teaching teacher, why do not you do a supply shift, which is proof that the system is working now? Mr Logan has other responsibilities. People are making their choices about that, but there is certainly the means of contacting those individuals who are not teaching to encourage them to teach. They are available to us through the GTCS, and we have utilised them on a number of occasions since I became education secretary, and there is no impediment to us doing that in the future. If it is for local government to sort out the problems of teacher recruitment that Liz Smith has been talking about, how is it imposing the pupil-teacher ratio from the centre help? It is a crucial element of ensuring that young people have access to an appropriate level of teaching resource, given that the teaching resource is the most significant contributor to the educational performance of young people. However, if you do not have a maths teacher in an Edinburgh school, how does the central imposed pupil-teacher ratio help that school? We have to make sure that we have the maths teachers available for those individuals, which is why I take steps such as putting in place stem bursaries to encourage individuals to enter teaching to make that transfer. I get that point. What I do not understand genuinely is how a pupil-teacher ratio, which is the part that central government imposes on local authorities, is consistent with sorting out local government difficulties in teacher recruitment, which you have openly and very sensibly accepted. We have to take steps to ensure that the current relationship exists to ensure that high-quality education is available for young people. We have a challenge about recruitment to the teaching profession in the current environment, but seven years ago, we had way too many teachers. The key challenge is to get that approach correct and the correct balance to make sure that young people can get the educational resources that they are entitled to and that will affect their performance. However, if Highland Council cannot recruit enough, Strathcon and Primary School will close after Christmas, as you are very well aware, because it does not have two teachers. How is a ratio set by you helping Highland Council to solve the problem of Strathcon and Primary School? What we are doing is taking a host of different interventions to boost the number of teachers coming into the private profession, such as the fact that we have 3,861 teachers coming through initial teacher education as we speak. None of them are at Strathcon on the 9th of January. That is about local authority. I have just gone through the UHI options as well, which are very specific means about trying to enable individuals who are living in Highland and Highland communities to be able to secure access to teaching qualification within their own communities, which might enable them to teach in Strathcon on other primary schools in the Highlands and Islands. There is a range of interventions, but fundamentally, if we depart from the idea of recognising the significance of pupil-teacher ratios as enhancing the quality of education, then I think that we would be making a mistake as a country. You do not therefore believe that pupil-teacher ratios should be set by the local authority or set by a school? I think that they should be set across our education system to give young people across the country an assurance about the quality of education that they are going to experience. I asked if it should not the pupil-teacher ratio in a school be set by the head teacher and his or her promoted course. I think that it is part of the framework of education to guarantee the quality of education around the country. Why does the centre know better than a head teacher in a primary school or in a secondary school about how many kids should be in class? Fundamentally, we all know that the strength and the quality of education is driven by the access that individuals have to individual teachers, and that should be an assurance that young people have across the country. I could not agree more, but if you cannot get the teachers, then the pupil ratios are relevant. My point is that we should have a circular argument here. I think that we are actually in agreement here because we both agree that the quality of teachers is important, and we both agree that it is important to get as many teachers into the schools as we possibly can do. I accept and I first accept that we have challenges in that respect, which is why we are putting in such an effort to get more teachers into the profession and to get them to stay longer. I entirely agree with all that. What I am trying to push at is how a centrally driven target in relation to pupil-teacher ratios helps local government with that huge challenge that you have very fairly accepted. I do not actually think that the pupil-teacher ratio has got anything to do with the challenges of Strathconin. The challenges are absolutely nothing to do with it, but the challenges of Strathconin have two teachers that are leaving, and they cannot replace them. That is the challenge there. That is about teacher recruitment, which is why the interventions that I am making with the University of the Highlands and Islands are so significant in that respect. You would accept, Mr Sweeney, that there are quite a number of submissions to the committee from other local government, from particular councils, who say that one of the constraints on their ability to tackle teacher recruitment is that ratio. My definition has implications for that. No, I do not. If I relaxed the position on pupil-teacher ratio, it would result in a reduction in the number of teachers. I cannot imagine that the committee would be that cheerful about that issue. How do you know that? That is what happened in 2008-09—no, my number is correct—in 2009, 2010 and 2011, which is why we then had to put in place the constraints about the pupil-teacher ratio to protect teacher numbers. Okay, let me try it the other way round. You planned, Mr Sweeney, to give headteachers more powers. Do you not plan to give them the ability therefore in this case to do anything other than comply with this national ratio? Well, I think that the pupil-teacher ratio is an essential part of the quality of education in Scotland, yes. Okay, final question. I apologise for going on about that. Can I just check on the budget specifically, based on the spice briefing for members that was available, I think, on Monday, whether the 3 per cent pay rise for teachers earning up to £30,000 is included in the draft budget that was published last week? It is assumed to be, yes. Assumed to be, I am not sure that I understand that. Well, obviously, an assumption has been made about public sector pay within the overall budget. Obviously, there is a negotiation to be undertaken through the channels of the SNCT in which the Government will be a party, so it is assumed to be in those resources. Thank you and welcome, cabinet secretary. Liz Smith mentioned Murray council, where there are a number of issues facing teacher recruitment at the moment. I am sure that the cabinet secretary will be pleased to know that there are eight more teachers working in the Murray council this time this year compared to last year. I would urge the cabinet secretary to continue to support the training places at UHI and indeed Aberdeen, which are making a difference and appear to be going from strength to strength. One issue that you might be interested to hear about, of course, is that there has been a 67 per cent increase in the number of women on maternity leave in Murray at the moment, which is a huge increase, which is leading to some challenges for their head teachers, but it is great for Murray's demographic trends, as it has got to be said. However, those are unexpected, to a certain extent, trends—a 67 per cent increase in this case. I thought that we were dealing with young people as well in this committee. The lack of supply teachers is clearly causing a number of issues in Murray's case at the moment. However, there are some issues that the cabinet secretary can refer to in this context. First of all, there is the issue of the head teacher vacancies. One issue that many local authorities are raising is that it is difficult to recruit head teachers, particularly in primary schools, because the pay differential between deputy heads and heads does not justify the differential in responsibilities. I was wondering whether that was something that the cabinet secretary is in discussion with the profession over. I have a number of discussions with the profession about those points. One of the elements of the SNCT agreement about the teachers' pay deal for 2017-18 is that, through the auspices of the SNCT, we will look at issues of terms and conditions as part of that process. I will say the issues that Mr Lockhead raises are issues that can be raised in that process. Another issue relating to wider budgets within the Government is that head teachers are spending a lot of time dealing with issues that are not directly related to what one might refer to as education. Maybe more social work input would be required to deal with some of the issues that head teachers are having to deal with. Are there any discussions going on with local authorities or the profession about other help that can be brought into schools to deal with those issues? Just if I can add to my previous answer the point that Mr Lockhead makes about supply teacher availability, I hope that it will be enhanced by the agreement that we have reached through the SNCT on changes to supply teacher remuneration, which will make it more remunerative for individuals to be active on the supply list. I hope that it helps the situation in Murray where I appreciate that there are challenges about maternity cover that are in place, notwithstanding the increase in the number of teachers that are active in Murray in the course of the last 12 months. In relation to the wider question that has been raised, there is an opportunity for us to try to take forward a wider discussion with local government, which made the point to me during our discussions around the regional collaborative arrangements that local authorities—this affects the wider debate about education governance and the role of local authorities. One of the key points that local government makes in relation to the importance of them being democratically accountable for education is that they are running the range of other services that Mr Lockhead referred to, which will have an effect on the wellbeing of children, principally around social work and other specialist services. That will obviously be interactions from the health service. The resolution of some of the challenging questions about the workload of teachers and the circumstances around which individuals are able to have their needs met will be able to be deployed by local authorities exercising their wider responsibilities in that respect. It is a key part of the role of local government to be able to host those discussions that are multidisciplinary, and they should not all fall on the shoulders of head teachers to take forward those discussions. In terms of career switchers, one issue that has been put to me, although the cabinet secretary mentioned bursaries, is that when people in other careers want to change the teaching, which we should encourage to plug some of the vacancies, there is a £6,500 give or take cost of the fees to go to get your further qualification. That quite often puts people off. Is that something that could be addressed within the budget at all, given that £6,500 per aspiring teacher would not work out at a huge amount of money? Is that already catered for or something that you might want to think about? Part of my thinking about the bursaries was to address the fact that it is particularly to target career switchers and to recognise that they would invariably be people who had commitments by that stage in their life. Forgoing a year of income is not an easy decision for any individual to make in their circumstances. The thinking behind the STEM bursaries was to try to make that practical and tangible for individuals to make that switch. I am quite open to looking at different suggestions of the type. It is part of the dialogue that I am having with the schools of education about the different propositions that they are bringing forward to try to find other routes to enable individuals to make a contribution to the teaching profession. What is clear from the data is that, if our workforce planning model is sent us for 1718, we need to have 4,058 teachers and we can only recruit into the education process 3,861. We must find other channels and routes to motivate individuals other than the fundamentally traditional routes of leaving school and going into teaching or doing an undergraduate degree and doing a postgraduate qualification. I am very open to some of those questions to be considered. I am very much welcome to that because it is an issue beyond STEM subjects at primary levels. My final point is that, as councils face up to their budgets in the coming weeks, a number of councils are contemplating education cuts. In Murray, where we are trying to attract teachers to apply to work in local schools, they are speaking about scrapping school librarians, reducing support for children with additional support needs and also changing the arrangements for visiting specialist schools for PE and music and so on, which is causing a lot of concern. Do you agree that the budget that has been announced by the Government would hopefully give enough assurance to such local authorities to not impose those education cuts? There is an annual process that local authorities undertake to identify savings, and there are weighty documents produced almost invariably by council officials, which go through all those particular options. They are predicated on a financial assumption about what the budget may look like. I know from my discussions with the French Secretary that all local authorities are doing those things. Mr Lochhead cited the example in his constituency in Murray. I know from my discussions with the French Secretary that those options have been worked up by local authorities, assuming a very different and much poorer financial settlement than has been delivered by the Government in the budget. I hope that, after a period of reflection, local authorities can take a wise set of decisions in the context of the resources that are available to them by the settlement that has been put in place by the Government. I will mention the follow-up from Richard Lochhead's line of questioning on teacher places. Cabinet Secretary will know that, in my area, the G-Lite programme has been tremendously successful—almost too successful—because people who want to access that course and a part-time course that allows them to continue working are oversubscribed. I have had quite a few people contacting me, and they are really frustrated that they have not been able to get into that course. At the same time, you will have the PGE courses, the traditional type that you have just mentioned, that have been undersubscribed. What happens to the funding that is given to universities to provide the traditional courses if they are undersubscribed? Could that not be channeled into expanding things like the G-Lite, where there is a big demand for that? To date, we have not reclaimed resources from universities where they have been unable to fulfil traditional PGE-type courses. However, there is scope within the financial arrangements for us to claw that resource back and redeploy it in other areas. Obviously, Gillian Martin raises an issue to which I am giving active consideration, given the fact that we find ourselves in a situation where we have not been able to fulfil our expectations and we have to look at different approaches and different options to try to ensure that we have an adequate supply of teachers into the teaching profession. Gillian Martin, do you want to go on to your next line of question? Yes. I will follow on from that. One of the issues in terms of early years is about the workforce planning around that. There are significant amounts of funding that has been given into early years. One of the things that is not detailed so far is the funding that is going to be given to colleges around their part in training people for early years and childcare. Cabinet Secretary, can you expand on what that might be? Obviously, the role and focus of our colleges is to provide the graduates that we require to contribute in a variety of different areas. Our work has been taking place for some time with colleges around the provision of those courses and places to make sure that our expectations on the early years workforce can be fulfilled by the work that is undertaken by individual colleges. In terms of the budget that has been given to childcare, a lot of it is ring-fenced, but some of it is not. The huge part of it is the £202 million ring-fenced so that it goes to local government and has to be spent on the childcare in early years priorities, but there is a £40.8 million funding that is not identified as being ring-fenced. How can we ensure that that goes to the right places? There is a mixture of resources in there. Some of it will be resources that the Government itself controls and deploys. Obviously, we will ensure that that is spent very directly on early years activity. There is specific provision that is also in place for local authorities to essentially support the capacity building for the roll-out of early learning and childcare. We are working collaboratively with local authorities to ensure that those resources are used to support that expansion programme and to support it in line with the expectations that we all have for the sector. The voluntary sector has a role to play in the early years provision. What provision is the Government making to ensure that it gets the funding that it needs? Some of that will come from the interventions that the Government makes or the way in which local authorities design the delivery of the commitment in their localities. Obviously, there is going to be quite a mixed economy of how that provision is designed involving the use of external organisations and the use of in-house capacity in individual local authorities. The mechanisms that we will put in place will be around a model that is essentially of the funding following the child. That will enable us to have sufficient flexibility to make sure that voluntary sector organisations are able to be supported to develop that provision. I have a further question on the colleges and the training around people. I know that you are having on-going discussions with colleges about the right type of training. There is an enormous resource already out there, people who are coming back into the workforce. Maybe I have to have a period of maternity leave or bringing up their children. That could be a massive resource to fill the gaps that we have for childcare provision. Has it been looked at the circumstances around that demographic to get them back into training? Obviously, there is quite a lot of complex needs around the flexibility that could be required there. We have run a very active national communications campaign to encourage individuals to see the opportunities. We estimate that we will need something of the order of about 11,000 new employees to take part in the delivery of that commitment. There is a huge employment opportunity over the course of the next three years for individuals. We have run a very active media campaign to encourage individuals to see this as an opportunity. That has obviously had particular elements of it where it has been targeted disproportionately towards men who are disproportionately poorly represented in the early years workforce. It is not exclusively towards men, but it is an element within that to encourage the take-up of those opportunities. Obviously, that is part of an on-going effort that we take forward with our local authority partners to make sure that we have an adequate supply of individuals who are able to make their contribution. There is a need to look at the types of courses that are available and when they take place to allow people who might have family commitments in order to access them. That is an absolutely fair comment that Gillian Martin raises, and that is reflected in the discussions that we have with individual colleges. Continuing on the theme of early learning and childcare, I want to pick up on something that you said about the funding that follows the child. One of the issues with the first roll-out of 600 hours is access to it. If funding is truly following the child, what is your understanding of how places will be accessed and allocated? The first point that I would make is that, in relation to the roll-out of 600 hours, the data last week demonstrated virtually universal provision of access to early years education for three and four-year-olds. 99 per cent was the number, so that says to me that individuals are securing the necessary access to the early learning and childcare provision that we have made. Obviously, as we move to 1140 hours, there is the opportunity to deploy some more of the flexibility that would assist individual families, and that is very much the approach that has been taken. All of the material that we have published as a Government around this has been designed to respect that need for flexibility within the provision. We have talked about the opportunity for blended models to be put in place, and that will very much be designed at local level. We are giving the policy encouragement to those models and, obviously, we are in regular dialogue with local authorities about how they design the particular approaches that they will take forward. I will pick up on that. The partnership price that is generally being offered to private nurseries sits somewhere between £3.45 and the absolute top end £4 an hour. Obviously, with the expectation and the commitment by private nurseries to pay the living wage and the on-cost of delivering against the health and safety requirements that are there now, that sum is not going to meet all of their client-based moving over to 1143 hours. What reassurance or information can you give at this stage around how private nurseries, in particular, as part of a blended model, will be able to sustain their finances going forward if everybody is taking up free childcare? Are you expecting there to be top-up fees against private nurseries? I have had a couple of people contacting me and suggesting that they have been told within their contracts that, if they want to have a partnership arrangement, they will not be allowed to request top-ups. On the question of the availability of funding, our funding is predicated on enabling local authorities to agree rates with funded providers in the private and third sectors that enable them to pay the living wage to early learning and childcare workers. That is an assumption that is taken in the approach. Obviously, we will be working to ensure that that is reflected in what is available to providers at a later stage, so I hope that that provides some of the reassurance that is required in this respect. I think that, in relation to the question of top-up fees, I am not sure that I understand the issue in that I could not see any logical argument for saying that, if provision was to be available from 9 to 3, there should not be an opportunity for a parent to top up to make it available from 8 to 6. It is the early top-up, so if the fees for the nursery are £5 an hour and the partnership payment is only £3.45, the nursery is actually building the parent for the differential. I would need to have a look at some of the detail around that, but certainly the funding that we intend to provide should enable the payment of the living wage, which I recognise to be a material issue in relation to the rates that are commonly agreed, but in the local authorities and private providers. The final one builds on that. Obviously, we are waiting for the outcome of the quality review group in terms of the direction of travel aware, the balance will be in terms of educational and childcare in those provisions and in those contracts. Can I just ask what is your assumption around the budgets and particularly around your own assumptions of expectation of what that balance will be? Obviously, if it runs down an educational requirement, i teachers in place within early learning, the cost differential again will be significant as against pure childcare approach? Those questions are still very much for active discussion with local authorities as we design the model that takes forward, but there will have to be a blend on those questions and that will obviously have an effect on the overall cost of the provision, but those issues are very material to the design of the model that we take forward. The budget assumption that is in place, the money that you have allocated at the moment, is that predicated on teachers being involved in those early years or childcare? It is predicated on a proportion of teachers that are involved in the system at this stage. I do not have the proportion to hand in front of me, but I am happy to furnish the committee with that. Was your point of clarification? Yes, it is just a point of clarification, cabinet secretary, in relation to last week's budget and the Barclay review changes. Could you explain what advice the Scottish Government has taken regarding the anomaly that will occur when a private profit making nursery will be eligible for a tax break, but those nurseries that belong to an independent school, which obviously charities in which they are assisting the Government and local authorities with provision for three and four-year-olds, will not have that tax break? Is that not a nominee? There will be, clearly, the Government has responded to the Barclay review on the issues that have been raised. A number of different decisions have been taken about the nature of provision, whether nurseries should be able to secure relief from rates, which is a question distinctive in that area of policy. Decisions have been taken in relation to the relief for private schools, so the Government will have considered all those different issues and come to the conclusions that it has come to. I will ask a couple of brief questions on the educational reforms in relation to the budget. There is £4 million in the budget for educational reforms, but no detail below that. Will you help the committee with what that is going to be spent on? There will be the resources that will be spent to advance the core propositions of the educational reforms principally around collaboration amongst local authorities and the profession, and to ensure that the objectives of the education reforms are achieved as a consequence. There is, of course, a broader educational reform spend that is contained within pupil equity funding and the Scottish attainment challenge. Does that mean that regional improvement collaboratives will get our central budget? I will be considering and discussing with regional collaboratives what justification there is for that, so I will be involved in that discussion. That is fair enough. On education, the core budget has been reduced, although in every year, for many years, there has been a fair whack of additional finance through the course of a year, but you plan to give it additional responsibilities. Do you want to just explain how it can do more with less? Education Scotland is going to be changing its focus as an organisation, and it will be increasingly more active on the ground and involved in the education system. Along with the requirements that I have put on public bodies to operate efficiently, their budget has been set to reflect both of those priorities. Okay, so you are open to further devolution of education. That sounds like devolution of education of Scotland to regional collaboratives. That is an essential part of regional collaboratives, is that education Scotland will be much more visibly active in those areas and much more active in providing support out and about than being fundamentally a headquartered organisation. Thank you. I would like to ask some questions about the school estate. In the budget this year, it rather abruptly put it that the schools for the future programme was coming to an end, but there was not really any mention about what would replace it. Given the nature of the school estate, I was just wondering if the cabinet secretary could provide some insight as to what will replace that programme. I think that it's important that we recognise the distance that's been travelled in this respect. We find ourselves today with 86 per cent of schools being reported in good or satisfactory condition, which is an increase from 61 per cent in 2007 when the Government came to office. So there's been significant progress made in the school's estate, and there's obviously still a further three years in the programme, the existing school for the future programme, to take its course. I expect to make some further announcements in the early part of 2018 on the successor to the schools for the future programme, and obviously I'll advise Parliament of those details in due course. Of course, the flip side to the statistics that you were just quoting is that 14 per cent of schools are still in poor or bad condition. When you look at the pupil numbers and suitability of schools, that puts it at 16 per cent. So there's quite a significant future requirement. Indeed, the report that I raised in Parliament last week suggested that there's a need for an additional 500 classrooms across secondary school estate. I was just wondering if the cabinet secretary recognised that figure or had a comparable figure and whether or not future announcements would be reflecting and addressing that point. As a matter of fact, the proportion of pupils who are in a poor or bad condition school, described school, is 13 per cent of pupils, which is a reduction from 37 per cent when the Government came to office. So again, significant progress has been made there. We need to look carefully at the formulation of the school estate in the years to come. I delivered a speech at the education buildings conference a few weeks ago where I encouraged interested parties, local authorities, private sector, colleges and universities to consider the needs of our future school estate and to move much more to what I would describe as campus models, where we have a greater degree of integrated provision. So if we take, for example, a Garnock academy, which I think is just outside of McGuire's constituency, a Garnock academy is a 2 to 18 campus, and it essentially blinds together early learning and childcare, primary education, secondary education and increasingly college provision within it, so it extends beyond 18. I think that we have to have a fairly open discussion about what the contents of that plan will be and that will obviously have an effect on some of the questions about school capacity that Mr Johnson raises, and we have to look very carefully at how we blend together the estate to meet pupil needs in the course of the period that lies ahead. I mean, just given the figures in the budget this year, essentially because of the School of the Future programme coming to an end, that means that essentially we were going from a budget line that was 23 million last year to zero, and if you look at the capital provisions in local government capital, once you take out childcare provision, the capital budget, according to Fraser founder, is down by 63 million. So that obviously means that we're left with a gap, at the very least for this year. Given that our successor programme hasn't yet been announced, I mean, how quickly will the cabinet secretary be seeking to bring a successor programme online and how long will that gap between programmes likely to be? I said that I'd be bringing forward a programme in 2018, so I'll be setting out further details to Parliament in due course. Mr Johnson misses my point about what I've said in relation to the investment that's required and the thinking that has to go into the development of our school, or what I would call our education estate, as opposed to just our school estate, because the investment that's been made in early learning and childcare has a part to play in how we ensure our estate meets all of the requirements that we place upon it. So we will bring forward in 2018 that programme, but we should also recognise the colossal achievement that's been made in getting to the position where 86 per cent of schools are in good or satisfactory condition, which is a significant transformation of the school estate, given what the Government inherited in 2007. Thank you very much. Richard, a brief question just in relation to the school estate. Many rural local authorities clearly have to maintain a lot of rural schools, and quite rightly the Scottish Government put in place some hurdles that have to be overcome before a rural school is closed. Nevertheless, that does leave a financial burden on many rural local authorities. I wonder if the cabinet secretary felt because of the hurdles put in place by the Government, whether there's enough account taken of the additional cost of maintaining rural schools in terms of the budget? As Mr Lochhead will know, the distribution formula for local government takes into account issues of rurality, the particular and distinctive provision that has to be put in place to service those communities, and those factors are reflected in the local government settlement. Just one question, cabinet secretary, on the university sector. Peter Scott sent some very interesting things in his widening access report, one of which was that when it comes to widening access, he was anxious that the financing of that didn't squeeze out other students who obviously had the ability to get to university as well. Do you believe that, should there be savings made as a result of Brexit in the sector? Do you believe that that money should be channelled back into the sector to make those provisions available? The concept of savings from Brexit? I can think of a lovely saving that I'd like to have from Brexit, and that's to be saved from Brexit, which would be nice. He's making a very serious point here. Yes, I know, and please forgive me. Flippin says that he's got the better of me on this rare occasion. There is a serious point here, and it's something that I need to give consideration to in due course. We don't actually know what all the arrangements will be for a transitional period and for an aftermath period, if I can call it that. I'm very alert to the issue, but I can't at this stage give a definitive position on what future funding arrangements will be like, but I'm very happy to be considering it with the sector. I've got a couple of questions around higher and further education first and then someone's skills. If I deal with the higher and further education first, how has the independent review of student support the recommendations that have been addressed by the budget, particularly—I'm particularly interested in the recommendations around mental health support for students? Obviously, we've put in place what I consider to be very strong settlements for both the higher and further education communities as a consequence of the budget. I'm very pleased with the resources that we've been able to invest in both the higher and further education sectors, with real terms increases for both the higher and further education sectors. In relation to the questions around mental health, I think that they are very important questions. They are at the core of the wellbeing of students and the sustainability of education for many students because of the significance of the issues that are involved. The strength of the settlement is, in my view, an important investment in the sector that I would like to see reflected by the sector. Our guidance to the sector will reflect those points that are raised by the independent review in relation to mental health. In relation to the recommendations of the independent review, we have put in place an initial investment to begin to address some of those questions, but there is a complicated interaction of issues that we need to look at, particularly in relation to the beneficiary system that we have to consider as part of understanding the implementation of the independent review. We will need some time to come to conclusions on those points. On student debt, the budget has taken into account repayment of student loans. How is that going to impact on graduates? Obviously, we have given a commitment to raise the threshold for repayment to £22,000. We are actively taking forward steps to make that possible and practical, and that will provide some assistance to graduates at that stage. I am moving on to skills and training. I have noticed in the budget that we have the modern apprenticeships that are going to be increasing. One of the things that I have discovered in some of the work that I have done in the economy committee, we have been doing some focus groups, is that quite a lot of older people do not really appreciate that modern apprenticeships are not just for young people. There is an opportunity there to provide people with a second chance at another career, and I do not think that that message is getting out there to people already in the workforce. What is the Government doing to address that? There is a general issue here, which is about the reskilling of our population to create the working population that we will require in the years to come. I heard a chilling statistic the other week there, that there are 280,000 working people in the highlands and islands, and given the normal expectations of demography, we will have to find 80,000 new employees to replace those who will believe in the labour market through retirement, etc. That is a colossal undertaking, which is part of why I am so concerned about the implications of Brexit and whatever happens on free movement of individuals, because that has actually helped us significantly in the past few years. The point that Gillian McArthur makes is a good one, and the important one is that we have to make sure that there is a wider understanding of the opportunities that exist for individuals to reskill and retrain, and we need to pursue that. The £10 million that has been given to the Flexible Workforce Development Fund, is that part and parcel of what I have just been talking about? Is that going to be used to get people moving into different areas of work that maybe there is more of a future for? The Flexible Workforce Fund is essentially targeted at people who are in work trying to redevelop and redeploy their skills, so there is opportunity in that respect. That takes us to the end of this session. I thank you very much for your attendance and take this opportunity to thank the cabinet secretary, his officials and all those who have appeared before the committee this year for their time and evidence. We wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. That brings us to the end of the public part of the meeting. I will now suspend and wait for the gallery to clear.