です. Good morning and welcome to the 10th meeting of the Education, Children and Young People committee, 2021. The first item on our agenda today is a decision on taking business in private. Can I ask whether members are content to take agenda item 4 in private? Are we all agreed? We are all agreed. Thank you. Moving on to our main item of business this week, the committee will take evidence ond sefydlu North Korea Nartol o'. O hyfforddiad o'r ffordd o'i unrhyw o'r llwydd yn gyflym am rwyfodol mewn hyfforddiad iawn o'r ferfawr, ond gallwch yn eich cynnig Questochiol o'r amreithiau iawn i gyffredinol i gael cyflog. Yn eu parfod dda, dim ond yn iawn i gael y ffordd, o'i gael y yr hanfrwyd, yn tyddu'i hyfforddiad iawn i gael'u aruno ar gyfer o'r ffordd o'i ein digudhau, a dwi'n John and Colin are present with us physically in the committee room. It's nice to see you here as well. Thank you all for your time today. We will immediately get our questioning under way. We hope to have you for at least an hour and a half or so, maybe a bit longer. We'll see how it goes. I'm going to turn first to my colleague Stephanie, who is going to lead the questioning. Thank you. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. Thanks for coming along today. First of all, whether you believe that aim to close the poverty-related attainment gap is an achievable goal or should we really be talking about narrowing the attainment gap? Probably if I ask that to John. I think we need to make it an achievable goal. Obviously progress towards that needs to be about narrowing that gap. But I think when we set targets and we say that it's not right for children to attainment and achievement at school to be undermined by their home circumstances by poverty, we need to put everything in place to achieve that target. So I wouldn't want to do anything under mine or to suggest that that's not achievable. It is achievable. What it will take is action on two fronts, on the one hand action to tackle the underlying drivers of poverty, to make sure that all our families actually have adequate incomes to give their children a decent start in life and enable their children to participate fully at school and in every other aspect of life, and that means the kind of action that we're seeing beginning to take place, investing in the Scottish child payment, removing barriers to work for parents, increasing levels of funded childcare, all the things that we know are needed to tackle and meet the child poverty targets but at the same time we need to see action within the education system to remove the barriers that exist for those children from families with lower incomes. I don't know if anybody wants to add anything to that. Michael, you wanted to come in on that. Yesterday we had some pretty significant announcements regarding changes to the Scottish Tainment Challenge, which was one of the key mechanisms that the Government is seeking to use to address poverty related to the Tainment gap. Those shifts, and I think that you may have followed them, I suppose, did you? The Parliament didn't perhaps receive as much detail as some of us might have wished in terms of the direct funding allocation issues, but what's clear is that the money that's been attributed to nine local authorities, the most deprived communities in Scotland, has now been spread more widely across all local authorities. John, if I can ask this question to you, I know that you know the city of Dundee well. You've given evidence to the Dundee Poverty Commission. That's resulting in a significant cut to the amount of resource. Do you have any initial thoughts in terms of what the impact of that might be in terms of our ability to deal with that poverty related Tainment gap? The first thing to say is that it's right that we ensure that funding reaches all parts of Scotland, because we know that children live in poverty in every part of Scotland and that most children living in poverty don't live in the most deprived areas. It's absolutely right to find ways of ensuring that resources meet need and are allocated in a way that ensures that wherever you're growing up in Scotland, if you're growing up in a long-income family, your local school, your local authority has the resources to ensure that there are no barriers, there's no charges, there's nothing that will stop your full participation at school. At the same time, we would certainly be concerned if any area was to invest less or to have less resources to tackle that gap. I urge local authorities and Government to work together to ensure that that's not the case. We don't want to see any area reducing the amount of resource, the amount of focus that's going into tackling that Tainment gap. Dundee has more than 100 members of staff who are tied to funding through the Scottish Tainment challenge at the moment, which is going to be reduced by up to 80 per cent in terms of that money. I think that your fears around that might well be realised. Any comments on those areas and the changes from Colin or Satwatt? Not for me. I don't know the detail, and I'm sure that the local authorities will be working out their responses to that. Satwatt? No? Okay. I am sorry, I was just waiting to be unmuted. Apologies for that. I think that I would just reinforce what John has said. Obviously, we want to ensure that there's funding available across the country to support those who are impacted by the poverty-related attainment gap. The bigger issue is to ensure that, where there is funding required, what we have is adequate and where we need additional funding. It is that collaboration to work together to look to see what the resources are available and how we can utilise what is available to ensure that those who are at the greatest risk of poor outcomes due to poverty are enabled to achieve on a par with their peers. I urge joint working and collaboration to look to see how we can make the most of what resources are available across all sectors, including some of the valuable work done by the third sector, to be able to support families. As John was saying, with the underlying causes and structural inequalities that cause low income at a family level, what additional measures can be put in place to support young people in schools and around schools and learning? I think that the point is made in terms of making sure that everybody who is in poverty across Scotland can access support is absolutely right and correct and have no problem with that at all. In fact, it's an imperative that we have to rise to. I wonder if you could comment on the particular character of poverty in the most deprived areas where young people won't have access to the same kinds of opportunities and facilities. For instance, the character that is taken to Glasgow whereas such a concentration of the most impoverished young people in Scotland are in the Glasgow city area. The fact that there are fewer resources and opportunities around that, what is the character of that kind of poverty that creates particular barriers to learning? As I said, we need to look at things both at a place-based and individual. It is right to ensure that children, living and families, growing up in poverty wherever they are, are supported and the systems are in place and the funding is in place. There are additional barriers where there are particular concentrations of disadvantage. In terms of what we have picked up, transport barriers, children will not be able to access the kind of school opportunities or even the school opportunities because of transport barriers, less access to childcare for parents and the quality of that childcare, not necessarily at the same level as it is in better-off areas. There are additional barriers that exist at a place level, and those need to be tackled as well. I suppose that that is where we would see the importance of linking up education policy and education funding with wider action to tackle poverty and disadvantage in the different ways in which it plays out for different groups in Scotland. It is about both. That is really so. Colin, what are your comments on the specific areas of high multiple deprivation in those particular, some of the most urban areas? For me, it might be a bit of a rewind. It is families that need support, it is families that need income, it is families that need to be able to manage their lives, raise their children and provide the things that children need. That is a priority. The education system itself will not sort some of the fundamental experiences or consequences of poverty. It is families that need an effective income and support in communities that need decent resources and provision locally for them. However, in terms of what the system can do, it might just need to be a bit smarter about where those interventions need to be. For example, we know that an investment in speech and language therapy in the early years reap great benefits for children who are living in families where they are maybe not immersed in reading and literacy and the kind of verbal communication and support for those kinds of things. I just feel that these conversations can be so general that we do not actually look at what is impactful either in terms of people's lives and that is about dignity and control of their own lives and their own income. It is also about targeting the interventions that we know, particularly in the early years and in primary school, that have an impact. We only need to look at our prison population to understand the impact of not doing anything around emotional wellbeing and what child should leave school functionally illiterate in a modern society. That should not be happening, but if you look at our prison population, we can see the consequences of that. I do not know about a scattergun response, but it seems to me that the impact of poverty can only be tackled if we look at what those lived experiences are and target resources are at them. I did not make myself clear earlier on what I was going to invite any other panel members to make a comment there. Everyone has touched on the broader societal measures that are impacting education around poverty in the early years. Are there any other particular local or national policies that you see dovetailing to support causing the attainment gap? I am quite happy for anyone to answer that, John. I suppose that I would come back. That is fundamentally about tackling poverty, and poverty is about families not having enough money to give their children a decent start in life and giving their children the same opportunities as they are better off peers. We need to see national policies that tackle, at root cause, child poverty and ensure that families have enough money. There are policies that dovetail with that. I mentioned earlier that the new Scottish child payment, making use of Scotland's social security powers to invest directly in low-income families, is a policy that dovetails with that. It is a policy as yet that needs to be built on. There is no credible route that we can see or the independent analysis can see that would allow us to meet our child poverty targets. At the same time, we close the attainment gap, which requires tackling poverty at root cause without, at the very least, doubling the Scottish child payment in the coming year, with further action around that to ensure that targets are met. That is one policy lever. That is probably the most immediate thing that this Parliament and this Government can do to make progress on child poverty, which integrates with the education closing attainment gap agenda. The wider ones are building on the commitments around investing in funded childcare, removing barriers to employment for parents and women, looking at the rewards for work in our labour market. We need to see fundamental changes to ensure that women, particularly parents and mums, have opportunities to progress in the labour market and have the childcare available to enable them to increase their hours and improve their earnings and have the progression opportunities that allow them to do that. Those are the policies that will help to end child poverty, and by ending that child poverty, we can go a long way to plugging the attainment gaps that exist within our education system. Thank you, John. I do not know if any of the other panel members want to come in, and then I have just got a very short question for John directly. Can I come in? Is that okay? Yes, of course. I am going to talk about a single parent. One of the priority groups within the child poverty act is that there is much greater risk of families being in poverty to begin with. What we saw during the pandemic was an intensification of the conditions that created poverty for many of those families. John is right to say that we need to begin to look at other policies such as childcare, such as how we can create a childcare offer from the family basis, which supports that really important early learning experience for children in high-quality settings and enables parents to look at how they can enter into training and progress in employment. One of the big issues that we see with single parents is that, while they may enter work, they tend to stay in their entry-level jobs, part-time hours and very few opportunities to look to see how they can progress. In terms of the other policy agendas, we need to look at fair work and see what can be done around the fair work. In the short term, for the parents, in the longer term, we create those high-quality opportunities for training, particularly for young people living in low-income families. We need to look at how we can dovetail more closely with further and higher education, particularly further education, if that is an option that young people want to take. One of the things that we found had a particular impact on families during this period over and above the financial stresses that increased was the digital divide. We need to look to see how anything that is being done to connect across Scotland recognises the need for connectivity, devices and support for families to be able to access the things that we can. One of the things that we heard over and over again from families was the stresses of trying to manage during the pandemic with homeschooling, possibly with having to work from home for some of the families, having more than one child across different age groups within school and trying to manage all that on one small device. We need to look at some of those measures that can level up for families to make sure that the playing field is more equal where we have any further restrictions but also more generally enable to be able to access some of the learning opportunities that are available for young people. I would definitely say something about childcare. We need to look at fair work, employability, employment support and then the digital divide as well. The one other area that I think is really important to think about again, just based on what families have spoken to us about, is how we can ensure adequate and targeted mental health and wellbeing support for the children and young people but also for the parents. What we heard was the generalised anxiety that many of us felt around the pandemic and how that was impacting on families and their capacity to engage in other things when they became available and the particular stresses of being the sole carer at home during lockdown and trying to manage things, the impact that that had on the parents and consequently on their children as well. We definitely need to look at how some of those additional services and supports can be built around what we have in place for children's learning to make sure that they can make the most of those opportunities. That is great. Thanks very much. I am touching a lot of really important points there and I think that some of those will be picked up later in the committee by my colleagues there too. It is good to know that the Scottish Government's focus on wellbeing going forward as well, childcare etc. We are on the right track with that there. A very direct question for you there, John. I know that Covid has been a bit of a leveler in some ways as well. There are families who would never have expected to be in poverty who suddenly tragedy has struck and the rug has been ripped from under their feet there. There is that feeling generally that people appreciate the fact that it could happen to any of us at any time. I am a councillor at South Lancer Council as well. Part of our parent councils are doing the child poverty action group poverty proof in schools and it seems to make quite an impact locally. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the outcomes that you have had from that, how effective it was. This is the cost of school day project that CPAG runs and worked, started off in Glasgow intensively supporting the local authority in schools in Glasgow to support children, young people and parents and school communities teachers to identify what are the cost barriers, the resource barriers that are preventing children from fully participating at school, gone on to develop at working Dundee, working in schools in Murray now and taking that work to develop online resources, tool kits, providing support and training to school leaders, to train e-teachers, to raise awareness of the impact that poverty has and to identify the practical things that can happen at a school community level involving, as I say, young people, teachers, parents at every level. We know from direct feedback ourselves that that has an impact but we also know from evaluation commissioned by Public Health Scotland that it has an impact and that when barriers are removed, schools report and evidence increase levels of participation, increase levels of engagement at school, so those things do make a difference. I think that what the pandemic did was throw into sharp relief many of things that we had been identifying and parents and young people had been identifying as barriers such as not having digital devices, not having connectivity at home. Those were preventing children from doing homework, from being able to fully engage with their school work pre-pandemic. Sometimes they were sort of seen as a bit of a luxury but these things weren't really what children and young people didn't actually need their own device, which actually now has become absolutely clear, clearly that you do need. Access to digital connectivity to devices to be able to do your work is critical. In that sense, if there is a silver lining, that has become absolutely clear. There is a greater awareness of the extent to which lack of resources at home can prevent full participation at school. Another thing that came out through the work that is maybe worth flagging was how important communication between school and parents and carers and homework and with pupils themselves. We did two surveys of children and young people and parents during the two periods of lockdown during the pandemic. What came back from parents and young people was where schools communicated and asked questions such as, do you have the resources that you need? How are you getting on? How appreciated that was. However, it was inconsistent. In other areas, parents were telling us that nobody had ever asked if they had the device, the technology or the support to be able to continue to engage at school. The importance of communications and how that communication is done, given confidence to schools, staff, school communities and parents and parent councils to talk about issues of money, costs and resources in a way that is not stigmatising, that is not singling out individual families in the school but that is taking this as a standard part of the school day, that is a recognition that families are under pressure, they do not all have the resources that were assumed that they did have and that they were able to talk to parents. We have produced, again, a toolkit on talking about costs and money at school to support. I suppose that we have just spread the good practice that exists in so many schools and so many individual classrooms but make sure that that is promoted and spread across Scotland. Thanks, John. It is really important that all parents understand the impact of poverty and take that into account as well when making decisions. I have seen this work with children directly. It is not just with adults and professionals. When we see children using those tools and talking about poverty, what it does is it destigmatises that experience and frames it as a matter of social justice and rights so that children—collectively children—understand what that means for everybody, but it also means that if you are a child who is having those experiences, you are no longer left feeling that it is your responsibility, that your family are failing you, that you should be embarrassed by that but it creates a space for conversation. I think that it is really powerful work and it moves that idea of charity to one of dignity and rights. I think that it is the important work that we really admire. Thank you, Stephanie. John, can I ask you a question, listening to what you are talking about in terms of all those different dimensions that have surfaced during the pandemic? Has anything about the nature of child poverty fundamentally changed because of the pandemic? Are we measuring child poverty in the right ways? I do not think that the level of poverty that existed pre-pandemic has thrown them into sharp relief and exacerbated and, in many cases, deepened the poverty that families are faced. On top of that, all the other pressures that families generally have faced during the pandemic, which are particularly acute if you do not have enough money. The way in which we measure poverty, primarily, is about lack of income, but we have a range of measures here in Scotland and a range of measures in which we measure progress against, around income, around material deprivation and the persistence of that poverty. Those are still the right measures for measuring progress. It is fundamentally about families not having the money and then the choices and the limitations that that creates. Again, I suppose that one of the positive that has emerged from the pandemic or some of the learning that has happened during the pandemic has been that recognition that the best way to support families on low incomes is to ensure that they have more money. When we saw, for example, the response to the replacement of free school meals during lockdown, there were a range of responses, such as vouchers, food and kind parcels, as well as cash responses. What was very clear from the feedback from the surveys that we did and, more generally, was that what worked was cash. That is what gave parents the dignity to be able to make the choices and the food choices that they knew that they and the family needed gave them that dignity. There may have been good intentions behind some of the other approaches, but for families and for parents it is recognising that we are talking about one in four children living in poverty in Scotland. What they need is additional money, not charity handouts, and they need to be absolute backup to that. For the vast majority of low-income families, they need opportunities to improve their earnings and work, and they need a decent social security safety net that provides support when they are having to juggle caring responsibilities when they face disability health or crises such as the pandemic. Describing is the root causes of poverty. Something to that. What we also know from last year from the work that children's Parliament did was that one in four children, roughly in terms of two measures, one in four children told us from our large-scale surveys that their families were struggling financially. Can you imagine your eight, your ten, your eleven years old and you know that? Similarly to another statement about worries, one in four children told us that they were worried about their family's income and what they had, and that increased through the pandemic. We know from good data that one in four children are living in poverty, but we also know from our work that one in four children know that they are living in poverty and that they worry about it. They take that into their learning and into their other social experiences. That, for me, is incredibly worrying. I will go back a little bit to the attainment challenge, because it addresses a wider question and direction of travel from the Government. We all know that poverty impacts on education and the poverty-related attainment gap is quite wide. The issue is who should lead on tackling poverty. The indication yesterday was that the education system would have a bigger role. It already has a role in trying to address the relationship between poverty and education, but the direction of travel was that the education system would have more of a role in that. I do not have a fixed position on that. I am just interested in the direction of travel as to whether it is right that the education system that has already got many challenges should have additional responsibilities on the issues of poverty. I am just interested in whether there should be a greater focus for the education system on education rather than on the wider issues, or whether it should be expanding its role to cover the poverty issues. For me, the question is a problem. If you are suggesting that there is something very pure about what education does, that it is not impacted by the social circumstances that children live in, that it does not have to consider what children bring into the classroom, if the suggestion is that education has some kind of very narrow understanding of what learning and teaching is, that is a problem for me. This Parliament, every single person here, has voted to incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. That is all our responsibilities now. We are all duty bearers. Your duty bearers, whatever emerges from various educational reform work, the new systems, the new structures that are set up, are public authorities that are duty bearers. We have a duty to all children and young people to live a life with dignity. Poverty is the greatest infringement of human rights, and we see that reflected in attainment in certain communities or for children from certain backgrounds. However, we need to not consider that we are asking education to do. We are not layering something else on top. It is not another initiative. If you start with the human dignity of the individual infringed by poverty, that becomes as much my responsibility as a primary 6 teacher as it does yours as an MSP. We cannot separate those things. What would you want teachers, schools and the education system to do? What extra thing could it do and what extra responsibility could it take on to try to assist with the things that you have talked about? What I am saying is that it is not extra. First of all, you enter into that educational experience with rights-based relationships so that children know that they are loved, cared for and that you have an understanding for them. That is the starting point as an educator. Then, as an educator, you need to be able to address the needs of the children as learners. I have already mentioned things such as speech and language therapy. We sometimes forget the first thousand days of a child's life because we think of an education system as being 3 to 18 as if nothing happens before a third birthday. When we know that during pregnancy and in those first hundreds of days, outcomes can feel as though they are already fixed and that is based in poverty usually. I am saying that if we understand, if we start with the child and their carers, their parents, we understand their needs and we address those needs. That can be income, it can be support. We have not even mentioned disability. If we are really going to try and tackle some of the fundamental core issues alongside poverty, we need to look at disability because people living with disabilities and children with disabilities are disproportionately more likely to be living in poverty. It is almost impossible to pull those things apart that what we need to do as an educator, as I was at one point, my interest was in the whole child and it was an interest in their family and in their community. I could not pull those things apart nor would I want to. I might be wanting to improve certain skills in terms of literacy, that would have been my specialism, but what I am saying is that that had to be located in this broader understanding of their lives. As an educator, my job would have been to fight poverty. Is that basic for me yet? I do not have any disagreement from me on that. The direction of travel indicated yesterday that the education should have a greater responsibility. I am just intrigued as to what that should be that is not being covered by other parts of the public service. John, do you want to come in? I declare a lot of what Colin has said about the role of education. It is about what can within the education system, what needs to be done to ensure that every child has access to the opportunities and all that Scotland's education system has to offer. There is a real job to be done there and it is already happening in lots of schools. It is integral to the work of schools anyway, understanding your school community, understanding the young people in your classroom, understanding the barriers and challenges that they face, identifying where cost issues are preventing them from participation, whether that is school trips, costs of dress down days, school events that make them feel uncomfortable because there is money involved. That is just about good practice and developing an understanding of your teachers. That, to me, is the role of education. There are ways in which we can add to that, and all that has already been added to that, in terms of a key place where families and children engage with public services, so a key place where that additional support can be provided, for example in Edinburgh and Glasgow and elsewhere, of financial inclusion being built into schools so that there is access to advice and information on the financial supports that are available to families, engaging with parents about wider issues around employment and employability. There are opportunities to build those things in and around schools, working with other bits of public services and the third sector to do that. None of that takes away from the fundamental importance of policies to address child poverty and improve family incomes through investment and social security, through improving rewards from work in the workplace, removing barriers to work for parents and so on. Those two things, to me, go side by side. I have not seen any kind of suggestion that, somehow, those things are less important or being offloaded on to education, so I suppose that I would be concerned if there was a sense to education. We have had periods in the past where education in itself has been seen as a solution to poverty as a way of avoiding the reality of what is driving the levels of child poverty. I do not see that in Scotland. I think that we have a real consensus in this Parliament. Everybody, all the parties supported the child poverty act, supported the terms of that act, the measures that are in place to tackle child poverty, supported the requirement on government to produce a child poverty delivery plan that focuses on the drivers of child poverty, which are lack of income, him from work, social security and the high costs that families face. I do not see anything that is diverting away from that, but I think that there is a role for education in all that as well. I just want to try to move on to the issue of looking back to the pandemic. There was some evidence provided, including some case studies, about families that find it difficult to get child care even though their employers were required to go back to work. Was that the responsibility of the employers, or was it lack of synchronicity with the easing of the lockdown? The Government was given an indication that companies could take their workers back, while child care was not up to full speed yet, or was it bad practice by employers? I do not know if you want to answer my first question as well as addressing that one too. Yes, sure thing. I will try to address both. If I can just start with the first one, then I will come on to the child care one if that is okay. There is a quote in our evidence, which I think is really critical to the whole question about should there be a lead or how does the responsibility for tackling child poverty lie? Children do not just walk in, they bring their families and their lives with them. That is critical when we are looking at addressing child poverty. A child in a school does not just suddenly leave everything at the school gates, it is all there. As both the previous speakers have said, it should be joint responsibility. That is not to say that there are not particular actions or areas where certain services would be seen to take a lead, but it has to be in collaboration and partnership with all the other services that I spoke about earlier. We need holistic family-based solutions, and I think that the most critical to that would be, as Collin said, the voices of children, young people and parents in terms of what they need and what is going to make the difference to them on the various fronts that poverty manifests in their lives and how it manifests in their lives. What we have is something that is going to work for the family, and I think that that is critical in all this. The avenues to enter into that support is really about thinking about where those families and those children and the young people are going to feel comfortable being able to express what is happening, being able to look at what they need and using that as the starting point. All our statutory services and additional services are critical to us being able to end child poverty and end the poverty-related attainment gap. It is about the coming together and the collaboration that is going to make a difference. As Collin said, the role of education is not just about what happens in those structured lessons, etc. It is the broader stuff that goes around that, because, like I said, children bring their lives with them when they come into school. On the issue of childcare and childcare availability, I do think that, in some cases, some employers were putting unreasonable pressures on parents to be able to come back to the pre-pandemic ways of working. That was something that we heard from the single parents that we work with, but it was happening almost in parallel and at a different pace to the way services quite rightly were being a bit more cautious about how they opened up and how we could keep everyone safe in schools, in nurseries and so on, at a time when things were changing so quickly. I think that there was a bit of responsibility there. I also think that there is some learning that we can take from this, should we ever find ourselves in this position again, in terms of how we organise the support and how we differentiate the support, recognising the different needs of different types of families. We found that, with single-parent families, there were some at the start of the pandemic and the first hard lockdown that we had. There were key workers who were trying to get access to key worker childcare, for example, or for their children to be able to go to some of the hubs that were available. However, because we were doing everything so quickly, there were not the usual levels of consideration and consultation that service providers might have engaged in to ensure that they were being inclusive and getting it right. We had forms coming out for key workers to be able to request childcare, which asked if you were a key worker and this parent said that you ticked yes. It then asked if your partner was a key worker. It did not give you the option to be able to say that you were a single parent. The only way that you could move on and submit the form was to tick either yes or no. She ticked no, which made her ineligible, therefore, for the support for her children in the first instance. That was then pointed out to the authority where that happened, and they quickly addressed it. We were all doing this more quickly and, in a way, we had never worked before. I think that it is really important for us dorms to take stock now, as we are doing here, to look at the learning from what has happened and to see what that means for how we develop and build our services in any way and what measures should we be looking at having in place should we find ourselves in this situation again. It goes back to fair work. It goes back to looking at more family-friendly, flexible working generally, which can then be put into place and used when we find ourselves, should we do so again, having to go into further restrictions? It is just about the digital divide. There were reports back in July last year that, even though laptops and digital devices had been purchased, they had not been distributed to pupils in need until August. What was your experience of that? Do you think that the system worked quickly enough? Have you got any evidence to add to that report? A number of children we work with, and we often work with children who are not finding school engagement or learning easy in the first place, fell off the radar that, first three or four months, they were just gone to the education system. What I also know is that many headteachers we knew, who love and care for their children, were literally scrambling about and delivering devices every day, knocking on doors, making sure that people had food, never mind digital devices. There were some amazing practises that have enriched the on-going relationships that a school has with some of those families who are struggling most. The first few months were chaotic. It is still the case that some families do not have the digital devices that they need. Once that disengagement happened for some children and families, it was very difficult to re-engage. It will have long-term consequences for some of those children in terms of attendance. The ability to work in that blended way, the way that other children have become much more used to their digital engagement with learning and are taking that home and using that to build on learning. If there is a gap in attainment, there is certainly a gap in how children are using that digital space to learn for some children that are just taking off and blossoming with it. For other children, there is a legacy of disengagement that is going to be difficult to address. I have been very much echoed that. The first thing to say is that it made a difference. The feedback from our surveys was that where those children and those families got devices, that transformed things and made a big difference in terms of their ability to engage, but it was inconsistent. I think that it was around a third of the young people that responded who were on low-income families and were saying that they still did not have access to a device, so there is clearly still a way to go. I suppose that that is why the commitment to ensure that every schoolchild has access to a digital device and connectivity to use that is so important, but we need to get to a stage where that does not rely on which organisation that you happen to be engaging with does not rely on a particular headteacher or teacher to think that they might need that. That is just an accepted part of to engage in school in Scotland. You need a device, and that is just we ensure that every child has one. A quick supplementary from all of our followed by a quick supplementary from Bob, and then we are going to come back to all of our for his new line of questioning. I am going back to Willie Rennie's first line of questioning. I listened to Jim Wallace from Aberlour on the radio the other morning, and he was saying that I do not want to misquote him, but he was saying that there should be more of a role for the third sector. I am enthusiastic to have more teachers and more support staff in schools, but I guess the question is, is money that is designed for tackling poverty really there to just bring in more teachers? With the accountability structures that are there, effectively local authorities have a quite a big say in how this money is spent, and in some cases directing headteachers, is that the right way to access the right expertise? Is there really partnership working, or could this money be distributed differently? It is a bit cumbersome to negotiate with 32 local authorities if you are a national organisation, and then sometimes to be expected to negotiate with school clusters, and then sometimes expected to negotiate with individual schools about something that you can provide is very difficult. Where there are good existing relationships, those things have grown, but it is not easy for many third sector agencies. They do not often have the capacity or the resource to do all the negotiation and tendering and all the rest of it that is hugely time consuming. That is a very broad statement. I am not saying that is true everywhere, but it is certainly difficult for third sector organisations, even the big ones, to negotiate and to access some funding streams. It is just really whether we are getting the priority right, whether a lot of the money that is going in for equity is ending up plugging staffing shortages, looking at other things that are very education focused. I recognise that there is a gap there, but it is just whether the third sector and other people have better expertise in addressing poverty and whether they are getting a full chance to use the money as best we can. The reason that there is some fluffle at the end of the table is because we have lost our colleagues who are virtual. Once you have finished the question, I am afraid that I am going to suspend the committee until we can recover the technology. I am sorry for the distraction, John. You can come back in and we will finish this exchange and then we will suspend. There is a role for third sector organisations, particularly for children and families who have not been engaged at school, who find school particularly difficult or have not been at school to find ways of working with those families and their expertise that lies in the third sector to support those families and those children. As Jim was saying on the radio the other morning, some of those children and young people found that the pressures are not going to help because they were not previously able to engage or get the most out of the school. That is about local government, third sector and schools working to identify what additional support they need to ensure that the resources are there so that wherever you go to school in Scotland, wherever your home background, you are able to access the opportunities. You have the same kinds of opportunities as children in better off areas or children on higher incomes or children and families on higher incomes in your area. That is about ensuring that the resources are adequate to deliver that, to deliver a genuinely free education system and an education system that is genuinely open and able to engage and support children from whatever background they come from. That is required. There are examples of where that already involves third sector organisations in terms of providing that kind of support, so we need to learn from that. At this point, I am going to suspend our committee proceedings until we can get a technological solution. I apologise.