 Fynyddu a chyfniddo i'r ddechrau cael digwydd yn y Cymru a'rír cynllun i Gwyl Fwllffordau a gyda i ni i紅eddiad o'r modd mewn bydau oherwydd ni'n gwirio i'r teimlo iddyntau neu oedd y blynynno ymlaen o fanolodau oherwydd ni wedi gwirio i'r bodlonogau oherwydd ni wedi gwirio i dirigol i gyrs. Dwi'n fyddwch i chi'n mynd ymlaen o pobl nesall a ni i gyrsio i chi'n mynd i chi i chi'n mynd o rightsiеч yma. Mae'r drosbwyllt ar hyn amser Fy nid o bwysig i gael IATOMS 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 i gael Fy, pwysig i ddim yn unrhyw gwrs o ddraff yn gwylfaenedd ysgolwngur IATOMS neu ddraffigaethur, a'r trafffyn hwn yn gyfer charlywonol eich sydd ymgyrchu ymgyrchol yng Nghymru yn ymgyrch. Udyllwch i ddefnyddio iddyn nhw i gael i Gweithgellol y Serf啲ol erioedd ddechrau o gyflau sydd yn cyddiadau i Gwylfaenedd chi i unrhyw gwrs ac mwy yn cyffredigener i iddynt ni, i gael i. Thank you and good morning, convener and committee. Thank you for inviting me here today to give evidence on the early years change fund, which, as you know, is a partnership fund between the Scottish Government, local government and the national health service. Community planning partnerships submit annual returns to the Scottish Government on their change fund activity. When Eileen Campbell addressed the committee in January 2014, we only had information from CPPs about the first year of the change fund activity in 2012-13. We now have the second year of returns available to us for the 2013-14 activity. I should at this point apologise for the delay in making this information available, but we only received the last CPP return on the 19th of May this year. The returners give us an indication of how CPPs are progressing in their journey to deliver transformational change in early-year services, and the part that the change fund has made in that journey. I have been heartened by the picture from the latest returns, because we can see progress being made in terms of giving the early years the priority it deserves and real tangible examples of how CPPs are doing this in their everyday work. This is the very nature of what a change fund is about, delivering a different way of doing things. For example, in Western Bartonshire, they have attached a speech and language link officer to each early education and childcare centre. That allows them to address waiting times and to ensure that the right referrals are made to speech and language services. This is also the first year that we have been able to capture some sense of the actual spend of the CPPs. Our calculations indicate that just over £100 million across Scotland has been invested in early years activity through the change fund. This is above the minimum commitment from all the partners to spend £89 million in year 2. However, we must recognise the challenge associated with gathering information and spend in relation to the change fund activity. In doing so, we have had to make a number of judgment calls on what to include as part of providing an estimated level of spend. For example, one CPP provided figures on its total integrated children's services budget, which we have not included in our total, as our judgment is that not all that money relates to the change fund. The conclusion that we can therefore draw are only as good as the information that we are able to gather. Nevertheless, despite those challenges, we can see real progress this year. All 32 CPPs provided examples of prevention, and in year 2 we have received examples of disinvestment for the very first time. For example, in Dundee, they are responding to feedback from the community on the type of services the community needs by moving away from standalone social work family centres to reinvesting in locally-based teams to deliver a family-orientated approach to services. The early years collaborative, our national quality improvement programme that enables local practitioners to test and develop evidence-based early years services at the local level, was given as an example of how change was being delivered in every single return. As Sir Harry Burns said when attending the committee alongside Aileen Campbell in January last year, and I quote from him, I would not be the least bit surprised if 20 years from now, because of the change fund, we shut a prison, because of the preventative work that we are doing now in the early years. In conclusion, I have been very heartened by the progress that I have read about, and I will shortly be requesting the year 3 returns from CPPs, which I am sure will provide yet more examples of how we are giving the early years the priority the evidence tells us that it deserves. Thank you very much for that very helpful introductory statement. Turning to the 2013-14 returns, you said that the last semester was on the 19th of May. When is it likely to be published on the website? The actual returns are now on the website. Is there going to be a full report published on that? Are we going to do that this year, or are we going to wait till next year? We will do a summary similar to the one that we have not completed yet, so over the summer. That is fine, so we should be ready there too. Just to go into the meeting of it a wee bit. In March, the committee took evidence from the Auditor General for Scotland and the Chair of the Accounts Commission on Audit Scotland's report on community planning and turning ambition into action. In that evidence, the Auditor General highlighted that, and I quote, despite the focus on this issue and the effort that has been put into prevention, with policy shifts and the introduction of the change funds and money that we are shifting is very small and at the margins. In that regard, he is looking at the £2.7 billion invested in earlier services, and relative to that, it is still fairly small. What is your comment on that? I would say that this is a large amount of money that we are working in partnership over a three-year period. It is money that is being invested, and with the returns especially this year, as I said in my introduction remarks, we are beginning to see change happening and we are beginning to see some disinvestment. I think that 10 out of the 32 returns showed examples of disinvestment because of the change fund investment. Yes, you will know that one of the committee's concerns has been the lack of disinvestment in order to invest in other areas where returns are much more significant. For example, there are still some concerns that I have. If you look at what the Inverclyde Alliance said, I quote, disinvestment will happen much further in the future once early intervention and prevention approaches take effect. That can be generational, 20 to 30 years. I take it the Scottish Government of looking for much more rapid progress across the board. I appreciate what you have said about a prison that we will not have to have in 20 or 30 years, but you are really looking for much more significant changes in a much shorter term period. I think that the change fund is there over a three-year period to almost like a seed fund with the local authorities and the community planning partnerships. The evidence to move towards preventative spend is the right evidence and it does work. As you said, I quote Harry Burns again, we are seeing changes already, but the real change is a journey. The three years will allow us to find the evidence to roll out, but it is generational. This is about working on the early years to ensure that people in their later years get the benefits of a good start. If you look at what Scotland said in evidence to the committee, it said that smoking bills are an obvious example. There can be opportunities where prevention can have more immediate effects. One of the concerns that the committee has had is that the finance committee and its predecessors have been talking about prevention and disinvestment for years and we are only now having to be touching on the margins. Is there any sense of frustration to the Scottish Government that prevention is not taking place much quicker and that results are not clearer and more obvious? No, I would not say frustration, because I think that what we are seeing is the journey that we are on. There is one wonderful example that I was reading about, which is child smile, which is the money that we have invested in teeth brushing in nursery schools. I will send them to you, but the figures on that of how much—I think that it is a £1.8 million investment in getting every child at a nursery school to do their teeth brushing every day. We are seeing already the numbers of children having to go for, for example, fillings having gone down. The estimate is that that has saved £5 million in dental treatment for a £1.8 million investment. That has only been over a few years, but we are beginning to see that. There is another lovely example. You are talking about smoking cessation in my constituency in East Dunbartonshire, where, with the early years change fund, where they have intervened with pregnant mums to get them to stop smoking and their rate of smoking in pregnancy has gone down, I think. I would have to check the figures again from something like 37 per cent to 20 per cent. Again, we are seeing some very early good returns. One of the things that the committee has also considered is that there have been a number of projects that have been funded by early years change fund moneys, but it is not clear, certainly from the returns that have come in before, how many of those were already being funded before the early change fund moneys came in. There is concern that a lot of good projects would have happened in any case, so there is not really an additionality factor with some of those. What has the Scottish Government done to look at that and find out what difference has been made in terms of new projects, rather than just funding being put into existing projects? That is one of the things that goes back to the heart of how do you collect those figures and then how do you analyse them? There is a certain amount of judgment that has to be made when the figures come in from the CPP about whether it is a move in funding, whether it is early years change fund, so that is not always an easy judgment to make. The analysis that we have been doing is tended to be quite conservative, so we do believe that we are seeing a real use of the early years change fund, real benefit from it, but we are also seeing the use of existing money. That is what this is all about, getting it all together. The projects that you mentioned have been successful over the three years of the fund. What is happening to those projects? Has there been any analysis as to whether they are continuing to be funded from mainstream resources or how many have been stopped, etc? What is happening with those projects? Clearly, what you want is good projects to continue. Over a number of years, you do not just want them to end because of the fund's end. Do you know that the partnership money ends this year, but the Scottish Government has decided to put in £8.5 million for the next financial year? That is really about making sure that the projects have sustainability in them so that those that are good continue on. I went through one of the monitoring forms, and it is quite interesting that at 4.2 we are asking how will you measure the impact of the activity that you have been funding, and we are beginning to get that back. Again, it is back to the analysis that involves some judgment calls. On that, you talked about, for example, early on about the difference in money that has been accounted for in terms of some of those projects. I looked at, for example, the spend by local authority, and Outer Hebrides is putting down £11.8 million, yet Glasgow is only putting down £4.4 million. There are clearly big differences in the reporting here. I understand, for example, that some local authorities assume that Outer Hebrides being one of them, although I do not know why it is called Outer Hebrides and not Western Isles or Aileen Sharp. It looks as if they include core funding such as nursery provision in terms of their reporting. Is there anything that the Scottish Government is doing to look at that in greater depth to see where we are with those funds? Again, it is back to the monitoring form that has changed between year 1 and year 2. In the year 2 monitoring form, for example, at 4.4, it says, can you provide specific examples of preventative spend? In my opening remarks, I was talking about the fact that one of the CPPs sent in their global sum that they had spent on the integrated children's services budget. There was a change in the monitoring form from year 1 to year 2. Year 2 was asking much more specific. Are we considering asking even more specific in year 3? Yes, and questions that relate to the three-year total, as well as the individual. I think that it is about learning the way that we are asking the questions, as we have gone along, having learned in year 1 that it is very complicated, not just for us to read what we are being told but also for the CPPs to work out on which budget they can clearly show that the spend is coming from. So, year 1 to year 2, we change the monitoring form, and we will do it again for this year. It is not clear why the report of spend over and above the early years change fund was requested by the early years task force. What was the thinking behind that? The early years task force is very much about tests of change, and not just standalone tests of change, but tests of change within the system that we are already working in. For them, it is important to ask that question to see if the test of change would have happened without the early years change fund money in the first place. Okay, thank you for that. I am going to open out the session now to colleagues around the table. The first person to ask questions will be John to be followed by Mark. Thanks, convener. The convener has touched on a wide range of issues that I am also interested in, so probably it is going to develop some of those questions. The whole question of preventive spend—this is not just for children, it is for across-the-board—is really possible to pin down that x-pound, this pound is a preventive pound. It seems to me that very often there are two ways of looking at things. If somebody is in hospital, it is a reaction to something that has happened maybe beforehand, so it is not preventive, but on the other hand it is preventive because it is stopping something worse happening to them. Do you think that it is possible to define all of this? Can I go back to the child smile example? First, I think that it is a very difficult concept to follow the pound and work out what the pound gave you in terms of prevention and early spend. Is there anything that we can look at and get concrete examples? The child smile one is a very concrete example where you can show that it was £1.8 million spent in nursery schools on toothbrushes, toothpaste and all those sorts of things, getting them to do that, and then see that the prevention is less children having to get fillings. Is that because they brushed their teeth at nursery school, that they had less fillings, or is it because we were doing healthy eating with them and they were eating less sweets, so they had less fillings? Can you clearly see that? I think that that is what I am trying to say. That is a fair example. That is clearer than some examples, because clearly the money that was put into the schools and the toothbrushing is absolutely by my understanding preventive. I am interested in the £5 million saving. Can you tell us anything about that? Does that mean that there is one or two dentists who lost their jobs, or is it just like a saving in equipment so that they do not have to buy so many fillings? Has the work been done in that £5 million? My understanding is that the £5 million is what it would have cost to have given all those fillings that we no longer gave. Of course, that is the thing about preventative spend. You are saying that there were less fillings, therefore there were less dentists, but we have now got—what is the figure for children registered with a dentist? It is in 93 per cent or something. That is part of that as well. Although there are less fillings, there are more kids understanding or more parents understanding that take them for the check-up every year. I think that that is a perfectly fair answer. It does, though, I suppose, confirm my concern that when we say that there is a saving, sometimes it is not like a real saving that we have suddenly got £5 million at the end of the year in our pocket. We can do something else with it, but immediately it gets filled up by more people registering at the dentist or the dentist is able to do some other work or that kind of thing. I suppose that that is more a question that I will need to ask John Swinney at some point rather than yourself. How do we pin that down? Some of those savings can easily get spent again without us doing very much. Some of the examples that have been given to the convener made the point that sometimes the savings are really going to be quite a long way down the line, but I accept that your dental one is quite a quick one. Do you think that there is sometimes the case where we need to cut some spending now in order to put more money into preventive? It seems to me that we are only putting a little in, and yet to close a prison or close a hospital would be a very major thing to do, but it would free up resources for intervention. Isn't that the essence of what we are going through with preventive and early intervention? Is that you are investing now for a longer-term outcome? It is a generational thing, and we have to accept that and work on that. That is where it becomes very difficult. You were saying that show the saving isn't the word that is used to continue the disinvestment. I just wish that we could think of a better description for that. If you invest in prevention and early intervention, ultimately, you will not need to invest in chronic long-term care. I suppose that my question is really how quickly you try to do that, and do you really cut into some of the current services in order to free resources? I think that there was a case in the States where they were thinking about building a prison, and there was a need for that prison, but they decided not to do it and to put the money into early intervention, stopping young people being a part of the system. In the long term, that might have been successful, but it did mean that there was not a prison there that was actually probably needed. That is the more dramatic hurting, cuts or disinvestment that I wonder if we need to be doing more of. I cannot think of a big dramatic one like that in my portfolio, but prisons bring to mind the fact that we have made the decision not to build the women's prison that we have ever climbed. That is a long-term change in the way that we invest. Of course, that will impact in my portfolio because less women in prison means less children separated from their mothers. That is helpful. Thanks just before I let Mark in. Those projects that are being looked at and analysed, etc, etc, the ones that are successful, is the Scottish Government making any effort to see them being rolled out across Scotland if a project is working very successfully, what are you doing to ensure that they are picked up by other community partnerships? That is one of the joys that I discovered when I came into this job, was the early years collaborative, which is the way that when folk are working on something and find that it works, they come together and share that. It is not so much about the Government rolling it out as about all the people on the front line sharing their experiences and taking it home and going, that worked there, let's us do it here. I went to one of the learning sessions of the early years collaborative with 700 front-line professionals, and it is a great experience to be part of where professionals feel empowered to one come up with a project, give it a try and then share it, but also being empowered to share when it did not work, because if we are investing in early intervention and find that something does not work, then that is a lesson to share with everybody rather than have somebody else do the same thing. I think that we are all quite familiar with early years collaborative, but are there any examples of a project that started off? For example, Lenny Slodyn has now been implemented in Highlands or Ayrshire or whatever it happens to be. I can't think of one of the two from my head. Well, a lot of the stuff that we are doing on play, for example, which comes from the play strategy, but we have also got things now, such as the playrangers toolkit. A couple of local areas have said, let's do more stuff outside. When they are talking about outdoor early education, they are talking about risk benefit analysis. That is not the right term, but it is something like that where you have to encourage the children to take a risk, because by taking a risk you learn and therefore there is lots of evidence about how it helps you in all sorts of ways. A couple of projects were doing that. It worked, so I launched the playrangers toolkit, which had that all there, so that anybody, any local authority MD that wants to take children outside to play has now got a toolkit where they can counter the sort of elf and safety culture that we live in, which says that they have to wrap a kid up in cotton wool, and they have now got a toolkit to use all around the country that says, this is how you assess a risk and decide if it's worth moving on. That's the last point, and I will let colleagues pack in. I apologise to my colleagues here. Is there any direction of this? You are talking about these folk getting together and talking about what works and what doesn't work, but is there anything to say, look, this is something that we think you should do? Is there any sense of direction being done? Is there any, as the Scottish Government is saying, this is something that we think you should do? As opposed to just letting them do it organically? What I will do is, at the end of every learning session at the early years collaborative, there are decisions made about what we're going to work on, what we're going to look at in the future, what areas we're going to work on, and I can send all that to you, especially from the last one. It's things about what key changes we need to work on, and that's what we would like the collaborative to go out and test for us over the next period. In terms of buying into the change that the Scottish Government wants to see, one thing that I remember when I was vice convener of housing at Aberdeen City Council was trying to convince other departments of the council that the concept of regeneration didn't just relate to building more houses. There was a wider issue that other departments had a buy-in, too. In terms of early years change fund, obviously there are a range of services out there that could be making changes to the way that they deliver services in order to facilitate some of the early intervention that the Scottish Government wants to see. I guess the question would be, while you're here sat in front of us as the Minister for Children and Young People, what level of buy-in do you have from other Government departments, ministers and also at a local level beyond simply local authorities being seen as the drivers of this? What further buy-in is there beyond that? I can speak as the minister and say that there is buy-in across the Government, across different portfolios. If you take again the decision not to build the Inverclyde women's prison, that's very much a justice issue, but it's not. It's also seen clearly as that that will have an effect on young people and bonding. It's also an effect on women's employment. There is that clear joined up. Of course, as of Monday, that becomes much more something that is going to happen, not just in Government but across all agencies, because as of Monday, part 1 of the Children and Young People's Act says that ministers have to give cognisance to the rights of young people. We're talking very much about interventions in the early years and about funding for interventions in the early years, but the bottom of all that is about a child's right to get access to services that are best for them, so that's clearly embedded. It was interesting. One of the returns that I printed out and read through in great detail was North Lanarkshire, and it's interesting to see North Lanarkshire talking about their partner organisations in doing this. They're talking about across the council, across the health board, Police Scotland, the voluntary sector but also parents and children. I think that from year 1 to year 2 we're seeing in the returns that this is becoming embedded in culture across different organisations. You mentioned that from 10 local authority returns you'd seen evidence of disinvestment taking place. The optimist says that's great to see. The pessimist says, well, what's happening in the other 22 local authorities and why are they not taking those approaches? What works the Scottish Government doing to interrogate further with those 22 local authorities? If we can look at the older people's change fund as an example, one of the concerns that I've had at a local level with the older people's change fund was that it was used for three years and then the projects that were funded were packed up once the funding stopped. There wasn't really a concerted effort to mainstream some of those and perhaps look at how the funding was being spent in other areas and maybe have that disinvestment and put it into some of those projects. It was a short termism when what we want to encourage is more long term thinking. What works being done with those other 22 to say, look, you need to start showing some evidence that this funding isn't just there as a kind of stop gap for you? I referred earlier to the fact that we're now in year 3 of the three-year funding but the Scottish Government has committed £8.5 million for a fourth year. We're not looking to our partners, that's just our funding and that is very much about how, at the end of the three years, can we ensure sustainability? Just to go a little bit further on that, sustainability is fine in terms of where local authorities are showing a willingness and a move towards mainstreaming and perhaps changing ways of working. With the other 22, where there hasn't been that evidence of disinvestment, is it a concern that they're not maybe to making those changes or is it just perhaps that they haven't presented the evidence to the Scottish Government as yet, but they may well be doing that work behind the scenes? My suspicion is that it is the latter, but if I can let... Yes, I think that the interpretation of what disinvestment means has been applied differently. It's good to see 10 examples of it, but I don't think that that is an indication that none of the others are doing that. There is some work going on with the early years collaborative around support for CPP areas to help to identify tests of change and things that work and to work through some of that as well, through the work of the early years collaborative. Obviously, you've mentioned child smile and that's a very welcome initiative. There are some quick wins that you can identify off the back of some of the investment. Some of the investment is going to be a much longer term thing before you could really see a benefit talking maybe one, two decades before you would see a real shift. Do you think that there is the mindset out there that says, we're in this for the long haul with some of these projects and some of this investment? The nature of the political world in which we live is that we look for results that we can present at five, four or five-year intervals to say, look, we've made some progress here. Do you think that there is that collective buy-in to say, look, we're in this for the long haul? We know that it will be maybe 10 years before this pound or this million pounds shows absolutely positive outcomes, but we're in it for the long haul on that and everybody's on the same track. I think that we are, and I think that the political cycle aside, although it's not the political cycle, a lot of these things in four and five years are beginning to get evidence of change, getting evidence of benefit for the child, but also getting evidence of change in the funding. Within the political cycle, you probably can go out and trumpet a success, but the biggest thing is that it's a generational change. As you are building up, if it has to be in four and five-year increments, if you're building that up, then within five cycles you've just changed a generation. I was going to ask about the earlier collaborative, but the convener obviously started off on that, but this is obviously very important to this agenda. I noticed from the Edinburgh report that it said during 2013-14 that there were 20 active early years collaborative projects in Edinburgh, so I suppose you've said something about the collaborative, but I'm interested in just hearing a bit more. Do you think that that's quite typical of local authorities across Scotland when it talks about 20 active projects, but I suppose—well, there are several questions about the collaborative, but I suppose another one would be to what extent—I mean, it's a methodology, an improvement methodology, but I suppose the key thing is to find the right activities that are actually going to deliver the results that we want in terms of preventative spend. So who decides what the key actions are that are going to be tested, as it were, and so on? If my memory serves me right, there's about 500 across the country. That sounds like a huge number, doesn't it, 500, but there are small tests of change. Because of that, it's really about the local, the locality, saying, here's a change that we think could work here. It's very much devolved to the folk on the ground saying, I think, if I tried this, it would make a difference, and that is the beauty of this, and that's why there's so many of them, but it's also the beauty of it is that you can, in a short period of time, test a change, see if it works, if it works, continue it, if it doesn't think again. That sounds very decentralised, but is there not the big national gatherings? Are there not some kind of objectives that are kind of accepted? Everyone's going to try this and see what I mean? No, no, not everyone's going to try this, but they set out, what did they call them again? Key changes. Key changes that we want to explore in the next period, but those key changes are very much arrived at by the collaborative. When I was at the last one, I went to the session on play, and the discussion was about whether that should become a key change, and it was really interesting to sit there and listen to the discussion, and in the end they decided that it would be a key change. So we'll now see a lot more work happening on play as part of the early intervention agenda, because the collaborative decided that that was a key change. I noticed that Dumfries and Galloway returned and said that, initially, it was assumed that spreading the improvement methodology would lead to changes in services that would impact positive employment. That approach has previously worked well on the NHS patient safety programme. However, we have learned that, in a multi-agency context, it is necessary to provide more structure to the proposed changes. Has there been much discussion of how easy local authorities have found to adopt this methodology, which started very much in health, but it seems to be quite different for the early years? I do not quite know what the background to that quote is from Dumfries and Galloway. I will get Amanda to come in on that. I think that the early years task force, which I have attended once—I am sure that you have been more of them than I have, Malcolm. That is the kind of thing that is at that level that that would be discussed, but I will get Amanda to come in on that. Within the work of the collaborative and the parts that our team supports, there is some work going on with improvement advisers, specifically within regions. That is quite early, and we are at the process of testing to see what works, so what things are actually possible to scale up in local authority areas. The idea will be that that spreads and we provide that support to local authority areas to identify both the key changes that, nationally, we have identified are the big things that will make the biggest difference, but also locally that that is applied in a way that is appropriate because different things work better in different places. We are on that journey, and we should be making a lot of progress over the next year on that. Okay, well thanks and perhaps I should go to one of the collaborators. I have been to a health one, but I have not been to the earliest collaborative, but it is obviously very important and it is one of those things that I think it would be good if MSPs knew more about it because, obviously, people are putting a lot of faith on it. I highly recommend the visit. So that is that one. Well, I think that this investment has been well dealt with in a way, but I was looking at something that your minister, your predecessor minister said about the committee about it not considering this investment alone to be a key indicator for prevention, and yet, obviously, the change fund returns us for specific examples of this investment to be provided. I do not know if there is some tension between those two statements or not really. I mean, how would you see in that sense if it is not an indicator, but you still want to see some indication that is taking place? Yes, you are right. On the monitoring form, 4.4 is, can you provide specific examples of preventative spend, 4.5 specific examples of disinvestment? That comes back to what is the change fund for. It is about trying to move the way that we fund services to early intervention rather than just always thinking about how we react to a crisis. So, yes, I do not think that there is an inherent tension there. No, there probably is not. There might appear to be one. Perhaps there is not one. And finally, savings. John Mason dealt with savings, but I suppose the question on that is, to what extent are we thinking of savings as financial savings, or to what extent do we have a broader view of savings in the sense of that it will save lots of undesirable things happening to people in the future, or is it a bit of both? When it comes to the money, I do not think that we should talk about saving, we should talk about reinvestment in early... I would like a better word than disinvestment. In financial terms, it is about moving money to the right place to deliver the long-term outcome. In terms of the actual outcome for young people, that is a saving, because it is saving them from their mother smoking in pregnancy and all that follows for the child in the rest of their lives. It is a saving in terms of, or it is an investment in their early years to ensure better later years, would that be a... Toothbrushing and nursery, you could argue that it would still be prevented of spending, even if it did not save a penny, although you are arguing that it does save a penny, but you could argue that it would still be prevented of spending either way. Well, it is two things, is not it? The toothbrushing saves children from tooth decay, so there is a saving, but it also moves money from fillings to better support for oral health. What happens to the early years change fund now? You mentioned the £8.5 million from the Scottish Government, presumably for 2015-16. Is that effectively the end of the early years change fund as we know it? Yes. It was the original agreement. It was only set out to be the partnership for three years, then the Government decided to put the extra in for the fourth year to get sustainability, but can a change fund last forever? It has to be for a period to try and effect the change. The Government's intention is that that is the end of the change fund as such, apart from the enactment. In terms of judging the success of the change fund over the three-year period, what mechanisms are in place and how will you judge the overall? Clearly, there are some individual successful projects that you have identified, which I concur with the committee member's remarks on them, but the fund as a whole will have to be judged. A £274 million over three years, what did we actually get for it? How will that be judged? Can you just explain the mechanism of how the Government will report back on that? We are just thinking about what you do at the end of the project. It is about looking at committing to an analysis of all the returns that we have had and an analysis of the changes that we have seen. I would like to say to the committee that that is something that we would like to commit ourselves to, to analyse with the partners, because that is not just about Government money, it is about local authority money and NHS money. How, at the end of the three years, can we analyse what happened over those three years and then learn the lessons? You obviously do not have all of the 14 or maybe any of the 14, 15 returns in yet, but you have got the first two years worth. You have not done the full external analysis as such, but you must have a feel as a minister who has read, presumably, all of those returns. How successful has the change fund been as a whole over the first two years, so which you have data? Bearing in mind, I accept that some of the benefits will be longer term, so you cannot capture all of those, but you must have a feel overall of how successful it has been over the first two years. Is it fair to talk about having a feel rather than looking at what evidence we have got and how we can analyse it? My feeling is that this is moving in the right direction. My feeling is that, especially the small tests of change by front-line practitioners, is a very successful way to effect change. Those are my feelings. At the end of it, the analysis will show if my gut feeling is right, but I think that we have got enough just from year 1 to year 2 to see that the returns are giving more data more examples of change. You give some specific examples of investments that were successful. Not every project will be successful, but there will be a degree of failure. You said that people were publicly happy to stand up at the early years collaborative in state, so what are the kind of projects that have not worked and that should not be continued? Being an optimist, I have only written down the ones that worked. Can I come back to you on that? Sure, of course. I just think that it is important that, if we are going to learn lessons, we have to be. One of the committee's frustrations is that we hear lots of good stuff, but nobody is prepared, and it is certainly my experience, to say that those things have not worked and that we need to stop doing them if we are going to prioritise. I just think that, until we actually start doing that, it is more difficult to make progress. I cannot think of the time ahead, but we do have a couple of video clips of people who have talked about things that have not worked and are things that have been shared. We can send the committee those examples and pull out any others that we have. Now, a number of people have asked you about disinvestment, and I accept that you do not like the word and you want a new word, but sticking with that word for now until we come up with a better one, you did mention one project in your opening remarks about where there had been disinvestment. I think that it was done D, if I wrote it down correctly. Can you just explain a more deal to what actually happened there? I did not quite follow it. I guess that I am trying to see what savings have resulted from that disinvestment. What fundamental change was made? Are you able to just expand on that? Can I write to you with the actual—what I have got is a couple of lines on it, but it is one of the questions that I have asked on a few of the examples that I was given. Now, there was one really good example—Clack Manager. Again, I cannot give you figures, but I asked what they would be and that is the difficulty in that. Clack Manager put in a mental health worker to actually work with parents in the services that the parents were at rather than the parents having to go to mental health services to get support. What Clack Manager was able to tell us was that, because of that, some parents had come off of benefits because they were able to go back to work, some parents had returned to work, some parents had gone to college, some children had been able to be removed from the child protection register, all because of the way that they were putting the mental health worker in where they were putting them in and how the parents could access it, but when I said, well, can you tell me how many come off of benefits, how many children they said you cannot be as specific as that? Is it working? Can we put a penny and a pound on it, or is it going in the right direction? In the long term, we will be able to see that, in Clack Manager, you would be able to see the number of children on the child protection register had dropped over a certain period of time, but it is back to was it because of the way that they got access to a mental health worker or was it something else? I accept that causation is never absolutely and straightforward, although you can quite often make links. I suppose that the key for me with disinvestment is this, when you have explained something in Clack Manager where mental health workers were made available to families more readily. Without looking at the detail, I can see why that would help, but that is not the disinvestment. The disinvestment is what did they stop funding or what did they stop doing in order to free up the money to do something that sounds quite—and that is where, certainly from my point of view, there are just no details over several years. For me, on the Clack Manager, what jumped out at me was that they said that there was less social work input in those families, less that some children had been removed from the child protection register. The disinvestment is that less of those children will end up as looked after children. Therefore, we do not have to spend the money that it costs to support a child out with its own home. However, how do you actually put the pounds and pennies on that? I accept that you said that you have only got minor details just now, but I think that anything that you can share with us, particularly if you are getting follow-ups out personally, I would say that it would be hugely helpful. We have agreed with the task force to delve into the disinvestment examples. We have got in more detail and we are working with them, so we will make that available to the committee. I want to go back. Minister, you mentioned outdoor education in one of your examples. That was, in answer to the question about rolling things out nationwide. You also mentioned, I think, the phrase, that we produced a toolkit of some sort. What is that? Is the fund then held centrally and different local authorities are applying for different ideas? Or when it comes to the toolkit, how does that fit into the fund? Does everybody buy into that? Or is it imposed, if you know what I mean? It is being sold to everybody. Here is a really good thing that does work. Is there some kind of central fund, or is that through another different fund? The playranger toolkit was through a different fund. Is it the inspiring Scotland fund? I cannot remember, but I will check and come back to you with what actual fund. I was using that as the example of small change, small attempts at change, do outdoor education and then what comes back is that we need the manual, the handbook, whatever we call it, a toolkit because it should not be, you have to do it this way. You can find a different central pot of money to say that is something that is proving good, so if we use this other pot of money to produce the toolkit, then everybody has got it. That would be the same for the toothbrushes and the toothpaste. The child smile one is done through the NHS funding, so that is clearly a central fund. I will go back to Gyrffic. Has that spawned a lot of the ideas of collaborative working? Is Gyrffic now rolled out across all of Scotland? The principles of Gyrffic getting it right for every child have been used for about 10 years now across different local authorities. The reason why we put it in the Children and Young People's Act last year was because we wanted it to be that it was not your, you know, everybody took this on and it had a statutory footing, so Gyrffic will actually come in in terms of the legislation in August next year as a legislative programme. I suppose just looking forward, the prediction is that children living in poverty in Scotland is on the rise, whether we blame the austerity agenda or whatever, it will have some effect, but an increase of three or four per cent on already what is approaching a quarter of a million children in Scotland is going to bring a lot of pressure too for priorities and so on. Realistically, the predicted cuts for local authorities are fairly severe. How can you feel confident that some of those changes and disinvestments are reasonable and practical and possible? It's going a bit beyond the early years change fund, but there is a ministerial working group on child poverty, which I am on with the minister for welfare and also the cabinet secretary for social justice. It's out with what we're talking about today, but the lessons that we have learned from any of the early year change fund projects can be fed into that and hopefully become part of our way of trying to tackle child poverty. The preventative spend is, I think, a sound philosophy or a good basis for any budget. People understand that it's hard sometimes to articulate exactly in every service what that looks like. That is why we have had the change fund for three years. It is about that. As ready's gut feeling is that if you spend on prevention it's better than letting the accident happen, so that we've had three years in order to be able to test those changes and then, as I've said, we can do the analysis with our partners at the end of the three years and get things embedded. Finally, you mentioned Dr Harry Burns and his enthusiasm. Has he been actively involved in some of the reports or the evidence or so on? He was when he was the chief medical officer. He was intrinsic to this. Of course, he's no longer the chief medical officer, but he knows that he was appointed to the Economic Advisers Council, so I think that that sends out a very positive message, and it will keep his enthusiasm being part of the work that we're doing. That appears to have concluded the questions from the committee. Is there any other point that you'd like to make? No, but to say that I will follow up with the things that I said I would say. Thank you very much for answering our questions. We agreed earlier on that the following items would be in private, so that ends the public session, so I'd like to call a recess to 11 o'clock to allow the public, the minister and the fish report to leave.