 I welcome everybody to the Equal Opportunities Committee. It's the 17th meeting of 2014. Can I ask everyone to set off any electronic devices to flight mode or switch off, please? I'd like to start with introductions this morning. We are supported at the table by the clerkin and research team, official reporters and broadcasting services, and around the room by security. I'd also like to welcome the observers to the public gallery. I'm Margaret McAlloch, the committee's convener, and the members will now introduce themselves in turn, starting here in my right. I can also ask when we get to the witnesses if you could give a short introduction of who you are and where you're from as well, please. I'm Mark Obiagie. I'm the MSP for Edinburgh Central, deputy convener of the committee. Good morning, John Finnie, MSP Highlands and Islands. John Mason, MSP for Glasgow Sheddleston. Good morning, Christian Arad, MSP for North East Scotland. Alex Johnstone, member for North East Scotland. Michael Donald from Skills Development Scotland. Two distinct parts to my remit are the opportunities for all remit within Skills Development Scotland. That's the guarantee of a positive destination for 16 to 19-year-olds. The second bit is through national training programmes ahead of the partnership work that we do with stakeholders across Scotland, local authorities, third sector and other partners as well. Scott Reid from the Scottish Transitions Forum. It's supported by Arc Scotland and we are a membership organisation that represents the voices of 500 different organisations and individuals across Scotland with an interest in transitions across education, health, social care and allied health professionals. My name is Kate Hanna. I'm sector lead officer for additional support needs and special schools within HM Inspectorate Education Scotland. My role is to manage the inspection programmes for the special schools sector. That includes granted schools and secure care services and units. Good morning. My name is Claire Fraser and I'm the Equality Diversity and Inclusion Manager at West College Scotland. Good morning. My name is Jim Gray. I work for Glasgow City Council and I'm in charge of support to community planning in Glasgow. Thank you very much. Today's first agenda item is on witnesses' expenses. In keeping with usual practice, members are invited to delegate to me as convener responsibility for arranging for SPCB to pay under rule 12.4.3 any expenses of witnesses in our scrutiny of the draft budget 2015-2016. Are we all agreed? Agenda 2 is an evidence session on our scrutiny of the draft budget 2015-16. Today, we have two panels of witnesses giving evidence. Welcome to our first panel and thank you very much for introducing yourself. Can I ask when you wish to speak? During the discussion, could you indicate to tie the myself or the clerk on my left? Thanks again for your introductions. We're now going to start asking you some questions about the draft budget and we'll start with Marco, please. I think that we're all going to ask about different subsets of the issue, but I'd like to ask about young people with additional needs in particular in terms of how well are they supported at the moment in making transitions, what are the barriers and how are we trying to overcome them? Who would like to ask for a speak first? I would like us to set the scene. As you might be aware, convener and members, the additional support needs figures have doubled since 2010, so that's an increase in 50%. Additional support needs figures for pupils within schools now represent one-fifth of the pupil population. Additional support needs figures haven't increased because there are more people with additional support needs than we had. It's just that we're better at identifying them. From my experience in the Scottish Transitions Forum, if you look at the report that was given to Parliament last year, there is a range of young people not being fully supported into what is called positive destinations by that employment, education and training. If you look at the figures, you're looking at those without additional support needs, having an 8 per cent failure to achieve a positive destination. Across the range of additional support needs, if you look across the figures, those at the top of the failure rate within failure to achieve positive destinations are looked after children, those who have had interrupted learning, those with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, and those with learning disabilities, which is almost four times the amount for those who don't have additional support needs. If you look at the figures, it's roughly 40 per cent against those without additional support needs, which is 8 per cent. It's our suggestion from the Scottish Transitions Forum that if you focus purely on an educational pre-to-post-16 destination in terms of positive destination figures, that will not meet the needs of those with additional support needs in terms of health transitions that occur at the same time and social care transitions that occur at the same time and education transitions that occur at the same time. For those people with more complex needs, there needs to be a joint approach through all those different kind of universal services if you like to make sure that we're ensuring to get transitions right. So looking at the figures, you can see it's a very mixed picture and I would invite comment from the other witnesses. Dr Hanno. Yes, can I just ask you to repeat the question, please? It was quite well covered there in terms of what are the obstacles for transition transitions in whichever field you might want to name for young people with additional support needs. How can we overcome them? For this year's ministerial report to Parliament 2014, Education Scotland identified several key indicators that make a positive transition more likely for young people. For example, where we have a whole school or service approach to transitions all stages, where policy and practice are coherent in schools and in services, where there are positive relationships with parents and carers and parents and carers are involved at an early stage, where there's effective partnership working and where the quality of communication is well established, clear and transparent and that families are aware of the communication systems and they know what the transition process will entail and also effective planning and organisation. We're really talking about rigorous and systematic planning and organisation at an early stage. Those are just some of the areas that we've highlighted, which are prerequisites to successful transitions for young people with additional support needs in schools. Can I then ask, and I'd be open to any of the panel answering this, what should we be looking for from central government in the central government budget as signs of action being taken on this support for this particular area of work? In answering that question, it's a successful project that we've had, it's a third sector support. I can talk to you about ground level. Students who are in transition and they're moving on, they can be a wee bit anxious about their travel plans, about managing their emotions in a different environment, about even finding the right classroom and it's about having the additional support there to assist them. We can do it while they're learning but actually getting them there in the first place, we've worked with a project called Moving on Transition Service. They offer the softer support that students need and I find that very successful partnership. How is that funded? That's funded through. Is there any of people that's a lotto and it's share Scotland and Cornerstone? Can I ask when you're talking about transition for maybe young people into from primary school to secondary school? Even I saw a documentary about young people with Aspergers and that's a difficult period for them to move from primary school where the routine is very regular and they know what's happening. When they then go to secondary school, they're moving from class to class and they get real upset from them. What support is there for people with that sort of background and support help needs? Dr Hannah? First of all, I would want to remind everyone that there are specific provisions within the additional support for learning act relating to transitions and authorities have a duty to plan and prepare for transitions for young people from primary to secondary stages and from secondary school to post placement. That's all considered extensively as part of the ASL legislation but to answer your question, HMI evidence from inspections in 2013 and 2014 show that enhanced transition programmes across primary and secondary schools, including for young people with autism spectrum disorders, which target vulnerable children from primary six at risk of not fulfilling their potential and at risk of disengaging from school or not making a successful transfer, are showing evidence of better outcomes for children and young people. They basically involve targeting from primary six of youngsters identified at risk as part of community planning partnerships and also planning with secondary schools, targeting those young people and their families and providing additional support such as summer programmes, frequent visits to secondary school, close monitoring of progress once they have made the transition to secondary school, nurturing approaches and transition passports, which help teachers to understand better what their needs are and provide support strategies to enable them to meet those needs. Where we find these enhanced transition programmes in place and we do have examples which we've provided in this year's report, children and their families are telling us that children make positive relationships, they feel more included, they're more likely to attend and engage in secondary school and they're more likely to make a successful transition. In relation to the budget question, we are experiencing cuts within education budgets and the key staff that work with young people with additional support for learning are classroom assistants on the whole. It's our members' worry that if the resources are reduced within the education environment that people with additional support needs will be less supported within the classroom and that is basically the classroom assistant's job to do that. In terms of budgetary considerations, we really need to look hard at the job that classroom assistants do and how well they support people with additional support needs within the classroom for fear of losing them. We will lose what's been touted in the times education supplement as a generation of children with additional support needs. I would just like to add that in. Aside from Skills Development Scotland perspective, we are anxious to ensure that young people with additional support needs are given the same type of support that they need to make successful transitions into other forms of education or work. We see that this is partnership territory, if you like, in a school where, if someone is identified with additional support needs, how we work with others who are within school settings to support those young people, and in post-school looking at a range of other partnership agreements that we have with third sector organisations, for example, we have expertise. If I could give you an illustration, recently we have done a lot of work with Enable Scotland to begin to tailor some of our products, for example the certificate of work readiness, to look at how that can be delivered with young people with learning disabilities to enable them to progress in the same way as people who would traditionally progress within that programme. Enable worked with us to—this was part of our risk assessment that we did on the certificate. Enable worked with us to ensure that the delivery and the method of delivery and the documentation and so on were written in such a way that it facilitated the engagement of people with learning disabilities. That holds good for across the range of products that we have got. We do risk assessments on them all, and it is not a risk assessment, it is not a bland thing. It sets out some actions that we require to take. That, again, looks at who we can partner with in terms of specific expertise to allow us to tailor the products for individuals. Alex Rowley I begin to look at the figures that are being put in the budget this year. I notice that there is an additional £16.6 million allocated to the training youth and women's employment portfolio. How do you see that contributing towards the achievement of your broader aims? Anybody would like to start answering that question? Starting on that, absolutely. As I understand, at Skills Development Scotland we have been allocated some of the resource. What we are keen to ensure is that, if I could use modern apprenticeships as the example, we have also been asked through the young workforce commission to look at extending the number of modern apprenticeships that we deliver across Scotland. What we are keen to do is to look at both sides—the supply and demand side—and to use this as an opportunity to look at and do some research that will begin to tell us what some of the traditional and non-traditional barriers are for young people, so that we can attract mainly young people into modern apprenticeships that might not have had the opportunity to do that, but also to look at from the demand side, from the employer side, about how we can up the ante with employers in terms of communications and knowledge and so on, and maybe try to break down some of the barriers that they perceive might exist in terms of taking on some of the young people who have got additional barriers to progress into a modern apprenticeship. We are doing that in conjunction with looking at enhanced access programmes for young people who may not have moved into modern apprenticeships traditionally. What is it that we can do by developing a defined pathway into apprenticeship opportunities? Of course, as members will be aware, there is a lot happening within the apprenticeship space in terms of not only the extension to £30,000 a year, but also in terms of the type of apprenticeship. You mentioned that women are trying to look at positive role models in terms of breaking down some of those barriers where, traditionally, women are not getting into, for example, engineering, but that is beginning to change. How do we use role models and the ambassador programme for apprenticeships to help young women in particular in school and post-school settings to think about moving into a wider range of opportunities? That is great that that money has been put in. My concern would be how will this benefit people with additional support need to be supported into the work environment? Has there been an impact assessment and how that would be dealt with within that, if I could ask that question? Is there an impact assessment in terms of how people with disabilities would access that financial money? There are projects such as Project Search. I do not know if the members are aware of this, which is a project that helps to support people with autism primarily into the workplace, which is a kind of intern project that they intern within different organisations throughout a year. The last intern placement, I believe, is guaranteed a job. People with autism have a lot of soft skills that we have mentioned that they need to learn to manage to navigate the workplace successfully. That is something that could benefit from that funding. I would just like to raise that, if you are not aware of the information around that, I can send that to you post the meeting, if that would be helpful. Do you want to ask that question again, because we will have it on record and ask the cabinet secretary that question for you? I am just wondering if there has been an impact assessment done on the money that you talked about—the £16.6 million for people with accessing it with disabilities. We will get that question asked for you. I think that it is fair to say that, in Glasgow, we have recognised that there certainly is an issue in terms of underrepresentation of certain disadvantaged groups. Certainly, although we have made significant progress in addressing youth unemployment in the city, we are conscious that there are segments of young people, youth population, young people, who are not doing as well as others. That could be for some of the reasons that have been mentioned, but also geographic spread. Certain parts of the city appear to be harder to get employment than in others. There seems to be particularly those furthest away from the city centre. Travel seems to be an issue, for example. We are looking at that in the round. In general terms, we would welcome the £16.6 million and the approach to the modern apprenticeships, but we would endorse what has been said. We think that those interventions have to be tailored. We perhaps have to become more granular in our approach. I would also say that, in endorsing some of the comments that were made earlier, without being trite about it in any way, it is important that we develop effective partnerships and joint working, a more integrated approach and improve the ability of agencies and organisations in the third sector or private sector to make referrals. We need to have a more people-centred approach, which is tailored to the needs of the individual. We hope that some of the funding can assist in progressing that. There is one particular change that has been proposed, which I welcome. That is the proposal to work with the third sector to offer supported employment opportunities to groups who face barriers to employment. The issue that we have at our college and in all colleges is finding work placements for students with additional needs. What do they do after college? There are aspects that are not just about getting a job, but life skills, independence and so on. They want to be able to contribute and they want to be involved in doing something post college, so I am interested to see that point in the budget change. You mentioned women. What we are finding is that the earlier targeting of pregnant teenagers and young parents has been very successful in keeping mothers in education and enhancing parenting skills and long-term work prospects. There is evidence that that is leading to better outcomes for children. We have one project in Glasgow, the young parent support base in Smithy Croft secondary school, which is an authority-wide initiative for keeping pregnant teenagers in education and leading to better employment prospects for them. I will add one thing and it is a point about the third sector. I endorse the support of comments that have been made about the third sector. One of the things that bedivelling the third sector is short-term funding. A lot of the services that we are talking about here are not discretionary services. I would argue that they are absolutely key to any community across Scotland. I welcome the focus that we have also got skills development in Scotland. We have been asked to lead the development of a third sector employability fund for a challenge fund for European funding. I am currently working with third sector colleagues from within the third sector to shape that fund up. The way that it shape up will certainly be strongly focused on young people who are traditionally finding it difficult to find their way into mainstream services and how we do more around integration and bespoke services for people who have additional support needs. I think that Scott pre-empted my next question, but it is, as priorities change and some budgets are allocated, greater levels of funding and other budgets are squeezed. How will the reduction in some other budgets affect your current activities in the next year? I believe that I said at the start that if we look at transitions in the round, if we look at it as a whole process that happens between not just education for some young people but education, health and social care, those budgets, as they become less, will impact on these young people more. It is the concern again that people with additional support needs will be squeezed out and not be able to reach a positive destination. In terms of budgetary constraints and changes, transitions are not just a concern of education but also a health care budget and also a social care budget. If we look at the joint public bodies act and the children and young people's act, they come with duties for such things as continuing care for looked after children. I believe that there is a limited amount of budget put forward to that already. What would you like to see addressed in an impact assessment? How does it impact not just from an education point of view but how does it impact if we look at it in the round across? If there are deficits in other budget areas being built up in other budget areas, how does that all work out across when we look at a joint service between education, employment, health care, social care and the third sector? What does that look like? John Finnie, you would like to come in? I point yourself, Scott, about what you have said in health and social care. It is at different stages across Scotland but there is the integration of health and social care. Are you seeing any early evidence of improvement about outcomes as a result of that? That is a very good question. It is quite early days and it is a very mixed picture across the whole of Scotland. I can only talk to the idea of transitions and how some of the joint workings between health and social care and the third sector have brought really good improvements in some areas but there are others where the joint public bodies act has brought with it not just administrative changes but actually work practice changes within that. For instance, Highland and the island have done something quite interesting in terms of their approach but we are yet to see how that approach might play out in terms of transitions and that budget constraints between children and young people services and adult services being controlled by local authority or health care. It is still early days so we are not sure how that would work but if we link it into the self-directed support agenda of legislation and the principles behind that, the joint public bodies act should help with that idea of personalisation of support and people's focus on outcomes and it is interesting that education in terms of transition sits alongside that at the same time and how do we then raise the question around personalising education outcomes for people or employment options under that kind of agenda. I see it all very much tying together but I would say that it is very early days to make a comment on that. Mike, can I ask you a question? You said that you would receive some additional funding for Skills Development Scotland but the actual budget shows that your budget has been cut by 1.8 per cent which equates to 0.4 million pounds. What impact is that going to have on Skills Development Scotland regarding the training side of it? Built into that, you also mentioned that there will be 30,000 new modern apprentices in the forthcoming year. Is that within the same budget as 25,000 last year or is there extra funding built into that as well? Sorry to clarify. By 2020 it will be 30,000. Currently it is 25,000 so there is a 5,000 increase over that period so it is not an additional 30,000. Obviously any budget cut makes us have to look at the service that we offer. Other public sector organisations need to continuously refine what we are doing, get smarter at how we deliver services but ensure that we protect front-line service delivery across the school community and other communities across Scotland. Any budget cut is not welcome but we know where the world will live in terms of ensuring that we are able to provide the range of services that we are asked to provide in our letter of guidance from the Scottish Government. The additional funding that I mentioned was the funding that I gathered from Scotland's young workforce, which is probably one-off funding in terms of allowing us to do some additional research and communications and so on to progress what we are doing around particularly modern apprenticeships. The other funding that I mentioned is not owned by Skills Development Scotland but European funding. We have been asked to facilitate the delivery of that with third sector organisations across Scotland. What about the terminology that is changed now, the NEET group? What is the group called now? It is not an education point or train. It is a group that is not ready to go into modern apprenticeships and needs an awful lot of help and support. What extra help and support will you be able to give them as well? There are two parts to my response. The first part is that some of the additional resources that we have been given, we will be doing a deep dive, if you like, in terms of some research within SDS and our partners to look at. It is called NEET access to modern apprenticeships. It really sits within the zone of what you are asking chair. What we want to do is to look at what are the transitions and what is the additional support that we need to put in to create a pathway for young people who might be doing things like employability, fund programmes and so on, on and into modern apprenticeships. The work that we are doing through foundation apprenticeships in schools and how we encourage young people to think about the apprenticeship offer, along with other career options that they will have moving forward. If they want to move into FE, further education and higher education, considering apprenticeships is an opportunity there as well. The second part of my response is what we have learned through opportunities for all, if you like, in terms of the work that we do with young people who are struggling to progress and who need to provide strong, effective support to those young people. Very often those young people are not looking at that point for a skills intervention. There will be other barriers that we want to overcome before they are ready to progress. Again, what we have been doing through opportunities for all is that we have forged a lot of partnerships with local authorities, again third sector and other agencies that can provide support for those young people. Skills Development Scotland, but we are also with our colleagues in local authorities, the opportunities for all co-ordinators. We have developed what we call youth employment activity plans, and what services are available locally to support young people in making a smart referral. It is a no-wrong-door approach. A young person might come through your door, but using the activity plan, you are able to identify the appropriate intervention that is required for that young person, monitor the progress that has been made and, from our perspective, when that young person will be ready for a skills intervention and ready to progress. It is a partnership activity, and it is something that is owned by all of the services in any local area. To give you a quick update on the activity plans, this year we have been migrating a lot of the information from non-traditional employability services locally. Information on services that are available for young people with additional support needs or other interventions for equal opportunity groups, if you like, to make sure that they are all seen as part of the employability landscape and that they can benefit from the wider range of offers that are available in any local community planning area. How well are the partnerships working with the local authorities and other organisations? We have 32 local employability partnerships, and they are called different things, but what they are charged with doing within the context of community planning is to address a coherent approach to employability locally. As you would expect, it is probably a mixed picture. Some areas have progressed faster or quicker than other areas, but the direction of travel across Scotland from where we have started seven or eight years ago is certainly very encouraging. That is not to say that you could not sit there and say yes, but to give instances, of course you could, but I think that there is now a better understanding and a broader understanding of the range of activities that underpin employability moving forward. From our own perspective within Skills Development Scotland, we are partners there, but there are also particular programmes that we deliver where we form subsets, if you like, of the main partnership. For example, we provide forums to give providers the opportunity to come together to look at the range of activities that have been delivered by the provider network in the local area, which can be quite wide-ranging and engage with DWP, as well as other localised services. I add to that a couple of points. In Glasgow, we, through our single outcome agreement and the priority attached to youth employment, emphasise that there is growing evidence that the problem no longer is unique to the 16 to 19-year-olds and that we are looking at the issue up until the age of 25. Therefore, we have been encouraging our partners to look again at how effectively we are working to address the needs of the older age group in that category. We have undertaken an extensive review of a mapping exercise around youth employment provision in the city. In fact, we have a major event about this this afternoon back in Glasgow. We are hoping to co-produce an action plan with our partners as a successor to the youth employment partnership in Glasgow. We are looking to re-engineer our structures and processes to adapt to the emerging trends. In Glasgow, we recognise that there is also a demand problem in that, although we have seen improvements in youth employment in the city, statistically, there are now less jobs available than before the recession for young people. It is a real challenge to address that. We are starting to look at what we can also begin to address the demand side of us. It is our concern as the members across Scotland that, as we cut resources for things such as opportunities for all and skills development in Scotland, the spectrum of eligibility criteria for services will raise its head. As you may be aware, as you cut budgets within local authorities, eligibility criteria for services becomes more and more tight for young people. It is our concern that, with the resources being less, the eligibility criteria for children who have more complex additional support needs might be pushed out of the support that they require to get into jobs. If those people are not working with them and are helping to support them into employment, who will be doing that? We are at the risk of losing them, as I said, the lost generation of additional support needs. I would like to add that. Before we move on to Christian, you have experienced working with the young people with additional support needs. What needs are done to help the young people who have those needs? Encourage employers to employ them, and what encouragement and support does employers need to make the whole thing work? That is the million-dollar question. If I could answer that, I would be a rich man. From my experience of working directly with young people with additional support needs, if you focus on what I would call a kind of hotel model of support when you provide things for young people such as housing, such as job application support, if that young person is not ready to move into that situation, that positive destination, even though on metrics it looks really positive within two months will break down because you have not actually focused on the wellbeing of that young person. That is part A of the question. Part B of the question might be that there is so much discrimination and stigma towards disability across not just Scotland but the UK that to really manage the issue of supporting people into employment effectively, that is something that probably would need to be tackled. It is a bit outwith my remit to answer how that might be, but that is what I would see the way for it. That is excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, convener. I will keep on asking the million-dollar question because it is quite important, especially for the modern apprenticeship scheme. We know the figures and we know about the very role representation from women, from ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. The million-dollar question is actually this. Where do you think the budget should concentrate on, which is a priority? We talked about trying to help companies to employ all those people, which is a priority on the soft transitional part and helping third sector. Where do you think the budget should concentrate on? Where it has not yet and where it should? One of the areas that we think that there is not enough emphasis is on in young people who are already in employment, in sustaining employment, in terms of in-work support and in-job progression, because we think that a significant number of young people are failing due to the lack of in-work support and also, at best, are getting trapped in entry-level low skills, low wage, zero hours, contracts, jobs and, in a sense, blocking the pipeline for other young people. The ones that should be progressing are not able to progress. We think that those blockages—I think that there are mixed views on wage subsidies. There is a lot of emphasis in some of the funding packages on wage subsidies, and some employers are basically reacting to that and saying that wage subsidies on their own are not enough for us. That is not necessarily what we are looking for. We think that we need to work with the private sector and, in particular, to encourage them to make, and with DWP—we have some discussions with them about that—to encourage employers to recognise that there is an economic benefit to them in helping their, particularly, young employees generally, to access training through the colleges, etc., and to give them the flexibility. We would like to see more flexibility in the funding generally around that. How can we be more creative? I do not know if that is a Scotland-wide phenomenon, but it is certainly the reaction that we are getting. While wage subsidies are valuable and important, they are not the only mechanism that we think that we need in order to effectively engage with employers to encourage them to recruit more young Glaswegians, retain young Glaswegians and allow young Glaswegians to progress up through the employment ladder. Just a quick comment. I think that it is also the recognition that very often it costs a bit more. The journey for those individuals can take longer, and therefore the resource needs to match what the needs of the young person or the person would be. I think that Scott mentioned, for example, a project search, which I know well. It does a really good job in terms of supporting young people into employment, which is a lot to deliver through NHS for that. I think that I get a sense that the public sector could do more in that space, in terms of supporting people back into employment. There is a lot being done, but I think that we can always do more, but I think in this particular space that there is scope to do more in terms of the public sector as an employer, in terms of providing support to people who need support. Sometimes it is difficult and employers perceive it as quite difficult if you are a small business and providing that support, which can be an unknown very often for a business, can be quite off-putting. I think that there is a whole issue about putting more resource into how do we break down some of those barriers? How do we do a lot around case studies of where things are working? It is much more apparent where things are working and just putting some resource into that as well. Should it be done by sector as well? I know that Energy Skills Scotland has targeted ex-service personnel, for example, a woman to take them in engineering. Is that working? Should we put more money into this, into Government agencies, or should we prioritise more in the third sector? Sorry. I would not say that it is an either or. I think that, as any other citizen in Scotland would expect, they can access an opportunity where it best suits them. If people have additional barriers, surely we should be aspiring for them to have the same range of opportunities that other people get. I think that doing both work within third sector, support through third sector, work in support through public sector and private sector should be on the table. Can I add to that? In terms of your question, I agree with Mike. It is not an either or to use the language of outcomes. Young people have their own outcomes and their own wants and their own desires. To say that this would be the answer to everybody's problem would not be the right answer to give. A real focus for me is the question around the metrics of positive destinations and how that gels with the principles behind well-being and young people's well-being. Do the two match? Are we looking to get people into an employment without looking at what their well-being might need to be or are we looking at their well-being and is employment part of that? That is the question that I would raise in answer to your million-dollar question. I do not think that there is one size fits all. We need to personalise the support for individuals to their needs. Opportunities for all have been mentioned already, and I confess that I am not an expert on it, but I understand that one of the suggestions is that in every school there should be a post-16 transition team and a school post-16 transition lead. I am interested to know whether that is happening in schools. Do we know if that is happening across the country? We are certainly aware of the potential of the senior phase through curriculum for excellence in Scottish secondary schools. We would encourage all young people to stay and learn post-16 is the best way of ensuring their long-term employability and contribution to society. In terms of transition planning, we have a number of tasks just now within Education Scotland, in which we are looking with our community learning and development inspectors at how they work with secondary schools in order to support young people to have high-quality work experience placements and college placements. At the moment, that is at an early stage, and it is due to report in 2015, but we would hope to have clearer information about how well schools are delivering on that agenda. However, with regard to transition teams, that would tend to lie with pastoral care teams and support for learning teams at the moment and their partnerships with local employers. However, I am not aware of specific examples, and it sounds like a very interesting idea. I get the impression that we talk about positive destinations and we tend to look at that as one figure, but, presumably, a youngster could go into a quality job or a pretty grim job, as has been suggested already. Do you think that there is enough breaking down of that, or do we put too much emphasis on this phrase, positive destinations? No, I do not think that we put enough emphasis on it. To be honest, we are still at an early stage in collecting data about positive destinations. I am sure that Skills Development Scotland will be able to say a wee bit more about that, but there are certain key elements that we feel would be important here. The right learning, for example, must be in place. Building the curriculum for is about skills for learning, life and work. We are still working our way through the senior phase just now, but we would hope in the future that that would certainly provide young people with appropriate information and skills, such as financial support, managing budgets, advice and guidance about what is available and how employment opportunities could be matched to their needs. I thank you very much for your response to Mr Mason. I think that, from our perspective, what we are developing is an approach that suggests that there is not one single transition, and it is not a linear process either, that young people can go back and forward. In a sense, we need to, as a community planning partnership, construct a model, or work with our colleagues to construct models of interventions that are appropriate at different stages in that cycle for young people. It is important that we improve the data sharing and intelligence that the agencies can share. We still need to tackle big issues around data sharing, particularly for the older age group. It has become a bit easier for the under-19s, but we still struggle in part with the data protection act, quite rightly, regulations. However, we need to have an approach that emphasises, as you say quite rightly, the quality of jobs and the quality of life for the young person. There is a lot of evidence that young people in transition do not always—we need to help them to succeed in making that transition, and sometimes that will require more than one intervention. You mentioned that a few times, and I am interested in that, because you said that Glasgow is going beyond the 19th. Is there too much emphasis from here, the Parliament or the Government, on what has to be 16 to 19 and not enough flexibility for what you are saying is that we need quite an individual approach sometimes? Yes, we think that there needs to be more flexibility. There is no doubt that there still is an issue with school leavers, etc., but there is also an issue with college leavers, and there is an issue with graduates from universities. Sometimes the positive destination is to a college place, and we do not always know what happens to them after they leave college. There is a significant under-employment problem in the Glasgow economy now among young people, many of whom are on part-time or zero-hours contracts. One could speculate what different people have different views about how positive that is as a destination for some of those young people. It also causes great problems for them. I am aware that, for example, those on zero-hours contracts with fluctuating hours can cause them horrendous problems with housing benefit. For example, I was recently at an event where a care support worker was describing a case that he is working on just now whereby this young chap has, against all odds, managed to get a job. Unfortunately, it is a zero-hours fluctuating hours contract that has made it extremely difficult for his housing benefit to be calculated. The support worker was engaging with the housing provider to resolve a rent arrears problem, keeping the young person if he likes accessing the relevant service. When I was that age, I would not particularly want to have to spend a large amount of my spare time trying to work out my housing benefit and who I have to tell what to. We do not make life easy for people, and we need to change that. Let's get into a wider area possibly. Mr Reid, do you want to say something? Back to your comment around transitions co-ordinators teams. Under the additional support for learning act, there is a duty within the education to call a transitions meeting one year before that pupil is due to leave school and call what they call appropriate agencies around the table. Appropriate agencies could, in fact, involve the opportunities for all co-ordinator or skills development Scotland. I think that currently people are looking at how that measures with the named personal lead professional role within the Children and Young People's Act. That would be the person responsible for calling this transitions meeting around the table. There are some local authorities that already have dedicated transitions teams, but in terms of people with additional support needs and the marry of the Children and Young People services to adult services, there is a real difference between the pull and push from, for eight instance, pediatrics to adult healthcare and from Children and Young People's social care to adult social care and from school to college. It can be a very mixed picture, but the duty does reside within education. Is it just because schools are getting used to it? It has been on the statute book since 2004. We are still seeing a mixed picture. It is because, again, we are looking at teachers who are overstretched or not aware of the legislation or paying tokenistic measure to what a transition meeting looks like. However, there are things within legislation that do provide for a very long planning process, potentially for young people. It should provide that platform for young people to step into higher education or further education, sorry, or university or the jobs market or looking at what is their positive destination. I have problems with that because it is employment, educational training, but for some people our positive destination is supported housing with volunteering. We are not measuring those kind of metrics with that phrase, positive destination. Also, to Mira Jim's point about longitudinal looking at transitions, if you look at the looked after children's figures, it is quite scary how many of them do not make a positive destination. In any way, to add in with this rigid age thing that some of them might take a bit longer to get to the same place? I was going to say that, for people who are looked after, it could be, excuse me if that seems inappropriate, a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to push away the services that supported you because you view them in a particular way. It takes them a certain amount of time to get back on their feet. It would be interesting to see how many children who are looked after might actually be going to university at 25, for instance. Is it just that time that they need there? At age 18 it looks awful, but if you look longitudinally it might show an improvement. Can you answer very briefly, because I still get John Finnie's get a number of questions and we realise that we should be finishing shortly this session? It was just a point of information for Mr Mason. The opportunities for all for young people with additional support needs is up to your 25th birthday. I will wrap a number of questions into one then perhaps. The figures can only tell us so much and there are challenges associated, as we know, with poverty deprivation. What are the particular challenges that you each face as a result of the higher levels of unemployment associated with poverty deprivation? Do you feel that there is any reflection in the budget of the additional challenges that there may be? As you will know, a lot of people with additional support needs have parents who have disabilities or additional support needs. As you will know, those parents and families are already in poverty. We have a lot of case studies from families that will come forward who are able to speak about their experience in transitions in this particular area. My concern is that it is those who do not feel able to speak that are not represented in any way or form because they do not know what their rights are, they do not know what they can ask for, they do not know what support is available. Even with the great work that goes on, there are people who are, my future is, I will be living on benefits with my parents, or even where hopes are actually built up for young people with learning disabilities or additional support needs at transitions time, for instance, a family came to me recently and said, you know, how's your transition going, what's happening and how's your service provision? And they said, what's service provision? Because the eligibility criteria was set so high that they didn't meet that. So that young person with an additional support need was sitting at home not doing anything after they had been fully supported through the school system that cost quite a considerable amount of money for them to fail and not go any further, seems a travesty to me. But that will be my two cents. Anyone else like to comment? Mike. Of course, any additional resource is welcome resource and what I see across employability in Scotland and skills in Scotland is that we squeeze as much out of what we've got in terms of service delivery and front-line service delivery. And I suppose I've been doing this long enough to see that whenever we are subject to cuts or whatever, that one of the things that does benefit from that, if you like, is that we form smarter partnerships and it does give you an alliance with others to look at services that are being provided by others and how you do that in a more collegiate way as well. So I think a lot of the partnership activity that we see in Scotland brings together and is beginning to maximise the resource that's available through the third public and indeed private sector as well. So there's a bit of a benefit there as well but it'd be nice to have the resource. Special schools are telling us that they're very concerned about difficulties in accessing appropriate work experience placements and, in particular, fewer college courses for young people with complex additional support needs. I know we've spoken quite a bit about that. Although we've come across some good virtual college models in some of the independent schools, complex needs transitions funding and any additional funding that might be available for helping those either colleges to support them, to provide courses for those young people or ways in which they can be supported to access college courses would be very welcome. I'm sure that we would. I don't know that within the gift of the committee. One of the issues that Mike touched on there was partnership working. It's all very well that there are partnerships. How effective are those, particularly with regard to some of the objectives of Action for Jobs Scotland's youth employment strategy, and particularly with regard to how effective they've been with a lot of cliches this morning? I'll add another one, the hard-to-reach group, who are marginalised as a result of deprivation poverty, whatever. That's a programme that's delivered through the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. Is that the one that you're thinking about? I don't know the detail of delivery. I know from colleagues within SCVO that they feel that it has an impact in terms of getting to young people that are harder to reach. I know that within my own sphere that, for example, we deliver employer recruitment initiatives for targeted young people. We do that in partnership again with a range of third sector organisations. That's a programme that brings together disability offenders, ex-offenders and others from black and ethnic minority communities. That's a programme that encourages employers to support young people who are harder to reach and is growing that programme in terms of employer ask for that. They're quite difficult groups sometimes to identify and sometimes to find within local areas as well. Targeted programmes can work if they're given time to embed locally and to get known by young people, service providers and also crucial employers, because unless we engage employers then we're not going to move that forward. You mentioned about how the partnership is working out. Do we be absolutely honest with you? There is a wee bit of past the buck going on, so you'll get a local authority isn't quite sure. There's no definitive responsibility between local authority and the social support and the health and care and the further education sector as well. There's different practices going on in different colleges, so sometimes it doesn't work so well. Okay, thank you very much. I'm going to start at an ongoing challenge. It really sets out to bring together all of the people that I've mentioned in terms of transitions and we're starting to get really really good attendance across the board within different professions such as education, health and social work. Looking at local models of supportive transitions, forums within local authorities to allow bespoke solutions within that authority to work. I can send you information about that on-going if that would be interesting. I'd like to now finish this session. Thank you all very much for coming along and sharing your knowledge and information with us. We really appreciate it. I'll now suspend the meeting briefly to allow the second panel to take their seats and thank you very much. Welcome everyone to our second panel of witnesses. Can I ask you when you wish to speak if you could indicate to myself or to the clerk on my left-hand side? I'm actually Margaret McCulloch, the committee's convener and the members will now introduce themselves in turn starting here on my right, followed by witnesses. If you could actually say your name and give an overview of where you're from in your background, the organisation you're from. Okay, thank you. I'm Marco Biagge, I'm the member of the Scottish Parliament for Edinburgh Central and deputy convener of the committee. Good morning. Good morning John Finnie, MSP Highlands and Islands. John Mason, MSP for Glasgow Shetleston. Good morning Christian Arad, MSP for the North East of Scotland. Lorna Traynor, director of LNG learning, Scotland also representing STF and Stag. Good morning Fraser MacIowan, managing director of agile training and also a member of the sport training action group and STAG. Good morning, my name is Sandy Stark, organisation I'm from station house media unit and VSA voluntary services Aberdeen. Brian Webb, work for station house media unit and look after all the employability work that we do. Before we start asking the questions, could I ask Lorna or Fraser to explain what STAG is, please? Support training action group, we represent providers who work with additional support needs, young people and adults. Thank you very much. Can I now pass you over to Marco? I was going to ask the first question. Thank you. I think that we're all going to ask about a range of different subgroups, but my opening question is really about the particular difficulties that face young people with additional support needs in making transitions in their lives. What would you say those obstacles chiefly are and how well do you think we are supporting people through them at the moment? Who would like to answer first? Sandy, on you go. Well, your transition from school is definitely one great thing, because I treated school like my second home. I started school since I was five, so I really treated that as my second home. It was like the fun times of starting school and things like that. I really learnt a lot from school. Once I left school, the school progressed me on to college. The college opened so many doors for myself and they tried to show me what learning opportunities that I could offer and things like that. I think that it's a great achievement for somebody that's got a lot of learning difficulties and needs. We need that sort of help and support because it's a great big wide world that you're actually going into once you leave school. I think that a lot of youngsters experience huge barriers, whether it's learning disabilities, physical disabilities, mental health problems, often unrecognised. Poverty often leads to difficulties as well. Youngsters are excluded from class and activities. We have a number of youngsters who, for example, left school and still don't know how to work a computer. That's really quite unexplainable in today's society, but that's the kind of youngsters that we support on a day-to-day basis. I recognise, in terms of the additional support legislation 2004 and the amended one 2009, that we also include support for youngsters who are looked after and accommodated. For example, in my own programme, we deliver the employability fund and 33 per cent of the youngsters are looked after and accommodated. That's rather higher than average, so I recognise Fraser. A number of youngsters who go through the national training programmes are probably higher than average in terms of disabilities, exclusions and disadvantages in society. We also recognise, in terms of the additional support legislation, that youngsters when in school have an individual learning plan and that follows them through. Often that's just dropped and left once they leave school. I'm slightly worried about the transition from school to post-16 learning and development. Again, we support a lot of youngsters with no information, no support plan, and we are kind of left to work around that and somehow or other try to support those additional needs without the infrastructure that they may have had at school. That, I think, would fall down. One of the other questions is, do we work with other agencies and how does that happen? I think that we are failing in that sense in terms of multi-organisational working. I have concerns about that. We are often left to pick up the pieces that we like and national training programmes often support a higher than average number of youngsters who are disadvantaged for the reasons that I have mentioned there. The information is not always available past or a lot of these young people perhaps haven't engaged in education, so when they present themselves to the providers then these things become apparent and it's quite difficult at times to get the support for them so that they can continue to engage in the national programmes and move on into employment for their higher education. So we find that a challenge quite often and then, of course, from our own point of view, the kind of rural aspect and trying to fit in, there can be huge distances between where a young person is and potentially support and there's not always funding available to kind of match that in or flexibility within some of the programmes to allow for that. Can I ask how they present themselves to your organisations? What route do they go through to appear at your door, so to speak? Often through careers advisers, so they've been through the school, they've maybe just left school or DWP for the older people who come on to the programme or some will refer themselves because their friends have been on the course, they liked it and they've come along themselves, but it's predominantly through career guidance. Okay, thank you. Brian, do you want to come in? I'd just like to echo some of the stuff that you were saying that we were saying up in Aberdeen. I think there's a disconnect between where young people are in school and where their own services pick them up and there's always that missing information. So you are playing catch-up as soon as you take a young person and you're trying to find out where their learning difficulties are. Do they have dyslexia? What's their learning style? What's the best way for them to learn? That thing about IT, do they have an email address? Can they access the internet in nine times out of ten? The answer is probably no. So as projects, you are playing catch-up and you're having to try and figure out the best way to address the young person's needs whereas if they came in, actually learning plan, actually address all these issues, you would be maybe not 100 per cent ready to work with them, but you would have a good starting block to actually start working with them. I'm taking from this that a positive destination isn't necessarily a success because if the positive destination is going into employment and to fall out of employment a little bit later, then that's going to be an issue, but just working with what we have at the moment, the positive destinations measure, there's about a 10 per cent gap, generally speaking, between young people with additional support needs and the population at large in getting positive destinations. Could that be closed to zero? Could that be closed so that young people with additional support needs were as likely to go into positive destinations, and if so, what would that take? Could it go to zero? I think that if the third sector and other projects were invested in more, so rather than others, there's disrespect to Skills Development Scotland or the jobs that are possible, but we're the ones that are doing the groundwork, the ones that are taking the young person and moving the young person on. If we're given more resources and more money to actually do the work that we could do, I reckon that we could take that to zero quite easily. That's about having information on the young person. We've got gatekeepers, we've got the jobs centre, plus we've got a gatekeeper, we've got Skills Development Scotland, we've got a gatekeeper, we have the information on the young person. We use the third sector out there to give them the actual information that they need on the young person, and then they can put a real action plan together for a young person, and I think that if we work with young people who have the right information, we could take any young person and get them into a positive destination. Can I just build on that? Am I right then saying and understanding that through the whole school process, there's an action plan identifying what each individual person's particular needs are, and then as soon as they leave school, that stops and that information is not then passed on? Can I ask a really simple question? Why does that not happen? I have no idea. Has anybody asked the schools for the information? And what's the response? Some are slightly confused in terms of data protection, and that information shouldn't be going to you. There's trust issues around working with other agencies, not entirely sure what it is that the other agencies do. We do have a thing called GERFET, getting the right for every child, and it seems to work at school, but it doesn't seem to work once you leave school. So by you not having that information, what does that put you at a disadvantage? What problems does that cause for you then, and what do you actually have to do to overcome that? Brian? And then Sandy? Yeah. I think it's just about building up the right profile for a young person, for it to be successful, you need to know what style a young person learns in each one of yourself, everybody's an individual. So to set an individual learning plan for a young person, sometimes it takes you two or three months to even get to know the young person and get to know where they are, where their learning barriers are. If you had a starting block with that information already in front of you, you could cut down that two or three months leading to try to get to know a young person to actually physically get on with the work. And I think that valuable time of getting that young person in and getting them moved on could be half definitely a quarter, if we had the right information. Sandy? I think that your own personal support plan that you get from school should actually get, you know, you should be allowed to take that away from school, because that is your own personal plan and nobody else is going to gain anything from it, because it's your own personal plan. I think that should be it, you know, we called it a record of achievement when we left school. That should be the first thing that's in your first page of your book is your personal plan, what you've gained from school and it's something that you can take to an employer and say look, this is what I've gained from school, this is what I can offer you and then it's up to the employer to say right look, I think you're more than capable of progressing and then the things that you put your rest more on, your support plan should never really stop, because everybody's learning every single day. So when you left school and you went to college, your information didn't go with you? No. How did that affect you? What problems did that cause you? Well, when I was at college I had to kind of restart all over again things that I had ready learned at school. I told the college that I've already learned this, like IT, cooking and things like that. They were basically doing the basic stuff again, what I had ready learned from school. I wasn't learning anything new. I was kind of told I had to do it because they didn't have a record of it, but if your support plan went along with you, I wouldn't be sitting there wasting my time redoing something that I've already done at school. Did you feel having to do that again? Upset. Real annoyed? Real annoyed, because I know I've done that. Because they didn't have that in paper I had to sit and do that again. Thank you, Marko. Does the information pass on automatically between primary and secondary levels? Is it post-secondary that's the problem or is it any kind of transition? I'm not entirely sure if there is a problem between primary and secondary, but there certainly is post-secondary. Can anybody comment on primary to secondary, whether that's an issue as well? I couldn't want to settle it. Going back to the point that I asked before about what it would look like if we could close the gap entirely. How are you each of the organisations funded at the moment? What's the balance of sources between local, SDS and anything else? The only funding, for example, I mentioned that our organisation works with its employability fund, and the statistics there are 30 per cent looked after and accommodated. Of that number, 29 per cent have additional learning needs. We also support 6 per cent from ethnic minority backgrounds and, on top of that, 35 per cent with additional needs such as disabilities, learning disabilities, mental health problems, those kinds of areas. So there are fairly high statistics in terms of the average population. Of that, we managed to achieve 53 per cent positive outcomes. The only funding is the employability fund, £55 per person per week. That is the funding that you get to do that. It's on a shoestring budget, but we do recognise—back to your point there—what else do we need? I'm not saying that we need tonnes of money thrown at us, but we do need to recognise what exactly are the needs of the young people and they're not recognised. I literally supported a young person yesterday who is homeless, who self-harms, who has severe dyslexia and also has eczema. The day before, she had self-harmed and I was fixing her arm and putting a bandage on it and trying to work with other agencies, for example the self-harm organisation. I recognise that we need a lot of support from mental health services. You mentioned earlier on not just the traditional NHS where you go and get tablets, but the other types of services, the softer services that I'd like to call them. I'd like to see more of that and it's all working together and communicating with each other. There's a multi-agency approach that I absolutely get and I think that we could do much more in that sense. I think that we're failing there. It's not just the transition from the learning plan to post, it's just one example of where it just stops and we're not doing what GERFEC wants us to do. We're not doing what the Curriculum for Excellence wants us to do and we are left to pick up a lot of those pieces and try to do it the best we can. Fraser, would you like to comment? Again, like Lorna, it's really the employability fund that's there to support the young people. We're the people presenting to us that the information's not there, so you're asking them the same things. They've already given this information maybe two or three times, so they switch off the disengage from the programme or you can spend a lot of time trying to get the support the way the funding has changed quite markedly from the previous programme for young people, which allows you time. We used to engage with many other services that could support, but now it's quite a short programme now, so if they're not ready to hit the ground running, then it's more difficult, so we find that quite challenging. It's an organisation. We are several funders, we have inspired in Scotland, we have children in need, we've got money coming in from Farah Aberdeen fund, we have some money coming in from Aberdeen City Council as well, so we have a multitude of pots that we're trying to bring in so we can do the work that we do. We've just had the parliamentary photographer coming in to take photographs this morning as well, if you're all okay with that. Can I ask as well each of the organisations, do you use work really closely with other volunteer organisations and do you find that with the young people, because they've got so special needs and need a lot of help, there's a lot of intensive one-to-one support from staff, from your organisations doing that? Who would like to answer first? Fraser? That's correct, there's an awful lot of one-to-one, we've had additional training for staff to try and identify some of those needs and we're looking and going forward and doing more through Skills Development Scotland and other agencies. We are a social enterprise as well, we are very active in the social enterprise arena, so we do rely on partner organisations for support and sharing information on an informal basis, so we're trying to get around some of the problems that way. You are a big boss of a lot of organisations, you can't do this work on your own, so you need to build up really good work in relationships and get to know what other projects can do. We've said it has got to know people's names as well, so you can pick up the phone and physically phone someone and ask them for help advice, and the one-to-one work, we use a lot of the activity agreement money to do one-to-one work, to focus on young people and to take them for their point so that they're ready to access some of the courses that we can offer, so if they're not quite ready, we'll use the activity agreement money to try and bring them to a certain point, so they can then access some of the full-time programmes that we can do. Can you tell us what the activity fund programme is, please? The activity agreement money is money that Aberdeens Council's got, I think other councils have got it as well, where it's for young people who have left school with no positive destination, so they're not quite at a point where they can access an employability fund course that's at the stage before, so it's grabbing the young people when they leave school who have not come to a positive destination, aren't ready for a full-time course and allowing you to work with them to get them to a point where they're ready to actually access a course to then get a positive destination, so if that's stage 2, it's sort of stage 1 just before they're ready to do anything. Okay, thank you. Mark, have you finished yet? Can I move on to Christian now, please? Thank you very much, convener. We talked about positive destination, and to what extent can we evaluate how this positive destination is positive, because we heard in the earlier panel that there is no follow-up after that positive destination? I'm very happy to answer that. Certainly for SNU, we monitor young people for as long as they stay in contact with us. We've got our own Facebook page where we monitor young people. We did try and set up our own Facebook page to get young people to stay in touch with us, and it failed because young people don't want to access another Facebook page they want to use Facebook, so we've set up a closed group. I've been wishing me now for five years, and I've got five years worth of young people on Facebook. Every six months we need to report to Inspire Scotland, and I can tell you every six months exactly where the 500 nod young people that we've worked with are exactly where they are every day because they stay in contact with us for all the time. Having that information as their positive destinations, we can access it on a regular basis and be able to feedback to any funder on where they are, and if they fall out of a positive destination, it's worked first as well because they always put it up on Facebook at a bluster job or they've fallen out with their boss, and then we can pick up the phone, get them in, meet them, offer some advice and information and try to save the positive destination if it's a way to crash and burn. We're in quite a fortunate position, I know that a lot of projects aren't, but we've got quite up-to-date stats on where people are and where they stay. In many cases, because of the funding stream, there's a sustainability payment, so there's an incentive there, but because of the areas that we work in and the support that we've given young people, we've built that bond with them, so informally they keep in touch, and if they've got an issue, they come to us because they trust the staff member that supported them, so informally we probably track them, but nothing formal beyond statutory requirements for the programmes. We do pretty much like what you do. We have the Facebook and Twitter page and we keep track of everything. We have that on a database as well, so that we do know what the longer term, short and longer term outcomes are for the young people. I'm aware that at one of the meetings that I was at recently in Glasgow, for example, there is a definite lack in looking at follow-up and longer-term sustainability, if you like. For example, some people, school leaver destination figures said that they went on to college, and then what was coming back is that a lot of youngsters, significantly those that stayed on just because they didn't know where else to go, left college and that's where they were lost, so there was a significant number in Glasgow between the ages of 18 and 24 that nobody knew where they were or what they were doing, but they weren't employed, so I'm aware in general terms there is a lack of what happens longer term, short term statistics, so we recognise there is a gap there and we try to fill that in for our own local services, but there isn't necessarily a cohesive longer term statistical analysis there. That's where the college comes into. The school supports you to get into college and then the idea that I got from college was the one to get in, complete your course and then out again and that's all they were wanting. They just didn't, because I've got special needs myself and things like that, I just didn't feel I was getting enough support to say, look at this is where we think you are, what do you think and it was just low and behold that I volunteered with VSA for five years to prove to VSA that I could be a candidate for them, I could be an employer for them, I could be employed by them, I showed them the skills that I had learnt from school, so at least I had something to fall back on from college and I managed to get the help from SHMU as well and VSA, they worked together, SHMU gave me some helpful tips and I just worked together and I just think it's a shame for for young people you know that they've worked so hard all through their school life and they get pushed on to college but I just don't feel the college are doing you know enough with somebody's got additional support needs. Did you have to find out yourself about these organisations when you were at college or did somebody tell you about them? Some, I found out about VSA myself because I went to their holiday fun clubs at like Eastern in the summer time and things like that and I got to find out that VSA was a voluntary organisation and I got told when I was at one of their fun clubs and because I was 16 I could no longer attend their club but they took me aside and said you can stay with us but we'll take you on as a volunteer, what do you think of that and I just couldn't say no because I think volunteering is a great opportunity for somebody to build up their confidence with an employer and if it's something that they want to do I think that's great. I'm now a trainee support worker in a nursery called Maisie Monroe Children's Centre in Aberdeen. Congratulations and you're enjoying it. Yes, I really do enjoy it and my highlight of my day is that I need to get the children ready to go off to school so if I'm teaching the children the skills that I've learnt from school but breaking down the skills that I've learnt so they've got the understanding of learning through play or learning through speaking or taking turns and things like if you break it down it's much easier for them to understand and we've got a great you know we communicate with parents pretty well so we've got that you know we've got that background really well we've got that covered really well. Thank you very much that's excellent question. To the budget line you know is there any on this transition process is there anywhere the budget is failing maybe not getting fund to where it needs to be done I'm not talking about extra fund you know we all want money at every level there is no question but where do you think there is a lack especially on the transition period between school and between programmes and afterwards because we just talked about it where do you think the budget is not targeting right just now where the funding should go? Transport because every person you know leaves school and that and they go to college and things like that and the college turned down and say right we have not got funding in place for transport but the people that have got learning you know learning needs and that need the taxi to get them back and forth because that's all they can you know that's all they can rely on because it's too stressful for a young person and it's got needs or that maybe to go on public transport it's maybe the maybe can't cope with big crowds of people it just depends on their needs and our needs to be more funding in place for for transport and purposes from to get them from A to B from house to college or work or anything our needs to be that standard to put in place for them no I'm going to go back there's a number of points that I'll go back to it's great that you're volunteering some of the other activities that we do in our organization our commercial work is working with social service organizations and we do training and education there and I've got quite a bit of experience of supporting people with disabilities who've been denied access to voluntary work because they don't fit the picture of a volunteer so you're very lucky you got it but what that tells me is and there's a lot of other evidence it's not just from you know my experience in terms of attitudes around people with disabilities whether it's gender streamlining people into gender specific jobs or attitudes about young people because we still find that from employers I would like to see some kind of promotion work there about trying to shift attitudes how do we do that you often have to have positive examples of how that works we certainly have lots of examples where employers taking on someone with a disability or a non-traditional you know gender specific role or someone who's got additional needs example where that works and it's good to promote that so perhaps there could be some funding to promote and support employers to do to take on youngsters to maybe take some risks some chances so I'm kind of aware of that in terms of the promotion if you like and changing shifting some attitudes the other example sorry I'm just going to go back to the bit about the learning plan from the transition from secondary school you ask the question what's the value of knowing that and another example if we have a short programme of say eight weeks and you know that information what we tend to do is if we find it out is we then can tell the employer for example this young person here has autism autism here is what it will mean here is what you will need to do to support this person and we often find employers then once they know that that's what shifts it from being a failed placement to one that works where both learn how to work within a workplace and employer learns how to support and understand and get to know someone with a disability that's the beauty of it and we're denied that so we have to work really hard scramble about and try to do something about that within that short period of time so I'm sorry I'm covered a digress a bit there but I'd certainly would like to see some terms of floating attitudes positive attitudes towards people with disabilities before you answer on that on the back of that if you were to sort of look at trying to improve the transition process what would be your main recommendation to actually bring forward I certainly would like to see schools working much more closely with the post education agencies like ourselves not just colleges but ourselves and also social work services I'm very much aware that again within the spirit of GERFEC it's not working where a young person may be involved in social work services maybe someone who's been through the offending system or looked after and accommodated they don't want to really engage with us and yet this needs to happen we need to be talking we need to all be talking including the young person not just us as the experts but that doesn't happen so we've not quite got those nice little smooth links within the transition and that worries me yeah there was a real gap between stage one and stage two of the pipeline you know for a young person coming out of school if they're not quite ready for stage two it's what happens with them the the activity agreements will meet some of the needs but again it's a short period of time so these young people can be left languishing there as well even when they have perhaps have engaged in one of the strands of the employability fund and they come out and they've been on the programme and they haven't achieved a positive destination they're then not picked up again until they're 18 so there's a gap there as well you know which needs to be addressed with with the youngsters you mean they're not picked up until they're 18 well they can't re-engage if they've you know they can perhaps have two bikes at the cherry if they've gone forward and for example if they're doing the certificate of what readiness is one of the outcomes for an employability fund once they've achieved that if there's nothing else for them to do they've achieved it and they haven't moved on to further higher education and employment so they're then not picked up until they're 18 if they're not employed by DWP so these young people can be left and then they go back we find that in some areas where they've been on a programme they've hit all the targets for the programme they've achieved all the outcomes in their learning plan they've got the qualification but they're unemployed but because they're under 18 they've got no other way of engaging to any kind of financial support so it's very difficult as well and what we're finding now with most of the mainstream programmes they're all knocking on employers doors as well looking for voluntary places so there is even more pressure now for a young person even to try and engage you know through a voluntary route because these places are being taken back by adults in some cases so it's so difficult so these young people that you've managed to get engaged again in the system learn all the core skills learn the skills they need to make them employable then they get to a point where the funding stops and they're left in limbo for maybe it could be a year six months two years yeah till they're 18 and then the whole process has to actually start again because they've lost they've probably lost all those skills they've lost the yeah they're getting stuck in a rut again and they're getting caught back in the system where daytime turns into nighttime etc yeah and there's absolutely nothing there for them at all there's nothing certainly in every area and what we find weird we're getting people now engaging further you know with adult programmes that we had maybe four years previously on the young people because there was nothing for them in the gap percentage of young people go through your programmes is it actually happened to we we've got fairly successful conversion rates but you're probably talking you know more than 40 percent don't go into a positive destination and if they're under 18 they don't always get in and don't engage then what happens to them Brian we're 75 percent success rate this now so it's 15 percent that are probably moving on to a negative destination that's actually quite worrying isn't it because all that money is actually being invested in those young people to give them the opportunity to build their life up and then because they want to actually do something there's nothing there for them to do yeah they're not getting the opportunity to do it unlike yourself but Fraser as well the point the learner was making with the schools because we are not part of the education system it's quite difficult to engage with the schools i do a voluntary programme industrial we're going to stay with our local grammar school which i've done for the last 26 years and i find a lot of the young people who get the most from that are those that are not engaging academically they go back into the school and then there's really they're motivated in that sense but there's nothing for them to pick up on i think we need to kind of look at that as well because i think we could do an awful lot more okay i find um you've mentioned earlier on do you want to think it was um about some progress can still be a positive outcome for the person but it may not be what is perceived a positive outcome in terms of a job modern apprenticeship fee but it is still some form of positive outcome for that person that's not necessarily statistically monitored but another wee example i can give you quite often our programmes are quite rigid and it is a framework around employability but if for example you've got someone who has been looked after and accommodated um who has some really in-depth problems don't have a history of anybody working in their family so don't know how to how to what internal disciplines you need in order to work they don't have the behavioural attitude to work don't understand it and it's not because they're you know they're bad kids and they're going to be you know be criminals in the future they just don't know how to do it then probably being failed in school and we do have a number of examples of youngsters in that situation we can't do it in eight weeks and maybe employability isn't the only thing it's thinking about that they maybe need more time they maybe need other types of resources and facilities to support them we can engage the young person and they want to do it and they desperately want to do it but maybe don't have the internal whether it's resilience emotional intelligence internal discipline to actually achieve it so they feel as if they've failed it and that's not what we're about we don't want that but there is some kind of positive outcome in terms of they have been engaged and you would want them to then go on and do something else but what else do they do within a framework that says this is all we have this is all we think about we're not actually thinking about or understanding what those additional needs are and how to address them within the framework sorry am I right in saying then you work within a very tight timescale of eight weeks for each individual person you can't extend it sorry Brian we take 12 weeks when you're a 12 week employable of course we've based around 12 and then what we do is we we've just started we've added an additional six weeks to young people we've realised that not everybody gets a positive destination in 12 weeks so we've added an extension there six weeks for any young person that does go on that doesn't have any destination at the end of the 12 weeks so we offer can really offer a 19 week programme for young people and then what we try and do is if they don't go on to a positive destination we keep them engaged with Shmew through we've got a radio station in a film department so we get them involved in doing voluntary work with us and at the same time still deliver once a week employability clubs to try and keep the young person engaged but stuff that we do on it off our own back not because we have to but because we've invested that time and effort into the young person so we want to keep them engaged with us and at the same time still try and move them on to a positive destination but we realise it might take quite a bit of time this is not funded through the normal skills development no we have to fund that through other people other processes what we have found through our own organisations stf stag is that there's no consistency around the number of weeks we may put in a submission for a contract that says actually we think we need 16 weeks for example but the contract comes out and the contract tells you what you're getting and there doesn't seem to be any kind of discussion there that says well we've reduced it to eight weeks rather than the 16 that you asked for that's what you're getting and that worries me slightly that's a contract for themselves when i started to get ready for work and we've only been doing this for about the past three years we had 26 weeks to work with the youngsters that was wonderful absolutely wonderful time to do all sorts of rich work with the youngsters then the following year it was reduced to 16 weeks and the next this year eight weeks no rationale for the reduction in that there is some flexibility but not an awful lot because you're so tightly tied into forecasting and forecasting is based on you have been given a contract for eight weeks and if you need to go over that you need to justify and rationalise that so somehow or other we have created some rigid systems and not allowed for this lovely work that you can do so this eight week programme is for young people who could have maybe dropped out of school behavioural problems, literacy and numery problems, health physical problems as well and within eight weeks you've got to get them up to speed to move on to a mainstream programme what possibly modern apprenticeship a young person as well though it means sometimes you've got like an eight weeks to complete things but that young person might not fully engage in that eight weeks that young person might need a wee bit more a wee bit more time maybe a bit more one to one sort of basis to bring them up to speed because I feel a young person needs you know their own time to think right if I actually managed to achieve this bit they're getting rushed too quickly for their eight weeks so it just needs to you just need to try and think right is it is this young person engaging enough are they learning the skills or do we need to work just a wee bit more you know on a one to one sort of basis to make sure they can get get the same sort of skills because you're kind of you know kind of discriminating against maybe a young person it maybe needs you know that wee bit extra help and support and maybe that young person's maybe not at that confident in coming up and saying look I need you know just that wee bit extra support and that but that's where your employer should come in and say look this is what your weaknesses are and what your strengths are we need to try and fix out to try and get your weaknesses up to up to scratch to your own ability um christian are you finished question yep and we've wanted to join finish caught you by surprise Jen okay thank you parallel I spoke at the the previous session about what might be regarded as hard to reach in the challenges associated with areas of deprivation and the relationship between poverty deprivation and some of the work but I'd like to go a little bit off tack on that and thank you Mr McEwen for your submission there and clearly a challenge that it would be good to have on the record from you verbally is the the fact that it's a one size fits all as regards the funding and how that clearly doesn't work with a rural area and of course I'll declare an interest an area I represent as well could you maybe expand on that and particularly what the previous arrangements were and what has changed what has changed dramatically is the funding package in the length of time providers in the past were also paid a weekly allowance to support young people so it was all about the quality of the provision and the outcomes will come from that but now it's chasing the outcome everything seems to be on the outcome so there's a start fee so from that start fee you've got to work out the viability in the length of time of your programme now hours on average is 12 weeks now we operate in Ergyll and but we also operate in Inverclyde Inverclyde we are fortunate that we get groups of young people referred to as possibly or probably half a dozen four to six at a time in Ergyll it can be one and it can be one in Camel Town it can be one in Oban I have colleagues going to Islay today for a for a three hour meeting they've left at seven o'clock this morning they've gotten overnight with the possibility that they might engage now we've been established in the area for 23 years and always supported the rural and remote areas but it's now becoming more difficult to do so within this this kind of new funding regime it was recognised when Highlands and Islands had the skills remit and there was an allowance made there whether it was for modern apprenticeships additional milestone payments to offset the some of the additional costs of going to these areas and also what was what was get ready for work it was £120 a week rather than 75 to offset some of these costs now it's the one size fits all which which is proving difficult we're now having to make very tough decisions even although we are a charitable status organization we still have to cover our costs so we are now you know probably coming into a situation where we will not be able to support some of these young people in these areas because it's no longer viable to do so it's very very difficult and can I ask for the voidence of the outlast my Kevin are we talking exclusively Scottish Government money here or is there DWP money involved in well as well as a similar basis well it's kind of difficult because quite often the rules don't allow different levels of funding to come in if you're getting employability fund money you're not able to subsidize that with with other funds at the time you're disqualified and similar to DWP funds if they've been funded for one particular strand or programmer initiative they can't get support from another whereas if they were joined up at times particularly in rural areas we could do more and prolong the period of support and that change comes when the removal of training from high handstands enterprise into schools of element Scotland yes but there was a recognition initially where there was an enhanced rate but when the employability fund was launched it's now one size fits all and it's very difficult because as I had said in the submission there when the pilot was done for the certificate of work readiness I know that colleges were involved because I was involved in some of the consultation afterwards and one of the colleges publicly said at one of the meetings for the providers that they had a cohort of maybe 20 students who already signed up for a course and they picked 12 to do this oh how it would be great to be to do that you know and as a charity regardless of the person's barriers or needs we will take them on and do the best we can for them so it can be very challenging and you suggest in your written submission there that this is further compounded by a change with regard to the hospitality industry yes some of the funding frameworks you know they've been reviewed all of them are reviewed at the moment with the result some of them have been reduced in our area tourism is probably the biggest sector so that makes it difficult again to go out and fund these places so we're denying people the opportunity or deny employers quality staff quality training to to get good quality staff or to retain them now would it be your understanding at decisions like that would have been the subject whether by a Scottish Government level or more likely at agency level to be a subject of an equality impact assessment I'm not sure what the decision of how it came about whether that was a consideration or not but clearly it has a disproportionate impact on remote and rural areas absolutely yes and with regard to Aberdeen Mr web there and issues regarding and of course we know that deprivation isn't restricted to urban areas in fact rural deprivation can compound a lot of the problems but are there particular area issues there regarding your work we're funded to work in the seven areas of deprivation within Aberdeen specifically so we're all the work that we do is to target the region areas I think that Aberdeen has this perception that we because we're the oil and gas capital that we have we're very little deprivation in fact I would compare sometimes the places like London where the has and the has nots are extremes the areas of deprivation in Aberdeen are quite quite bad and so all the work that we do is to go in and allow these areas to what we call reclaim the voice so it's about working with them to allow them to get access to media access to projects access to the employability fund and be able to actually address the issues and actually move on from where they are about all the work that we do is there so we're it's not about looking at what we can and can't do we just specifically get money in and look at what we're going to do with in a region area okay and panel there's been mentioned made about sort of collaborative working and particularly with regard to action for jobs in Scotland's youth employment strategy how effective is the engagement between different agencies the statutory agencies of the third sector or whatever in our area because of the rural nature of it it's necessity so it happens by default so we do wherever possible work together a lot of it's informal because of data protection issues you know so we we do support each other so it does happen out of necessity you need to be able to work with third sector statutory organisations and you need to collect collaborative together work together if not you're going to fail the system and fail the young people that's where the young persons report would come in from from going from going to school and you know what this is where their report would come from instead of having the young persons report shut down once they leave school they could actually take their report to their employer and say look this is this is the skills that i've got or or take your report to like an organisation and say look and this is the skills that i could offer is it that you know is it is there an opportunity for me like to volunteer to to show you the skills that i've learned from school or from college or from other organisations and mr snark i mean clearly you viewed that document as as yours it was yours rather than the education system because it was it made clear to you that that document wasn't shared with the college for instance i know it became apparent but it was just i just felt that the college i put in my report of my needs to the college and that and i don't i don't think that the college is even bothered to look to look at my application properly cwm yn iawn o wneud yn ei ganfyn 來. The reason I learnt from school is because I had to go back and review everything I learned from school, but if the school had let me take my support plan instead of shutting it down, I could have went into college and said, I think that you've looked at I don't think you've looked at this properly. This is what I've actually done and then I could have moved on to new challenges for myself and you know ingained myself in new challenges. I think your point earlier, you have to make connections with other organisations. Yes, that's absolutely right. But what I find is that often organisations don't think outside of their own organisation. They just see what's happening within what I am doing rather than thinking who else can be involved, what is their role and what can we do to work together to improve the outcome for that person. They kind of tend to see as service delivery only, not the young person and the young person's journey or adult's journey. An example for that might be schools not fully understanding what training providers do, not fully understanding what national training programmes are about, colleges being aware of it they would be, but other services not necessarily knowing what else is out there. So there's a bit of a disconnect, I think, I feel. You scramble about trying to do the best you can, but I'm not sure if that's good enough. I think there should be more of a connection and understanding of and an acceptance that not just general terms of partnerships, people don't really always understand what partnership working actually means, but it's about the learner's journey first and foremost and we as services and resources should be working around and with for the learner. I'm not quite sure if that message is out there yet. You know, it's up to the young person themselves to go to the employer and say, look, I found this piece of information would this be helpful for the organisation that you work or volunteer with for them to engage more information, and get more training involved or something, or get more help and support in place for a young person. I think that's what we are missing. We need to work closely together, I think, with every organisation. I think every organisation should be printed out in a piece of paper or on some sort of website, that every organisation should be helping to get access to, so they can make that bond together and say, look, this is what we can offer and this is another organisation that can offer it as well. So, if they do get somebody through the door with when and support needs, they can go right. This is what this young person's got. We don't think we've got the things in place just now, but this is when other organisations, you can pick up the phone and say, look, is there any chance? We can see this type of equipment put in place for a young person, you know, for them to engage, you know, to help them achieve what they've got to offer by just putting this little bit of help and support in place. Thank you very much. Christian? Yes, sorry. Just on the particular point, thank you very much for coming in. Regarding, it's quite interesting to see that there are a multi-organisation, working in partnership together and getting different kind of funding. But there are other organisations, I think Shmoo, I know Shmoo quite well, and you alluded to it saying that you do have multiple services to the young people and with different type of funding. So, what do you think will be the better approach for the future? Will we concentrate our funding into different organisations and push them to a partnership? Or do we maybe go to a multi-organisation with multi-services with multi-funding? What will be the best approach? And especially in rural areas as well? I think the funding should be all about the individual and not to fit into a programme. It should be demand-led and need-led. So, if a young person or an older person had whatever needs, there was support there to support that, regardless of money for finance, to support that regardless of what that was, to let them achieve a positive destination and to support them along their journey. We don't do that, we're trying to fit them in to a rigid programme that doesn't always work, so if it was to follow the person that might be more flexible and have better results. There are some organisations where that is what they do. They do lots of different things within them. Their outcomes aren't any better than others, so that doesn't necessarily work either. It's got to look at what are the real strengths. One of the things that I'm aware of is that we've only been doing employability for the past couple of years, so we don't really have a real evaluation of it. We have the recent modern apprenticeship evaluation, which was really helpful in terms of what the strengths are, but we don't have that yet for employability. Of course, that's in terms of the ones that are even further removed. That's the kind of programme that really will try to get them into even more positive destinations, so I'm not entirely sure if putting resources into a service that will do all of those things will actually do it, because that might be located someplace where, let's just say it's in Glasgow, for example, and it's located in one part of Glasgow. People all over Glasgow will need those services, those little bits, so you wouldn't necessarily want to have one particular place. What I'm aware of with the STF and STAG is that there are some wonderful small organisations out there doing some fantastic work, just because that's what they do, so you wouldn't want to take away from that in Scotland. It's lovely for that. It's some amazing stuff. Your organisation probably started from very little, same with yours. I wouldn't want to lose that in terms of pushing funding into a one-stop shop type of thing, because I'm not entirely convinced that would work. Rhyon. I think young people need to learn how to work in groups. It's not all about one-to-one work. I know it's not, but I quite like the STS system about having outcomes and being accountable. I think it's okay to be accountable, but it's about how they address it within the organisations. I think that it's coming through quite clearly that what we really should be looking at should be the individual. When they come from school and transition into either college or further education or training, that action plan should go with them. If that was actually to happen, training providers like yourself would be able to then look at that person and make a judgement of whether that person may need 26 weeks, help them support or that person will only need four weeks help them support. Would that actually work? What else would we need to get involved with? If you had that information, you would see what support was already there. The contact is already made. It would make it much easier for us to follow up. Each of the statutory agencies has information on individuals, but they don't even share the information, so that's frustrating as well. Sorry, it was really just that exact point. Then you can start looking at what else do we need to put in place, including all the other organisations, to support that person, to reach that destination. Yes, absolutely. Brian. It's like you do an eight-week programme, we do it at 12 weeks. If you can find a young person who needs 26 weeks, there needs to be flexibility within the Employability Fund. They can say that you can move those goals post to 26 weeks, but they are quite rigid. You get six people who need 26 weeks, but if you've got a 12-week programme and you're funded for 12 weeks, how do you fund that extra work that needs to be done? There needs to be work done on how that funding works. If you really look at changing the model of the funding package, this is just hypothetical, to say to a training provider, okay, we'll give you, say, 3,000 training weeks, right, and within that you could then self-manage that for each individual person that came along to the programme, Fraser? We obviously had that in place where we would decide at the start how long that person's period of training would be, and we'd go back and agree that with the career service, and that would go into their training plan. It could vary from 12 to, it was up to a maximum of 22 weeks at that point, it was reducing down, but at least we had the flexibility, but the way it works now, when we run a 12-week programme and beyond that, it's not viable to continue. Can I ask how good the flow is from, you say, is it career service that refer young people to use on the employability programme? Do you get people coming through? Is there people sitting waiting in the background waiting for career service to actually refer people to use, or is there a constant flow of people coming through that can actually access the programme, Brian? We know the young people are there, the stats are there to say the young people are there, but every time, every 12 weeks we feel that we're physically having to chase STS to give us the names of these young people so we can get them in to get a taster, rather than there just being that flow of young people getting sent out to these projects. I don't know how it is in the earlier years, but we physically have to chase STS to get the names. We've been working on that for the last couple of years. It seems to me that every time we do a course, we're up to it at the last minute, a day or two, before a course starts still, when an adviser is going, can we get that person's details if you've got that young person? Even as part of the employability fund, we thought that would disappear, but it has become an uphill battle for us. We have the opposite problem, where we don't have enough places to meet the demand. I'm glad that you asked that question, because it leads into the local economic partnerships that aren't consistent throughout Scotland and are not always working. In Glasgow, we have not had any meetings with the local economic partnerships who make those decisions. In the meantime, we have waiting lists of youngsters who want to join the programme, but who can't because I don't have any more places. I don't know when the group will meet and make that kind of decision. It's not consistent throughout Scotland. The local economic partnerships in Glasgow haven't met at all? They haven't met training providers. There was an expectation that they would meet once a month, for example, with training providers to look at demand and what is being met, but that has not happened. The economic partnership does meet, but not including us. What do the local economic partnerships do? Can you explain that? As far as I'm aware, their job is to look at the employment needs of the particular area of Glasgow, for example, and match the employability fund programme to the employment needs. They may say that they will need hospitality jobs, care jobs and construction jobs. We will issue X number of employability places for those areas. We anticipate that there will be a demand of such-and-such, but we need to review that on a regular basis because it changes all the time. That is where it is falling down in terms of our services. We know from career guidance that there is a demand for youngsters who want the programmes and want them in specific areas, but we are getting stuck at that point where the economic partnerships are not quite keeping up to date with what the demand or the changes are. That is my understanding of the partnership. Fraser? We are in a couple of areas in the Argyll and Bute area. They meet physically. It is DWP, the Careers Service and Scotland. Again, as Lorna has described, they look at the number of starts that are used and available and reissue to meet the local need. Sensibly, at the start, we burst our contract very early on and we were needing a decision because we had young people waiting to come on and had no starts in the contract. They had a telephone meeting because of somebody in the S and somebody in the Argyll, somebody in the Clyde came together. There has been some flexibility there, which is very encouraging, but we do not, in terms of intake from the Careers Service, run a rolling programme because we are not running with groups, we are running with individuals, so whenever a young person is ready to engage, quite often we will identify the young person, although they present themselves to us because of a trite record and working with friends, family, siblings, etc. What we always do is refer them back to the Careers Service to be part of the system, because that is important as well. What part of the funding for your organisations is most problematic or needs enhanced? Who wants to say, Brian? I will pick on you first, then I will come to Fraser and Lorna. Truthfully, we need money for it all, but if we are needing to enhance it, it is about engaging these young people who are not part of the system yet, who are not part of SDS, who are not part of the school, who are maybe dropped out of school, who are a name only on a book but actually have not engaged in any projects. For me, we would like to tackle the unknowns that you were asking earlier about how we get the number to zero by targeting the ones that no-one wants to target, the ones that are out there in the communities that we know they are there, we know their addresses, we know their houses, we know where they are but there is no funding to achieve them because it is long-term work, it is not short-term work, it could take a year, it could take two years to engage with these young people, but if you want to get a number down to zero, you need to go back to where these young people are. Physically target them, you need that long-term work. We get funded for category 2 work, so it is stage 2, we get money for stage 3 work. There is no money for that stage 1 work because no-one wants to touch it, that is where you transfer your number to zero by targeting where these unknown young people are. Everybody stats, everybody reports, there is always 90%, 80%, 70%, 20% unknown, they are the ones that we need to target for it to work. Fraser? Just previously stated in terms of the available funding, you are limited to what you can do, particularly from the rural aspect, is taking the service out to these areas. There is travel budgets there for young people to go to work placement, but if there was something to compensate providers to take a service into these more rural areas, in the past we have run programmes on Islay and Arran in these places where they have perhaps found a small cohort of young people and they have gone in the process of funding us to go and do that. That is no longer a veil, but there are young people there. As I said earlier, if there was a package that a young person attracted and you could pull it all together, you could do an awful lot more for them. There is less flexibility now within the programmes, as we say. We do stages 2, 3 and 4 of the employability fund and stage 2, within the different age categories as well, where perhaps if you bust one part of it but you have a demand, you cannot transfer across within your own contract. It has to go back into a pot if it is unused and a fear of areas such as ours will possibly miss out because there will be pressure for more places for some of the big providers in the central belt. Everybody should get an equal opportunity to do what they want. It is like discriminating areas, because every young student or young person is all built up in skills and stuff. We want to show off our skills, what we can take to them, but they are not getting an opportunity because there is not that money in place. It is really disappointing to take them on and then it gets taken away and they get forgotten about and I do not think that that should happen to a young person. Every young person has their own set of skills. They know how to use their own skills in their own way. If they go into an employer and stuff and an employer asks them to do something, it is okay for the young person to turn around and say to the employer, look, I cannot do it that way, but what about if I adapt it to my needs? It is about the employers working together and adapting it for a young person. I know that everything comes down to money, but if a young person is eager enough to want to show off their skills to an employer, why not let them do it? It is a shame. It is definitely a shame, and it is well said for the voice of everybody else in the background that it is not getting the opportunity that you have managed to make for yourself. In terms of funding, I think that we have to understand what the needs are first in relation to equalities. Only this year, the SDS is beginning to collect data on equalities and needs of the youngsters. It is the same issue in terms of the equalities impact assessment. This is the first year that we are starting to collect that data. One of my concerns is that I have a background in further education in four colleges. I am aware that they have additional sums for those with additional learning needs. In all of the NTP programmes, there is no additional funds or recognition of any additional funds for people with additional needs. There is a disparity, if you like, in the service and delivery of it. In colleges, you are allowed it, and in higher education you are allowed it, but you are not within national training programmes, which we all agree are as important as the formal further education and higher education. That is one of the issues and concerns that I have. It is not recognised. I think that that would help. It was not the only answer, but it certainly would help and it would be a little bit of a parity, if you like. We certainly need to understand what the needs are, so the collection of data is the first step. For a young person as well, if a young person wants to move on to further education, why does it have to come down to money and things like that? If that young person has skills that they have learned and volunteered for an organisation and they know they do not have the skills to offer yet, they know maybe a course out there that can offer that skills and then give them the course that they want and things like that. I asked to go on the childcare course at college and I was turned down because I needed a scribe at college. That was the reason why I did not get to go on the childcare course and that is why I had to go to VSA and say, look, I want to work here and VSA knew I wanted to work with them but they could not take me on because I did not have the qualification under my belt. By going to Aberdeen College at the time, I thought that that barrier would have been lifted and for myself to go on the childcare course, but I was told no because I needed a scribe and there was not money in place, but if a young person wants to do something, why not let them? Thank you very much for that, Sandy. Based on what you have said, we might look into that and do some more further investigation into it. Unfortunately, it has been a really interesting meeting. I am not going to ask any questions. Oh, I apologise, John. I apologise. Or have you run out of time? No, on you go. Very quickly, I apologise. Just a couple of things then. A volunteering was mentioned earlier on. Do we get to the situation sometimes where volunteering becomes exploitation really by an employer? We certainly monitor that. There have been a couple of employers that we have withdrawn from because that is what we felt they were doing, that they were taking advantage of the young person. By and large, we have found that employers do not use that positively as a potential employee. If they have jobs, some of them recognise that they do not have jobs, but they recognise what they are giving to the young person in terms of experience, reference and employability skills. We are very much aware of that and that is not what it is about. I agree with that. We guard against that very carefully. There are organisations out there that are good for giving young people some positive work experience, but there are no jobs at the end of it, so we may use it for that to get them into a routine before putting them out with an employer where there is the potential for a job. I am also on the finance committee and this is part of the budget process. The reality is that we are not going to get more money. It is a question of moving money around. I am just wondering about the emphasis of the way that money is being spent. Is there too much going on mainstream services and not enough being targeted at young people with additional needs? That is not what I think. Learning difficulties pushed aside, but we are all human beings. In this day and age, we should all be working together. We should not be discriminated because we have a disability or anything. We should all be working together. We should all have the right equal opportunity for somebody who has additional support needs or does not have anything at all. At the end of the day, we have all got skills and we have all got something that we can offer to an employer. Although we have limited funds, there are always going to be more needs than we can meet. We should not be pushed aside. I feel that there are so many barriers put in front of us. In fact, there should not be any barriers at all because we are all human beings at the end of the day. We should not manage to walk into an employer and say, look, this is what I have got to offer. This is the skills that I have got. Is there an equal opportunity for me to come and work here? It should not all come down to money and things like that. If somebody wants to work, give them the opportunity to work. It is upsetting for a young person if they are turned down and said, you cannot come and work for us. That young person has not managed to show off their skills to that employer because there are ways of employers now of adapting the job to your needs. My final point is also on the financial side. There is a big push at the moment for preventative spending and especially for early years spending that we should spend more money on three- and four-year-olds and less money on teenagers, 20s, pensioners, all that kind of thing. That would mean disinvesting from your services to help to put more into younger kids. How would you react to that? I think that a lot of the organisations that are involved could have a lot to offer even to the younger people. We do not get the opportunity to engage with the schools because we are not part of the education system, but I think that we have the skills and experience to benefit them. You are hoping that the preventative work that you do longer term saves money and I absolutely agree with early intervention. I still think that the services that we do because we are not there yet. You have to watch who you take it from in order to give to them. That is a difficult one. That is your uncomfortable decisions to make. I do agree with early intervention. I am not entirely sure how you balance that budget there, but I would not take away from here because we are just beginning to move forward within the new employability. I am very much a supporter of the national training programmes and the new employability fund, so I can see a shift in progress. I certainly would not want that to be taken away, but difficult balancing decisions. That concludes today's meeting. Thank you very much for coming along. Our next meeting will take place Thursday at 13 November. Thank you very much.