Seòmar agus comataidhean

I thank you both—in particular, Professor Muir, for your report. Your care for young people in Scotland and their future prospects and the long-term aspiration that you have for the country shine through on every page. Thank you for all that work.

I will focus on the short term, if that is okay. My colleagues have asked some questions about leadership. Your report and the commission to do the work were precipitated by a crisis of confidence in the SQA because of the disastrous handling of exams through the pandemic. That is why you are sitting here today, and it is why we have the report in front of us. We are now looking at that organisation staying in place for another three exam diets—the current one and another two. Should we have confidence in its leadership and their decisions if there is another crisis?

The regional improvement collaboratives have budgets and seconded staff, so they create their own bureaucracy. Mr Ewing’s questioning along that line was about that middle ground. They are intermediate organisations. Essentially, they are the rusting hulks of the failed reform agenda of the previous cabinet secretary. They are the left-over result of an attempt to remove the control of education policy from local councils.

Having spoken to teachers, I tend to agree that some of those collaboratives have had some value. Indeed, what you have described—being led by teachers, sharing, empowering teachers and giving them the information that they need—sounds a little like what has been got out of the regional improvement collaboratives that have worked. Are we not looking at another duplication?

My questioning follows in a slightly similar vein. If the new national education agency was put in place according to the vision that you have outlined, Professor Muir, could we get rid of the regional improvement collaboratives? Are they one thing that could be scrapped, along the lines of Fergus Ewing’s suggestion?

It will be three years before we get into a new settled pattern, and the young people who are going through the system at the moment will not get the benefit of those changes. If we reflect on what has happened in the past couple of weeks—the study guides that were produced by the SQA were memorably described to me by a geography teacher in Glasgow as the “Mariana Trench of uselessness”—we can see that the organisation is failing now. I absolutely agree with the need for strategic intent and with where you are pitching the long term strategy, but is there not also a need for short-term leadership?

That is really useful. Thank you.

That policy landscape is a very busy place. I asked the Scottish Parliament information centre to give me the total number of working groups that the Scottish Government had set up for education, and it was unable to do so. The answer was “loads”. There were so many, it was unable to count them or track them down. We can see that in the announcements in the chamber on the commission of your own work. In each statement that the cabinet secretary makes, another three or four crop up. All those bodies then produce the kind of policies that we end up talking about.

I have an issue with what you identify at section 13 in the report: the transition period between where we are now and where we have to get to. I worry about the pace of that transition. I understand what you identify in terms of the twin-track approach and the need to ensure that there is an agency that sits alongside the other one, but we have urgent problems in Scottish education. We have the biggest attainment gap that we have ever had and the lowest attainment among primary school pupils, and no assessment has been made of the impact of the pandemic on the rest of our education system. There has, so far, been a complete refusal by the Government to do that work, but international evidence suggests that it is a very difficult situation, and that is what we hear from teachers. Are we changing quickly enough to address the problems in the system?

I have no problem with the instrument as it stands, but I noted your comments on the relationship between uptake and local government funding pressures. In going through the process, do you monitor or assess the sector’s financial health and the sustainability of the businesses in the area to ensure that access exists?

It is just that a couple of fairly large nurseries in my area have closed, which has created a lot of problems for people. I recognise that some of that is to do with behaviour changes in families, but such closures make the business models perhaps less sustainable than they previously were. It feels like a moment of fairly major change in how people are accessing childcare and nursery education, but you think that that has been taken on board in the work that has been done.

However, do you accept that the legislation is modelled on the powers that were put in place for the pandemic that we are still in?

If I can, convener, I will close with a short question.