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I know that it is hard to put yourself in somebody else’s mind, but is it your view that SATH was completely aware and conscious that it was entirely its decision whether to publish the results after the SQA had made its representations?

I have only one other question. You have made some comments that suggest that there has been constructive and even positive dialogue with Kirsty MacDonald and SATH. However, having gone through the written materials and caught up on where things reached before, it seems that the SQA and SATH have almost had an utterly dysfunctional relationship.

Do you agree with that? I can maybe guess your answer. How typical is your relationship with SATH compared to the relationship with other stakeholders that you deal with? Is it different with SATH or pretty much in the same space?

Thanks for that. I have one final question, and it relates to John Mason’s question, which I think was about a concern that the income is not washing the face of the expenditure that you are incurring. The reasons that you have given relate to helping people who are low paid and so on, or to helping people to become volunteers more easily. A contrasting point would be that, for example, if you were to become a volunteer minibus driver, you would not be exempted from having to pay the test fee that is needed for that.

It is a generous scheme, but I wonder whether, next year or in the future, it will be your intention, minister, to try to restore the equilibrium, if possible, between the cost of providing the service and the income that you receive for it.

Thanks.

To come back to Pam Duncan-Glancy’s question, I assume that all volunteers have the waiver. When I applied to be a host to a Ukrainian family, the fee was waived. However, the big issue at that time was the length of time that it takes to process a disclosure application. Is it one period for everybody? I had the impression that priority was given to particular areas. Is it the case that volunteers or others will get priority and be dealt with first, or is everyone dealt with on a first-come, first-served basis?

I have a minor question. Again, I am arguing against myself, but I am that kind of fair-minded person. It is on the point that Professor Cardwell made about the fact that people who have been on exchanges—I do not want to put words in your mouth—tend to achieve better grades or better outcomes in their degrees.

Is it not also the case—I genuinely do not know the answer to this—that, in order to qualify for many of the schemes, a person has to have passed all their exams that year? They cannot do a resit because they will be away at the new institution, or something like that. Does the person need to have achieved some other standard? Does a self-selecting group tend to do exchanges?

Will that report have objective standards that people will accept, if you know what I mean? Will it be quite a compelling report, and not just someone’s opinion?

Before I go to Professor Cardwell with the same question, I invite Ellie Bevan to talk about the benefits of the programme in Wales.

I will first give a bit of context before I ask the question, because I want to make sure that the question is well understood. I entirely agree and accept the point about the soft power element and the generational impact that the exchanges that we have had over many years have had, and I think that we underestimate soft power at our peril.

I participated in an exchange scheme at university for a year—not in the EU. I do not know whether I deserve praise or blame for this, but I was the first one to go to Canada on the scheme, and I was followed a few years later by someone who is now a Conservative member of the Parliament, which shows that when you have established that link, it grows over time. As a result, we also had people coming from Canada to Dundee university.

I will not go down the fruitless avenue of trying to compare Turing with Erasmus. I agree with the UK Government—I do not often say that—when it says that doing so is comparing two different types of activities. However, is there a danger that the institutions and the students involved overestimate the complexity of what is now required to continue these exchange schemes? The scheme that I was on in the 1980s had no support from the British Council or anybody else—the university just did it with another university in Canada, and, of course, that involved visas and so on. They just had an agreement that no fees would exchange hands and that they would support accommodation and food and so on. Is there a danger that, because it was so easy and seamless before, we do not take the full opportunities because there will be complication and bureaucracy? We keep comparing the situation with what we had before.

For what it is worth, I think that we should never have left the EU. It has been a disaster in many ways, and every local authority area in Scotland voted to stay in. However, is it not the case that the memory of what was there before and how easy it was might prevent us from taking up the full raft of potential opportunities? I invite my namesake, Mr Brown, to respond first.

I will come to Ms Bevan shortly, because I know that that question was probably less relevant—