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Sorry, I will press you on this, cabinet secretary, because it is absolutely vital to the policies. It is extremely helpful that we have a statement that looks over a longer period of time—it is the first that we have had since 2011.

You are making choices and setting your policy commitments based, I hope, on what you see as the accurate statistics. Given what you said last week, I want to know what you think we need to take into consideration that changes the statistic that the Scottish Fiscal Commission produced relatively recently.

You said something interesting when you said that, if you felt that people were not performing as well as they should be, the accountability level might be raised slightly, so that there were sticks rather than carrots to get them to perform better. Is the Scottish Government seriously considering that?

I will ask about an important dilemma in all this, which has been raised by three sets of witnesses—when we took evidence from Fife Council last week and from the third sector about four weeks ago, and at our workshop in Dundee. All those people are broadly in favour of the national performance framework’s principles, but they said that the best outcomes are those that are owned locally. When local communities come up with ideas and feel that they are making the best progress, that is when they—perhaps led by local government—have ownership of what they are doing.

The dilemma is that, if the best performances can be driven from a local bottom-up scenario, some of the 11 projected outcomes in the national performance framework may get more emphasis in one region compared with another region or in one local authority compared with another local authority, and other outcomes will be lower on the agenda. Dundee City Council gave us the example that it felt that it was making good progress on child poverty but that, as a result, it was not focusing on the other outcomes.

Are some of the best outcomes being driven by local empowerment? If so, does that challenge the need for such prescriptive oversight from national Government of what we are trying to achieve?

I have two quick questions. You described the outcome agreements between universities or colleges and the Scottish Funding Council. Do graduate apprenticeships feature in those agreements?

I would be grateful if you could, because it is important that graduate apprenticeships feature in those agreements. In relation to your job, I think that it would be helpful if there could be a more joined-up approach to that, because, like you, I think that graduate apprenticeships are extremely beneficial. I wonder whether we are talking enough about them and giving them enough consideration.

When you speak to people in schools, how much comment do you get about youngsters not necessarily having the breadth of curriculum that would be desirable from the point of view of their going straight into the workplace, rather than doing college and university courses?

Thank you. I think that there is a disconnect there and we need to do more on that.

If that is true, does that imply that, when it comes to accountability and measuring achievement of the outcomes, the Scottish Government has to allow the measurement and the ambitions to be developed much more from a local perspective? Some people have used the word “prescriptive” to describe the 11 outcomes that are on the diagram.

People feel that their local communities can do things in their own way with considerable effectiveness, without having to worry too much about what the national performance framework says. I have some sympathy for that, because I have certainly seen examples of good practice that has been informed not by the national performance framework but by what works for a local community.

Last week, we debated community wealth in Parliament, and we have had the levelling-up agenda. In principle, both of them are good things, even if we might debate aspects of how they are run. What I am getting at with this dilemma is that many local communities across Scotland feel that they have an awful lot of ambition, talent and resources that they can best use if they are the decision makers, rather than having to apply themselves always to a national performance framework. That is the issue.

I will cite comments from the Wise Group, which has done fantastic work. Its point was that, although the national performance framework’s principles are extremely important, if the organisation is doing its job properly, it does not need the national performance framework to tell it what to do. It feels that it has enough examples of really good practice—of collaborative work with the third sector, local government and the private sector, I may say—that is helping to achieve national performance outcomes, but it does not need the NPF to get those outcomes in the first place because, if it is doing its job properly, the outcomes will be there. Given that observation, do we need to be slightly less prescriptive about the national performance framework so that people buy into its principles but we do not have to set too many parameters about how it is delivered?

Earlier, Mirren Kelly quite rightly said that what works in Fife might not work in the Borders, that what works in Glasgow might not work in the Highlands and so on. The dilemma that the committee faces as we scrutinise the national performance framework is that there is broad agreement across the board as to what we should be trying to achieve in improving the wellbeing of communities across Scotland, but the measures that will ensure that that happens could be very different in different parts of the country. I am interested to know whether you feel that the structure of the national performance framework allows for that or whether we should have a slight change in approach.

If I follow the logic of that, are you saying that it is beneficial and helpful to somebody like you who makes local decisions on what is best for, say, Fife to have considerable flexibility and autonomy in what you decide to do; to have less ring fencing of money so that you can choose the priorities that you feel will deliver the best outcomes; and not to have anything too prescriptive at national level?