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I am the first to admit that not all youngsters will benefit from residential outdoor education. A small number do not like it at all; they feel quite pressurised by it, and anxious as a result, and we have to be mindful of those young people.

As for the way in which the centres operate now, they are much more understanding of and care more about that type of young person than was perhaps the case in my day, when you just had to get on with it and did not get much opportunity to do anything else. That kind of education is changing for the better with regard to looking after the child’s best interests. I suppose that, if we want to put it into Government speak, it is about getting it right for every child. I think that that is improving a lot.

We absolutely should include other opportunities from different perspectives, because education is a wonderful thing, which people can benefit from in so many different ways.

Quite right.

The Scottish Government—all credit to it for doing so—set up Inspiring Scotland, which is a collaboration involving the Government, the private sector, the charitable sector and the third sector. I have suggested to the Scottish Government that it has a long conversation with Inspiring Scotland, which has been relatively successful and has been a really good thing for Scotland.

Rethink Ireland has raised quite a lot of money from a social perspective, and we can write to the committee about how it operates. There is also the Ernest Cook Trust down south, which has been very good at providing centres with additional support. I think that we can make that work.

Yes. However, in his evidence to the Education, Children and Young People Committee in the first evidence-taking session, Mr Mannion made it clear that some close-to-home experiences that were provided near schools did not cost terribly much and gave as much educational benefit as a residential experience would.

Therefore, we have to see this in the broadest sense. The bill is not about trying to replace other educational experiences; the experiences for which it provides will be complementary to those experiences. Lots of really good things are happening on school campuses and in the world of outdoor learning—as the Scottish Government has promoted it—and the bill should not displace that sort of thing.

As for whether the ability of parents to pay for outdoor education experiences will have an effect on the choices that a school might make, it might do in some circumstances. The bigger issue is transport, because that is where the cost lies. The point was put to me originally that parents cannot afford the kit, the boots and all the things that are needed for outdoor education, but I was really pleased to hear last week that the centres are largely providing those things now. That is a big change from my day when we had outdoor education, when that really was something that stopped people going. These days, a pair of boots, a decent cagoule and so on are very expensive—it costs a good few hundred pounds to get a child kitted out to do such activities—and the fact that centres are now providing that equipment is a big step forward.

That is very helpful.

It is quite important for the overall tax burden in Scotland.

That is a good question. I have to say that, even after considerable research, it is difficult to tell how many schools have their own minibuses, how many minibuses there are within local authorities or, even within local authorities, how much of that service is deployed to schools. A lot of schools use coach services. Again, it comes back to the numbers. The average school minibus now seats 17. That includes the driver and will almost inevitably include two other members of staff. Realistically, each minibus of the type that we normally see on the roads has only about 14 or 15 pupils in it. A coach can take up to 44 pupils. I have a lot of experience of organising minibuses and so on, and there is considerable variability. It also depends on how far you are going and the capacity of the outdoor centre when you get there.

We do not have all the data on that. One of the fundamental issues is that we need more data. I am very pleased that the Education, Children and Young People Committee has written to the outdoor centres to get a bit more intelligence back from them about how many people are pitching up.

It will in some cases. Let us not forget that, because of Covid, there were two years of virtually nothing happening. The Scottish Government very kindly provided £2 million in the first year and an additional £1 million to ensure that the centres were able to stay open. I was very grateful for that at the time because, had it not happened, more of the centres would have shut down.

If somebody goes for a state-of-the-art outdoor education centre, where there is not only an improvement in the buildings and facilities for young people but an update to outdoor activities—if specialists are brought in to do rock climbing or canoeing or whatever—the costs will increase. That might have a knock-on effect, so we would have to be mindful of that.

No. Under the bill, it is not compulsory for everyone to take part in outdoor education—I have never said that it is. I want the opportunity to be made available for all young people, but it is not compulsory. Some families will choose not to participate, just as some do now, for very good reasons. The bill is not about making outdoor education compulsory, which would be the wrong thing to do. It is about ensuring that there are opportunities for more young people than is the case currently. The University of Edinburgh’s analysis from 2019 shows that about a third of pupils from the secondary sector and roughly a quarter of pupils from the primary sector get such provision, which means that two thirds of secondary school pupils and three quarters of primary school pupils do not.

When it comes to the public’s understanding of why Government makes a choice about what the money that they pay in tax will be used for and, more important, on what basis such decisions are made, it is an important principle that we should ensure that there is greater transparency for the public so that they can understand on what basis a specific decision has been made.

I cannot speak for the committee, but I think that we sometimes feel that it is not very easy for the committee to understand why a specific policy was put in place, given the other possible choices that could have been made. I would like to hear your thoughts on what we can do to improve that situation.