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I go back to Ms Duncan-Glancy’s point on schools in particular. If we can get the data arrangement with the DWP in place, that will help our intelligence with regard to how we target that support.

That is the point that I tried to make in my answer to Ms Duncan-Glancy’s point. I do not think that we are gathering the totality of qualifications through the NIF, but we are doing that via the stretch aims. There is therefore a disconnect in how that is portrayed. We are looking at ways in which we can move that, and that work is very much supported by Scotland’s secondary headteachers. Our measurement is a bit out of date in relation to capturing that totality; it is quite traditional in using the narrow measurement. I made that point to Ms Duncan-Glancy in discussing leavers’ qualifications. We are not telling the full story there, but we are doing that via the stretch aims. There is an opportunity for us to reset that through the NIF.

I hand over to David Leng to talk about the technical detail behind how we do that, because it has not been without challenge.

That is an interesting point. I do not know whether members were out and about in their constituencies last week for Scottish apprenticeship week, but I hope that they were. I always ask young people who are undertaking an apprenticeship how they found out about it, and I always receive a variety of answers. I think that there is space in the careers collaborative work that Mr Dey is leading at the moment and in education reform, in particular—although not through legislation—to look at our careers offering. I am very keen that we do that—Mr Dey is already undertaking such work—to ensure that young people are advised about the pathways that are open to them.

When I was at Glenrothes high school in my constituency last week, I had a chat with Roddy Campbell, who is the careers adviser there. He knows all his young people. Some young people who have left Glenrothes high school will come back to speak to Roddy about their pathways. There might be confusion about destinations for many young people, but others get real support, and the headteacher at Glenrothes high school says that she could not do her job without having such a strong offering from that careers adviser.

There are examples of good practice, but there is also a need for us to look again at how we can better support consistency. One key theme that came out of the 2022 report was that there is local variance in attainment across the country. We need to see greater consistency in the support that is provided for young people, particularly by the careers service.

I will wait to receive advice from officials. That relates to wider work. We are coming to the end of the 10-year investment, so the aim was to pull some good working together.

I have not seen it yet, but I will be happy to share the details of it with you.

Yes, it is quite striking. I think that there are a number of reasons for the issue. I have not been given further advice in relation to that gender split, so I will ask our officials to look at that in a bit more detail.

I suspect that it might relate to the fact that, in general—although I do not like to make generalisations—women are often able to talk about their feelings in ways that men might find more challenging. That relates to our understanding of masculinity. Particularly in Scotland, there are quite gendered traditional perceptions around talking about your feelings, and that might be coming out in some of that evidence.

Of course, the other interesting point is the rise of misogyny in our schools, which might be behind the issue. However, to be perfectly honest, I have not had official advice on the issue, and I will ask officials to look at it in the round.

The Children’s Commissioner for England commissioned a really strong piece of work on that. I do not know whether committee members have seen the report, but it is a brilliant piece of work with very strong recommendations to Government.

I will be meeting our Children and Young People’s Commissioner with Ms Don-Innes tomorrow and we will raise the issue with her in our discussions. As the member will know, it is not an issue that she has been pursuing. I have been keen to engage with the Children’s Commissioner for England because I was so taken by her work on attendance. She links it directly to improving outcomes for children and young people, which is her job as children’s commissioner.

That is a fair point, which I am happy to reflect on after the meeting. I suppose that it goes back to the central ethos of PEF, which is that it is for each headteacher to decide which interventions to introduce in their school and, to that end, it is not for us to provide direction. Some people have views about campus cops but, if they were to be funded from a justice budget line, would they be in every school? What would that look like?

In my introductory remarks, I tried to make the point that we need to think about school funding in its totality and in the round post-pandemic. PEF spend is 1.8 per cent of education spend, so it is a tiny amount. I accept that I am here to be accountable for PEF and for SAC, but a lot of other funding is going into education just now. I do not know whether we have the same level of transparency on how that funding reaches those who need it most. That goes back to Pam Duncan-Glancy’s point about Audit Scotland’s report on additional support for learning. I am intrigued about how it tracks the spend because, although we are protecting ASL spend nationally, it is not necessarily getting to those who need it most.

I want to reflect on Mr Greer’s point about how we can work on a cross-Cabinet and cross-portfolio basis. I know that PEF is being used to fund campus police officers and I do not want that to stop that, because the purpose of PEF is to free up headteachers to make decisions for their schools. PEF is also a protected budget line, which they guard very closely. The next step would be to review school funding in the round and consider what would go beyond SAC and PEF in the future. Decisions on that will be a matter for the next Government, but I think that all political parties should be looking at the issue. That is my homework for everyone.

Yesterday’s announcement from the University of Dundee was deeply concerning. The committee may be aware that Mr Dey and I wrote to the university yesterday. I am more than happy to share a copy of our correspondence with the committee. We also wrote to Universities Scotland to seek support for the university in order to respond to some of the challenges that Mr Rennie has set out.

Mr Rennie will recognise the challenges that ministers face around the additional investment of £15 million that the Government committed in the budget, in that we need to be very careful about the Office for National Statistics classification and the role of direct Government intervention.

Yesterday, Mr Dey and I met the chief executive of the Scottish Funding Council, and urgent advice is coming to ministers on what we might be able to do next. I am not currently able to share that with the committee because I do not have it, but I expect to receive it before the end of the week. Once I have received that advice, I will be more than happy to write to the committee more fulsomely to set out the Government’s next steps. I am aware that there have also been requests for ministerial statements on the issue. It may be that we will be able to share more detail about any action that the Government might be able to take once we are in receipt of the advice.

It is a deeply concerning and worrying time for the University of Dundee’s staff, given the extent of the proposed job losses. We have been very clear in our correspondence with the university that every effort will be made to protect jobs, given the quantum of the proposal, which is not palatable.

The decision making around that pre-dates my time in office, so I might ask my officials to speak to things that have not worked. In my experience, the move was welcomed. Some local authorities took the view that they were missing out—to be blunt, they were missing out on the funding, given that we had nine challenge authorities—and we had to respond to that ask. The move was welcomed at the time.

David Leng has already spoken about some of the issues with tapering and the additional support that we provided. If you look at the funding that is going to local authorities in the round, you will see that record levels of investment are coming from the Government. I spoke to the funding that has been protected for education in relation to teacher numbers and ASN, and it is important that we protect those budget lines, although there is probably a debate to be had on the extent of ring fencing of education spend.

The approach was broadly welcomed. I will bring in officials on the question of what did not work well, because it pre-dates my time in my role.