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I have a couple of questions for Mel Ainscow, although others may want to respond, in which case they should indicate that.

Mel, I am sympathetic to your argument about the need for more professional autonomy for individual schools, teachers and heads, and I am interested in your suggestion about greater devolution of budgetary powers to headteachers. It is only a few years since a suggestion along those lines was made in Scotland, but at that time the feedback from a lot of headteachers was that they did not want to become the chief financial officers of their schools. They wanted to be leaders of learning and did not want to be buried under the bureaucracy that would come with significant additional financial responsibility. How would you respond to that?

My second question is much more political, but I am interested to hear your thoughts on it, given your experience elsewhere.

The phrase “postcode lottery” is not unique to Scottish politics, but it is used an awful lot here in relation to not just education, but health and a range of other areas. One of the challenges with decentralisation and giving local authorities or schools much more autonomy is that we inevitably end up with more variation, which creates a particular tension. The Scottish Government and we as a national Parliament are held accountable for the performance of Scottish education. There is partly a tendency for us to be collectively judged, at least at election time, on the national performance of the education system. However, the more power that is devolved to the local level through decentralisation, the harder it is for those who are held accountable nationally to have any influence over outcomes.

How is that tension managed in other settings? How would you resolve it here?

In the examples that we have of areas where extracurricular activities are free of charge or, at least, there are no significant financial barriers for families, there is higher participation, but it is not 100 per cent. How do we reach young people who, even if we remove every financial barrier, still face other barriers to participating, such as chaotic family lifestyles, or who simply do not want to participate in extracurricular activities? The activities are voluntary. That is great and they help a lot of young people, but what about the young people who simply choose not to participate in them?

Absolutely. I am still wondering, though—if we were to significantly increase the amount of funding that goes to the third sector and the organisations that are reaching out to young people in other contexts, would additional funding alone ensure that we reach everyone that we are trying to reach if the objective is to close the attainment gap, or are changes in approach required as well?

I am trying to figure out for the purposes of our committee inquiry whether we should consider recommending that some of the money be allocated not to schools, but directly to third sector organisations. Is it as simple as reallocating the money or do we need to explore whether we should recommend changes in approach as well?

Thanks. That is all from me for now, convener.

Are you saying that, in the Scottish context, our 32 education authorities, which are essentially clusters that education is delivered through, are too big?

Is that not moving in the opposite direction, with 11 or a dozen regional bodies instead of the small clusters that you have highlighted?

I will move on. One of my frustrations with the wider debate in Parliament this year—I exclude the high level of scrutiny that is provided by this committee—is that it has, yet again, focused almost entirely on spending, rather than on consideration of where and how we raise money. We can compare that with what was—certainly from my experience in Parliament—the highest quality of debate in any year, which was ahead of the 2018-19 financial year. That was the first time that we collectively, as a Parliament, seriously considered what we would do with the new powers over income tax.

At that point, the Government’s approach was to ask all the Opposition parties to provide proposals, which were submitted to the Scottish Fiscal Commission. Projections were worked up on that basis. My memory is that we could have had five options; in the end, four were submitted. That resulted in a much more informed debate in Parliament and one that was in some ways more comparable to the system that a lot of local authorities use, whereby opposition parties are obliged to produce their own alternative budgets rather than just voting for or against the budget that the council administration has submitted.

Could we open up the budget process to better parliamentary debate if other parties were provided with the opportunity to come up with alternative taxation proposals, and not just alternative proposals for spending?

I would welcome further discussion of that in the committee.

I will turn to a couple of points that you have made about the resource spending review. In your response to the committee’s report, the language that is used around the resource spending review mentions the need to make “difficult decisions”. The committee would acknowledge that, given that our report makes a point about the challenging public finance situation over the coming years.

I am trying to get a sense of exactly what is meant by “difficult decisions”. I think that we would all acknowledge that if we are to hit the Government’s three strategic targets on tackling child poverty, tackling climate change and economic recovery, it will require greater spending in those areas. All five parties in the Parliament agree that those three areas are important. We might mean different things when it comes to economic recovery, but we all broadly agree that it is needed, and we all agree on the climate and child poverty objectives.

However, that requirement for greater spending means that we need to make difficult decisions—about making savings in other areas, about where else to raise revenues or a combination of both. What is your expectation and intention in relation to that balance of difficult decisions in the resource spending review? Will the focus be purely on areas of spending that are to be disinvested from, as was mentioned previously, or will there be a wider discussion about where the money to hit those targets will come from? Would it come from other areas in the current budget or from other revenue-raising options that have not yet been explored?

I have one question for clarification from your conversation with the convener, cabinet secretary, and then I will move on to a more substantive line of questioning.

You explained that the additional £120 million that has been allocated to local government was given on the basis that you are confident that the previous instalment of £440 million will not have to be paid back. That leads me to the obvious question of how we reconcile two figures, one of which is almost three times the other. I presume that you were confident in allocating £120 million this year because the previous understanding was that the £440 million would be paid back over a number of financial years. If that is the case, does that leave us in the situation—I realise that this is grossly oversimplifying the matter—in which that £120 million can be baselined in budgets for future years because you made an assumption that similar amounts of money would need to be paid back in 2023-24 and 2024-25?