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Again, I appreciate the spirit of the question. It goes back to what Meghan Gallacher and I were discussing about institutional racism and the need for systemic change, which has only grown as we have become more aware of its effects on people, including those who are seeking to work in Scotland. To put it simply, we want Scotland to be a place where everyone has an equal opportunity to enter, sustain and progress in work in an inclusive labour market.

In December 2022, we published our new anti-racist employment strategy, which is underpinned by a series of actions that we are undertaking in partnership with key stakeholders, including evaluation of the minority ethnic recruitment toolkit to ensure that it continues to support employers in their recruitment of people from racialised minority backgrounds. We are developing the next stage of our anti-racism workplace training framework, which will support public and private employers to assess their own training needs and provide learning pathways that will build the capability of employers to address racial inequality in their workplace. We are also developing guidance to show how employers have used positive action to address underrepresentation, retention and progression of staff in their workforce.

We will continue to encourage and support public sector leadership to build that understanding of institutional racism and its impact, and to address the recommendations of this committee’s inquiry into race equality, employment and skills. All of that is being taken forward in the context of our new fair work action plan, which will help us to meet our ambition of becoming a leading fair work nation by 2025.

Again, that is a very important question on a key policy area for the Scottish Government.

I highlight that we have the most generous free school meal offer anywhere in the United Kingdom. It saves parents £400 per eligible child per year, so it is an incredible investment. We remain absolutely committed to the expansion of universal free school meals, and our programme for government set out that we will work with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to prepare schools and infrastructure for the expansion of school meals to primary 6 and 7 pupils who are eligible through the Scottish child payment. The next step is working with local authorities to undertake the planning work that is necessary to deliver that, recognising that there is a big infrastructure and resource requirement on schools to deliver those school meals every day, which needs to be worked through on a local basis.

More broadly, I point out that such commitments clearly require significant funding, and we are in a very difficult budgetary situation this year and next. However, that is an example of how our on-going work on equalities and human rights budgeting is making a difference, and of the fact that we are still prioritising a social justice response to poverty, climate change and our interconnected goals.

We are committed to further embedding equalities and human rights budgeting, which is the role that I have not just with regard to the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise’s portfolio but across all of Government. I recently met the equalities and human rights budget advisory group, along with the Deputy First Minister, to discuss what more we can do.

We have produced an equality statement alongside the budget for more than 10 years now, which represents an unbroken and consistent commitment to examining, through an equalities lens, the impact of the Scottish budget on Scotland’s population.

In September, we published our response to the equalities and human rights budget advisory group’s recommendations. In that response, we shared an overview of current and planned activity that progresses action on the recommendations. At the heart of that response is continuing to improve how equality analysis improves decision making, such as with the example of free school meals. We have a ministerial workshop on equality and the budget planned for early November, and I will take to that workshop the request about cross-portfolio working.

I hear that criticism. We are trying to improve exactly those issues of accessibility and transparency within the process. It is not that we are not committed to showing our work on equalities budgeting, but we must consider how best to build that into the process and how to explain that in an understandable format.

I will bring in Rob Priestley soon to talk about the detail. The programme for government and the material in our policy prospectus about equality, opportunity and community have given ministers and cabinet secretaries a clear focus. The mandate letters that went to cabinet secretaries regarding their portfolios communicated very clearly what this Government’s expectations are and how we should prioritise our core missions.

I hope that that has gone some way to helping people to see how the policy prospectus, programme for government and budget interconnect and how ministers are putting in the work to ensure that all that we do builds towards the missions that the First Minister has clearly set out. However, I appreciate that there is always more that we can do to increase participation and understanding more widely.

Rob Priestley would answer that more ably. However, there has certainly been a focus on the process when I have met the chair of the equality and human rights budget advisory group. The focus has been on culture, processes, the turnaround of the budget and how we can show our working throughout the process, not just at the end. A lot of it has been about culture change and putting in place checks and balances to ensure that any minister, regardless of their portfolio, has equality and human rights budgeting in their mind, so that it becomes habit rather than something that we have to drive through constantly.

Our equality and fairer Scotland budget statement links spending that has been undertaken with national outcomes. Through an equalities lens, that document links what we have spent money on with how that has changed things for people. More generally, in response to equality and human rights budget advisory group recommendations, we have made the commitment that officials will be resourced—to go back to Rob Priestley’s points—to mainstream issues, take a retrospective look and analyse what spending has resulted in.

I thank the committee and the citizens panel again for an in-depth question.

I suppose that I would hesitate to take such a broad-brush approach. I know that there are very good examples of PSHE education led by very hard-working teachers throughout Scotland. As I have mentioned, all teachers are required to adhere to the General Teaching Council for Scotland professional values, so they should be demonstrating, welcoming and encouraging inclusive behaviours to ensure that everybody in schools is treated with respect. It is the responsibility of all staff—not just teachers—in Scottish schools to promote and facilitate a culture of equality and diversity and to address individual and institutional discrimination, including where that stems from cultural differences.

I can give a specific example of our delivering appropriate training for teachers. We are currently consulting on revised statutory teaching guidance for relationships, sexual health and parenthood education that is aimed at enabling children and young people to build positive relationships as they age.

I appreciate—the convener has alluded to this—that diversity education has come a long way in 20 years, but there is still much work to do. We recognise that, and I welcome the scrutiny of that aspect. Additionally, I welcome the approach that my colleague the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise is taking with the statutory guidance to help to ensure that teachers are empowered to deliver PSHE education in a culturally sensitive way.

I will bring in Fi Robertson in a moment, but I can give you some initial reflections. For something that describes a piece of work as large and as complex as the annual budget, the equality and fairer Scotland budget statement is an incredibly accessible document. However, I appreciate that we do not want people to be involved only at the end of the budget process and in looking back over it; we want them to be involved throughout the process.

We are therefore committed to improving the budget’s accessibility. Through successive open government action plans, we have worked closely with civil society partners to improve the understanding and accessibility of public finances, and our current plan commits us to improving the accessibility of our fiscal data and information, to benchmarking our fiscal transparency against international standards and to improving public engagement and participation regarding public finances.

By using our own research and international best practice, we have developed a prototype fiscal portal to bring together and present our fiscal data and information in a more accessible, open and understandable way. We are working to produce a fully functional minimum viable product by the end of 2023.

Fi Robertson might have more to add on the subject.

We have committed to exploring opportunities to improve public engagement with the budget process and continuing to make the process more transparent, which includes exploring a citizens budget. There is a strong commitment and a will in the Government to hear more from people who have been empowered to comment on the budget in a way that allows us to take that into account. That means not just opening up opportunities for people to speak to us but making the process clearer, more transparent and easy to digest, so that the set of documents is not inaccessible.

Those two things go hand in hand. If people are empowered to understand what we are doing and why we are making our decisions, they will be able to comment and scrutinise in a far more informed way, which the Government absolutely welcomes. We are committed to exploring more opportunities for people to engage with the process.

That is exactly what we are trying to do. Covid was not the only or the first example of a situation in which not having intersectional inequalities data led to poorer outcomes for various groups. However, it certainly brought together the anti-racism interim governance group, which eventually recommended the establishing of the anti-racism observatory. The impact of its work will therefore be far more wide ranging than simply addressing the inequalities that became clear through the pandemic.

As for connecting pieces of work, it is important to note that the observatory is not the answer to racial inequality; it is part of the solution. It will allow us to create stronger evidence-based policy. It is also not the only approach that we are taking to obtaining data as we recognise the requirement for intersectional information.

You will be aware that we are currently considering a review of the operation of the public sector equality duty. Recently, I wrote to stakeholders to outline the next steps on that, which we propose should include two key regulatory changes, including revising the current pay gap reporting duty to include information on ethnicity pay gaps. Pay gap reporting is an important means of driving action to spotlight and reduce pay inequalities that affect certain disadvantaged groups, and extending the requirement to report on pay gaps between men and women to include reporting on those relating to disability and ethnicity will encourage public bodies to take more effective action on equalities issues that affect their disabled and minoritised staff.

That is another excellent question. First, I am glad that the panel members feel so positive about the process; I feel positive about it, too. It is a good experience to come to the committee and hear directly from committee members how they have been influenced by the work that the committee has undertaken in engaging with the public. I feel very positive about it.

In terms of my direct engagement with communities, my equalities migration and refugees portfolio is very people focused, and over recess—and, indeed, throughout the parliamentary session—there is a lot of direct engagement with people who make use of services. I go back to Maggie Chapman’s use of the term “easy to ignore”; it is a far better descriptor than the term “hard to reach”, which is used too often. We know where a lot of the people are. I engage with people directly through the Scottish Refugee Council and other bodies that we know assist people who require extra help to engage with those in power and to deal with councils, as well as other support networks that engage directly with people. Through them, I can meet clients and people who might not think to e-mail a minister or otherwise try to get in touch with me.

I am proud of the Scottish Government’s vision of public participation and the importance that has been placed on ensuring that people’s expenses and time are paid for when they engage and that engagements are designed with a wide range of needs and circumstances in mind. After all, we must bear in mind that people might be travelling from rural or island communities, or might require accessibility measures to be put in place before they are able to contribute fully.

The important thing for us now is to ensure that the participation offers result in change that we can meaningfully demonstrate. I would like to be able to come back to the committee and say, “Look, this is how participation has changed direction” or “This part of our policy making has been broadened as a result of listening to what people have taken the time to explain to us.”

I hope that that answers the question.