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Please do, Ruth.

If I can come on to the issue of additionally—

Greg Dempster, we have talked a lot about additionality but, for many in the poorest communities, these cuts are very serious. In your discussions with Government, have you had a better and a more comprehensible justification for this action?

I want to focus a little on issues of additionality, with particular reference to the pandemic. Witnesses earlier questioned a quote from Professor Paterson and what dataset that referred to. It referred to the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment data regarding the decline in more affluent pupils’ attainment. We know that things have become worse since then, because of the Covid pandemic. We have touched on additionality, cuts to council budgets, cuts to parts of the education budget and backfilling. Mr Thewliss gave examples of that.

I am particularly concerned about whether we are backfilling the impact of the pandemic now. We know that things have become worse. We also know from the Audit Scotland report that progress had been limited before the pandemic, with £1 billion of Scottish taxpayers’ money rightly being spent on the activity, but with limited progress. Need has increased, but where do we find ourselves now? Are the measures to cope with the impact of the pandemic that are being taken by the Scottish Government sufficient? As far as I can see, this is it: the Scottish attainment challenge process is the allocation of resource. I will start again with Andrea Bradley.

Mr Thewliss, do we risk being here in a few years, looking back on the reshaped programme for the Scottish attainment challenge and closing the attainment gap and saying that that might have been adequate pre-pandemic but post-pandemic it was not fit for purpose?

I want to get your views on the shift away from an approach involving challenge authority areas, where poverty is deepest, to one involving the more general allocation of funding across Scotland. That change is already having significant and difficult consequences for some of the previous challenge authorities. In my view, it is also a significant departure from what was a settled Scottish understanding of the particular challenges of communities that face severe multiple deprivation. Can you explain the rationales you understand for this departure from a focus on the deepest poverty?

I thank you both—in particular, Professor Muir, for your report. Your care for young people in Scotland and their future prospects and the long-term aspiration that you have for the country shine through on every page. Thank you for all that work.

I will focus on the short term, if that is okay. My colleagues have asked some questions about leadership. Your report and the commission to do the work were precipitated by a crisis of confidence in the SQA because of the disastrous handling of exams through the pandemic. That is why you are sitting here today, and it is why we have the report in front of us. We are now looking at that organisation staying in place for another three exam diets—the current one and another two. Should we have confidence in its leadership and their decisions if there is another crisis?

The regional improvement collaboratives have budgets and seconded staff, so they create their own bureaucracy. Mr Ewing’s questioning along that line was about that middle ground. They are intermediate organisations. Essentially, they are the rusting hulks of the failed reform agenda of the previous cabinet secretary. They are the left-over result of an attempt to remove the control of education policy from local councils.

Having spoken to teachers, I tend to agree that some of those collaboratives have had some value. Indeed, what you have described—being led by teachers, sharing, empowering teachers and giving them the information that they need—sounds a little like what has been got out of the regional improvement collaboratives that have worked. Are we not looking at another duplication?

My questioning follows in a slightly similar vein. If the new national education agency was put in place according to the vision that you have outlined, Professor Muir, could we get rid of the regional improvement collaboratives? Are they one thing that could be scrapped, along the lines of Fergus Ewing’s suggestion?

It will be three years before we get into a new settled pattern, and the young people who are going through the system at the moment will not get the benefit of those changes. If we reflect on what has happened in the past couple of weeks—the study guides that were produced by the SQA were memorably described to me by a geography teacher in Glasgow as the “Mariana Trench of uselessness”—we can see that the organisation is failing now. I absolutely agree with the need for strategic intent and with where you are pitching the long term strategy, but is there not also a need for short-term leadership?