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I will continue on the grounds that I intended to go on. I know that you interrupt witnesses at every opportunity, not allowing them to answer, but interrupting committee members when they are asking a question is overstepping the mark. Can you allow me to ask a question without interrupting again?

You can see what we have to deal with in this committee, cabinet secretary.

The rationale that I was trying to develop is that, to an impartial observer, the proposal before us seems, I imagine, an eminently sensible thing to do, although they might not be fully aware of the strictures of making appointments in an ethical way, which takes time. If we agree to the order today, or if we do not make representations on it, there is nothing that means any amendments to the Education (Scotland) Bill might be lost or cannot be carried. The committee has the right to come up with whatever amendments it wants, and the Parliament has the right to decide on them.

Today, the Government is simply going through a sensible process. Do you agree that, if the Government were to not go through the regulated appointments process, it would be pilloried for not proceeding in the correct way?

It is hard to see why any member would not want the appointments process to be carried out in that way.

Thank you for your answers.

We all have our own subjective experiences. On Monday this week, I went to a secondary school—Lornshill academy in Alloa—where three young men with remarkable innovative ideas were putting together an engineering project for a competition. That afternoon, I went to Abercromby primary school. Both schools are in areas of very high deprivation, but what struck me was that almost every child in the class asked me a question. I have been doing this for 18 years and that is not the norm. On Friday, I will go to Strathdevon primary school, where the pupils are doing a Scottish Opera production. So, intuitively, it seems to me that things have developed.

However, I want to ask about setting the target in the first place. You mentioned that we are moving towards 2026, which is an election year, and all the parties will want to make commitments. Is there something inherently flawed about setting a target when the Scottish Government—any Scottish Government—cannot guarantee the outcome? There will be external factors, such as austerity, Liz Truss’s budget or a pandemic. We would probably not have thought of a pandemic, but we know that there will always be certain levers that are not at the Scottish Government’s disposal. This is a cross-Government issue. Is it sensible to set targets when you are not in control of whether or not you will achieve them?

Accountability is surely an issue because, if what I have said is the case, it becomes much more difficult for the public to ascribe responsibility to anyone for a failure to achieve a target.

Cabinet secretary, I will take you back to the point that Willie Rennie made about the initial progress that was made up to 2016, whereby the attainment gap was reduced to 7 per cent, but there was only a 3 per cent improvement once the attainment challenge was established.

You mentioned the pandemic, although that came towards the end of the period in question, and you also mentioned austerity. I suppose that reducing welfare and other budgets will have a grinding effect over the years, and I accept that that might have increased in the latter period. However, is it the case—I genuinely do not know the answer to this—that the more progress you make, the more difficult it is to make further progress? Is the fact that you have harder yards to make to reach people in deprived areas another part of the reason for the reduction in the rate of improvement?

All of that is an argument for all parties to provide a more nuanced description of what they promise before an election. We have heard some very positive comments from previous witnesses about achievements in relation to the attainment target. The progress that has been made has been mentioned a number of times, as has the fact that progress has gone slightly backwards. However, there is now a real expectation that things will improve further again. In many respects, what has happened is quite remarkable. Very often, you would not think that from the committee’s deliberations, but there has been a remarkable change over that period, which is looked upon with some envy by other parts of the UK.

However—this is not a trite point; it is quite a serious point—as well as learning lessons from the challenges, including about the things that you still have to do, if you learn lessons from what has succeeded, that includes things that have succeeded unintentionally, if you follow my drift. The Government has achieved certain things and wants to go further, and the committee has discussed how we can better measure what it has achieved, for example, through free school meals. Has the Government done work to learn from what has succeeded, so that you can do more or tweak it? If progress is going to become more and more difficult, because of the numbers that are left to bring up to the required level, what has the Government learned from what has gone well?

Thank you for that. This raises the question of why members in this Parliament would give away the opportunity to legislate in this area and would have others legislate on their behalf.

I am conscious, Mr Hall, that there are a number of things in your organisation’s written statement that coincide with what was said by a witness on the previous panel. For example, you said:

“It is the clear view of NFU Scotland that the principles embedded in the UK Internal Market Act (IMA) 2020 pose a significant threat to the development of Common Frameworks and to devolved policy.”

You also said that the internal market act

“appears to limit the devolved administrations’ ability to act if any standards were lowered and give the UK Government a final say in areas of devolved policy.”

We were told in 2014 that we were going to be the most powerful devolved Parliament in the world and that the Sewel convention was going to be enshrined in law. Within a couple of years, the UK Government said that the Sewel convention was merely a “self-denying ordinance” and that it could choose whether or not to use it.

Given that change, and that UKIMA has reversed-engineered devolution—that term has been used—as well as the fact that the current UK Government does not want to repeal it, is the exercise that we are involved in likely to effect the changes that you want to see? Given the massive changes in the devolved nature of the Parliament, should there be something bigger and wider than a very limited review of UKIMA to address your concerns? In 2015, we had the Smith commission. In my view, the public should be involved in deciding on the Parliament’s powers.

Thank you.

Does anyone want to add to that point?

I want to come in on that last point. I know that it is difficult, and I understand that you do not want to talk up or to give more oxygen to a potential challenge—maybe I am wrong, but that is my impression—but is it not at least hypothetically possible that, in this so-called internal market, one area might object to what it sees as greater Government support being given to another area? It is a viable concern that the current support for Scottish farmers—or, indeed, the support for farmers in any part of the UK in the same situation—could be undermined on that basis.