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Professor Ken Muir has now completed his consultation on the work, which is, again, in the current financial year and not the next one. The consultation was exceptionally well received by front-line staff and stakeholders and was very heavily used within that. On top of that, we have had discussions in the Scottish education council and the teachers panel to ensure that there is maximum consultation and discussion.

Ken Muir will now report back to me by the end of this month. I think that his recommendations will cover a lot of ground, but I will report back as quickly as I can with the Government’s response. After that process has happened, we will absolutely make sure that the on-going work has a key role for both the agencies that are involved in the reform process and the staff. It is difficult to determine at this point what that will be, because Professor Muir has not reported yet. However, I have reassured stakeholders that I am absolutely determined to have a very empowered reform process where front-line staff and, importantly, pupils have a key role in the process, and that is adequately accounted for in the budget.

We had set out the direction of travel clearly in our Covid recovery plans before the budget came out, because we recognised that there was going to be a very big challenge in that area. That is exactly why we made a commitment to £1 billion in funding for the Scottish attainment challenge, and it is why a commitment was made pre-budget to make permanent, and therefore baseline, the funding for teacher recruitment.

We knew that it was going to be a difficult time for children and young people, and we dealt with that by putting in train, for Covid recovery, the money for the Scottish attainment challenge. That was funded through the budget process. Of course, it was on top of the £500 million for Covid response and recovery that we had already put in place as the pandemic began.

We have carefully considered calls from further and higher education institutions for multiyear funding packages. I am sympathetic to that idea on the basis that that will allow for better planning. Obviously, given that the Scottish Government does not itself have a multiyear budget, providing multiyear funding for those institutions is challenging. The issue of further multiyear funding will be taken forward as part of the work that the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy is doing. The Scottish Funding Council review also highlighted the importance of that, and we are keen to take early action on the SFC review overall to determine what else can be done to support the sector.

On what will happen from now on, there are aspects on which Governments should not intervene—industrial relations within the sectors, for example. As universities are autonomous bodies, industrial relations should certainly be left to them. It is also important that the role of colleges should be allowed to play out in relation to trade unions and to ensure that there is a positive working relationship with colleges and universities on industrial relations.

The spending review gives us the opportunity to consider how we can assist the higher and further education sectors in delivering not just for young people but for learners of all ages, as they do.

That is where the SFC has an exceptionally important role to play. It will engage with the sector to allocate the funding to the institutions and, importantly, continue to discuss with colleges and universities aspects of long-term financial sustainability—for example, long-term financial forecasts. It has an integral role to play as we move to the institutional settlements that will come from the funding. My officials and I will keep in close contact with the council as it continues to make its decisions on that and, particularly, as we move to wider discussions on the spending review for future years.

I appreciate that the college sector has expressed disappointment about the settlement that it has been given. It has been an exceptionally challenging process, and I laid some of that out in the first part of my introductory statement.

The challenge, as we moved through the budget process, has been to deliver a fair settlement that allows the Government as a whole to deliver on our multiple priorities. We have supported the college sector, and its budget has been maintained for the coming financial year. I appreciate that that is a difficult settlement for colleges, but, as I said to Mr Dornan, the SFC will now work closely with the sector on the institutional settlements that will flow from that, to see how we can best deliver for the sector in what I readily admit is a difficult and challenging year.

It is not fair to say that the funding that we are putting into teacher recruitment—which is the biggest increase in funding for teacher recruitment since 2007—is a rehash of what we were doing already. It is a substantial change in investment compared to last year.

Teacher recruitment is absolutely integral to partners moving forward with the reduction in class contact time, which is exactly why the Government has invested so heavily in that. We are aware that there are practical challenges in bringing that in, of which timetabling is one, and that schools continue to be under pressure due to dealing with Covid. We know that there is a lot of pressure on the system, but one of the ways in which we can assist—if we can—is through a reduction in class contact time for teachers. Going back to an earlier point that we discussed, that is important for staff welfare.

You have raised an important point. As funding leaves national Government and moves to local government, it is—absolutely—for local government to determine how that money is spent if it is outside ring-fenced budgets.

It is very important that we all have a close regard to the variation in outcomes in education, which should be a shared concern for us all. The variation of how things are done in education is absolutely to be encouraged, because we should not have a one-size-fits-all policy set from Edinburgh. However, variation in the outcomes for children is something that we are determined to look at. I would point to some of the key aspects in the Scottish attainment challenge funding, which I raised with the convener earlier, that we are determined to move forward with and that look specifically at variation.

In other areas, we will, of course, set outcome frameworks for what we expect from those programmes. There are outcome frameworks for the 1,140 hours policy, so that there is an understanding of what is delivered for the funding that goes in. It is important that not just the Scottish Government but local authorities know what the outcomes of ring-fenced funding are and that they have an awareness of what happens with the funding that leaves national Government and goes to local government.

We made a commitment that that funding can allow local authorities to deliver on permanent contracts. We know, to an approximate level, how many teachers that money will be able to recruit. For example, the £145.5 million that is in the budget is enough to employ 2,500 teachers and 500 support staff. We will be looking at the changing numbers of staff, given how much we know that money will be able to pay for.

Some local authorities may choose to spend more on permanent support staff rather than on permanent teachers. That is a local choice that they will be able to take, depending on what they think is right for their area. There may be some change to that, given local circumstances, but our analysis is based on how much money is going in and how much that funding should be able to provide for teachers and support staff. We will measure on that basis.

The census is annual. It comes out in December, so we have not had it long. In the interim period, we have to rely on our on-going discussions with local authorities. As I said, the official teacher census is published every December. We will monitor the situation very closely with local authorities in the interim, but that will not involve official statistics until that point.

The issue of supply staff is key and it ties into the point that you have made. Although there are teachers on temporary contracts who would wish to be in permanent employment—that is what the Government wants to see, and that is why I have made the funding available—there are some people who wish to be on a temporary contract and who want to work in that way. We will never change that entirely, because part of the workforce wants to be flexible. What is key is that we do everything that we can to encourage local authorities to have permanent contracts, where at all possible. The number of supply staff is exceptionally important to allow for a flexible workforce, particularly at this time.

I should make the committee aware that, earlier in the pandemic, we put a call out via the General Teaching Council for Scotland for retired teachers to come back into the profession for some time, should they want to. The uptake of that was exceptionally low—a very small number came forward from that call. I understand that the uptake was similarly low in other countries that have tried that method of approach. However, we are looking to do that again to see whether any difference can be made. We expect the numbers to be low again, as in other countries, but we think that that is something that should be approached.