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Good morning. There is a sum of £145.5 million in the budget to support local authorities with the recruitment and deployment of additional staff. Last year, local authorities received the same sum with a view to recruiting an additional 2,500 teachers—which, among other things, would support post-probationers into employment—and 500 classroom assistants. I am not sure about the progress that has been made in relation to the recruitment of classroom assistants. Perhaps you can share that with us. However, the overall number of full-time equivalent teachers being employed fell, due to a significant drop in primary schools.

Given that you presumably had a deal with local authorities on that recruitment, how can that be? How will you seek to ensure that councils fulfil their end of the agreement? I recognise that it ought to be the councils that we put on the spot about this issue. However, as you are here today, cabinet secretary, can you outline for me, first, your view on the lack of progress on boosting teacher numbers and, secondly, what will be done to ensure that we get the additionality that the funding is being provided for?

I will be as brief as I can be. At the start of the meeting, cabinet secretary, you set the committee members a challenge: if we suggested to you that you should spend more money on any aspect of education, we needed to tell you where it would come from. My colleague Mr Kerr was unable or unwilling to rise to that challenge when he talked about colleges.

Thank you. Good morning, Deputy First Minister. The redress issue has always been surrounded with great sensitivity. With a process such as this, there can be a disconnect between people’s expectations about how efficiently a scheme will work and what is reasonable to expect in the initial phase. Can you give us a broad sense of how you feel the scheme has performed up to now, recognising that it is still to be built upon and developed?

There is, absolutely, a logic to that, but what I would like to hear today is whether the Government is willing—at least in principle—to commit to taking a slightly different approach that affords this committee, or others, greater opportunity to scrutinise what is being proposed. What I am talking about goes beyond the affirmative and super-affirmative procedures. Is the Government willing—in principle at least—to commit to allowing committees to take evidence and produce reports, almost as they would do during stage 1 proceedings, and then treat the process of dealing with the secondary legislation more like a stage 2 process? That might give some colleagues a little more reassurance about having an opportunity to interrogate the proposal further, if you decide to take it forward.

We have the legislative angle to this, but we also have the practical application, which is about establishing pathways between a national children’s care service and its interaction with existing localised services not captured by the bill. If we proceed with the intended national care service for adults and then decide not to proceed with the same service for children, we will need to establish new pathways to ensure that everything works. What work is going on in that area?

Mr Stewart, you have talked about addressing the postcode lottery and getting a service that is fit for tomorrow. We all want that, but you have also mentioned implementation gaps. In evidence that the committee has taken from some of the professionals, there has been—or, at least, I have taken from it—an underlying admission on their part that the sector is, in part, resistant to change and has been so for some time. We have seen that in the IJBs and the variation in and extent of local delivery of services. What makes you confident that the national care service, with all its laudable aims, will deliver what you want it to, given that the people on the ground who have been charged with delivering it might well be culturally resistant to change in general and this change specifically?

Mr Stewart, you said that you are in listening mode, but I wonder whether you are hearing ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ concerns about the role of Parliament if you decide to move forward. I am talking specifically about the substantial volume of secondary legislation that will be required to deliver this. Parliament is rightly expressing concern about that approach. Do you understand that concern?

I am going to put on my anorak and deal with some of the nuts and bolts. First, I am interested in the work that the Government is doing, or planning to do, to determine the exact number and nature of the pieces of existing primary legislation that will be engaged by proceeding with the inclusion of children’s services within the national care service.

I am also interested in what work is being done to identify the pathways that would have to be established to interact with the aspects of children’s services that are not intended to be captured by proceeding with the proposals. What flows from that is the question whether, if you were to proceed with the national care service for adults as intended but then decided not to proceed with it for children’s services, any new pathways would have to be established. What work is going on or is intended to happen to identify the scale of the challenge and the solutions? After all, we all want to avoid unintended consequences.

You could have cited the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 as another example of local delivery not living up to the expectations of the legislation. As I read it, this proposal has the potential to address that and give carers a better deal.

To be more charitable, perhaps, than I was in the tone of my original question, I will come at the topic from a different direction. From a number of things that have been said today, there is sense of recognition on all your parts that we can do this better. If the proposals for including children’s services in a national care service involved an opportunity for you all to bring to bear your experience of the past 10 years or so—to look at what has and has not worked well, what cultural changes are required to be made and how the barriers that you identified could be overcome—so that you could bring your experience as front-line professionals to the table to develop a national system that reflected that experience, would that present an opportunity to make genuine and worthwhile improvement?