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The current economic environment is very challenging, as I intimated in my earlier responses to Mr Kerr and Ms Thomson. It is fair to say that the flat-cash settlement for 2023-24 has posed a number of challenges to institutions, and I will continue to work with the SFC and the sector to support the strategic change that we need.

I might bring in Stephen Pathirana to talk about the progress that has been made with the SFC. However, if it would be helpful to the committee, in advance of conversations and evidence sessions on the budget, I would be more than happy to provide written evidence in that respect as a supplement to some of the evidence that you might receive.

I do not have the details in front of me.

I think that that relates to the local government pay deal as opposed to the teachers’ pay deal.

Yes. Pam Duncan-Glancy has raised a really important point. Obviously, negotiations are on-going and I am not involved in them, but I am very clear that there must not be detriment to schools, which the member alluded to in relation to those negotiations. The funding was promised on a four-year cycle. It must come to schools and directly to headteachers, who have the power to make a difference in their school setting.

In relation to my responsibilities as Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, I reassure Pam Duncan-Glancy that longer-term planning in relation to the funding is vital, and it is why PEF is making a difference right now in our schools. There not being detriment to the levels of funding that are available at school level is absolutely imperative, in my view.

Including in this financial year? Absolutely.

If Mr Greer would like to write to Mr Dey—I am now issuing him homework—or to me directly, I will ensure that we get him a response on that issue. I would be keen to hear a bit more about the detail of that specific instance and about the picture nationally and how that is playing out, as I recognise the concerns.

We can selectively choose a year that we want to, I suppose; that would be the answer to Ms Duncan-Glancy’s question. My closest measure here is 2019, but even 2019 and the three years prior to that do not compare to 2023, because our young people have lived through a pandemic. I am not sure that I would accept the suggestion that their outcomes in relation to their academic attainment should be measured bluntly against that.

More generally, we need to be very careful in how we frame some of this, because our young people lived through a pandemic and were out of school for such a long time. We have just heard about issues with attendance. Some young people are not engaging. For many of them, getting them to engage in formal education will be very challenging.

I know that we will come on to talk about behaviour, but I see that as part of the wider challenge in relation to attainment. Do I think that we need to keep going in relation to closing the gap? Absolutely, but we also need to be mindful of that shift in the context. It is not just about Covid; it is also about the cost of living crisis and things getting much harder for families than they were previously—in the three years that Ms Duncan-Glancy spoke about, for example. Inflationary pressures were not where they are now at that time, and it is really important that we all take cognisance of that in relation to the targets that we have set.

We absolutely need to close the poverty-related attainment gap, but we need to be mindful of the new normal that the pandemic has created and that the economic conditions have necessitated in recent years. That is having an impact on our young people before they even enter the school gates, never mind when they are sitting their exams.

I state that headteachers must not have that uncertainty: they must know that the funding will flow in those four-year cycles. As far as I am concerned, in relation to my responsibilities, headteachers should and must have that certainty. The premise behind attaching pupil equity funding to four-yearly funding cycles was about giving certainty—giving headteachers the opportunity to plan and recruit on a non-temporary basis, for example. Any movement away from that would be to the detriment of our young people.

Obviously, I shared with the committee—it would have been late last night—the most up-to-date report that we have on that. When PEF was first introduced and sat more generally as a programme, it was meant to be additional to the system. As time has progressed, the system has evolved and, to be blunt, we are living through very challenging financial times, so there is, within our school system, probably now a degree of reliance on that funding structure. We need to be cognisant of that. At the start, PEF was meant to bring additionality, and I think that it still brings a level of additionality. However, I think that our schools depend on it now and that any movement away from it in the future would be very challenging.

One of the biggest privileges in my job as cabinet secretary is that, pretty much weekly, I go into schools where I see the impact that that spend is having. If you speak to any headteacher—as, I am sure, you all do in your constituencies—they will tell you that the funding is making a real difference where it matters in our schools. It empowers our headteachers and allows additionality to be brought in through additional staff members or people from external organisations—for example, third sector organisations that provide mental health support to our young people. We need to be very clear that the additionality that PEF and SAC originally provided have become intrinsic to our school offer, and I am very keen that we protect that additionality in the system.

Going back to Mike Russell’s time, I am fairly certain that he was cabinet secretary in 2014, which was when we reclassified the FE sector. The status of the college sector is unlike that of our executive agencies and therefore the policy of having no compulsory redundancies does not apply in the same way that it would have done previously.