���˿���

I will follow up on John Mason’s point and on some of the comments that you have made, Graeme, about the objective of driving up wages and creating a high-wage economy. In the plethora of economic plans, enterprise strategies and innovation documents that exist in the Scottish public sector landscape, is there a clear, overarching sense of which sectors we are discussing and where we think we can create jobs in the high-wage economy that we are talking about? Is there a consistent understanding of what that specifically means beyond a very agreeable high-level objective?

Thanks very much.

I will stick with the issue of gender imbalance in STEM. From a couple of studies that have been presented to the Parliament in evidence before, I am aware that negative gender stereotypes, particularly in STEM and computing, are generally pretty embedded by the age of seven or eight. An area that is tricky but which we need to focus on is engagement with the early years and primary schools. I would be interested in witnesses’ thoughts on the extent to which engagement is happening with business and how embedded it is in the education system. Is engagement happening with the early years and, in particular, the primary 1 to 3 early primary school age group? Perhaps we can start with Karen Meechan.

Thank you very much.

I will move on to another area. About five years ago, our predecessor committee did a wide-ranging inquiry into personal and social education in schools. That touched on some of the soft employability skills and questions about whether schools were preparing young people with skills such as CV drafting and preparation for interview. We found huge inconsistency across the country. Some schools were excellent at that—young people were leaving at the end of their fourth, fifth or sixth years knowing how to draft their CV and how to prepare for and perform in an interview. However, in other schools, that simply was not part of the PSE curriculum.

I am interested in your reflections on whether the situation has improved over the past five years. Do you get the impression that young people are leaving school with those soft employability skills, or is there still inconsistency there?

Thank you very much. I am very conscious of time, and I have another question that I would like to put to Mark Logan specifically. Does anyone else want come in on the issue of engaging children, particularly girls, at the early primary school age?

This is slightly tricky because we cannot see whether anyone is gesturing to come in. As no one is coming in, I will move on to Mark Logan.

You mentioned the challenges of trying to keep the computing curriculum up to date. It has been 15 years since I started high school, but I remember that, even at that point, it was quite clear that the curriculum was dramatically out of date compared with the average level of digital literacy of an 11 or 12-year-old.

Part of the challenge is the digital divide, which has always been there but which the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated. If we are to keep the curriculum up to date so that young people are not bored in computing, how do you manage that? If you are a computing teacher with a class of 20 to 25 young people, 20 of them might have computers at school, have their own iPad and smartphone, and have a pretty high level of basic digital literacy. However, you could have a handful, or more, who do not have a computer at home and who have never owned their own smartphone or tablet. How do we manage to keep the curriculum up to date so that young people are not bored being taught to do something that they learned years ago while managing to keep everyone in the room engaged when there could be a wide spectrum of digital literacy and access to digital devices in their own homes?

My first question is on Paul Mitchell’s point about apprenticeships. Do we need to rebrand foundation apprenticeships? That might sound like a slightly daft question, but hear me out. I have had a concern for a while that, for people who are my age or older, in education and skills terms, the word “foundation” is generally associated with the lowest of the three standard grade levels. However, a foundation apprenticeship is actually a really attractive opportunity—it is a substantial course and employment opportunity. My concern, which is based on feedback that I have had from young people, is that the brand that we have chosen puts them off—it sounds like something that they should not consider, and there are other opportunities that, superficially, sound more attractive. Do we have the branding right with foundation apprenticeships?

That is all from me, convener. We should probably write to the Government about Paul Mitchell’s point about the SDS apprenticeship registration system, to ask for an explanation of the rationale behind that.

I have a brief point about the seriousness of the offences that might result in an individual ending up on the list. It is very unlikely that an individual who had committed some of the very serious offences that we have been talking about would be in a position whereby their application for removal from the list would be granted. However, we have heard the example of an individual who might have committed theft and who wishes to work in a care home. That is the sort of circumstance that we talk about when Parliament debates the rehabilitation of offenders, acknowledging the adverse childhood experiences that affect some young people and the connection that that can have to care-experienced young people.

We are not talking about a mechanism for allowing those who are guilty of the most serious offences to get themselves removed from the list. The likelihood is that those who would be able to make a successful application would not be those who are guilty of the serious offences that you have mentioned; it would be those who have done something of far less gravity. They may have been placed on the list for something that is not a criminal offence. It is important to put that on the record.

Understandably, a lot of our debate has focused on the minority of people who are on the list because they have committed very serious offences. The mechanism that the regulations would allow will not commonly be applied to those cases. It will be far more common for it to be applied to cases that are far less serious and that absolutely fit into the category of the rehabilitation of offenders. We have discussed that many times in Parliament and we passed legislation on that—I believe, unanimously—during the previous session.

I will move on to a different area. You mentioned in your initial remarks that most areas of UK Government spending will avoid cuts over the next few years and will be at the level that was expected pre-pandemic. I am interested in how you account for the specific effects of Covid.

If we leave aside the capital issues for projects such as high speed 2, real-terms spending on transport will be relatively steady over the next few years. However, patronage of buses and trains is way down and operators still require significant subsidies. If the budget is frozen in real terms and there are no cuts, a substantial chunk of that money will go into operator subsidies that were not accounted for pre-pandemic. Will that result in a kind of displaced austerity? Will there be cuts not to the overall budget but to areas of UK departmental budgets to cover for the effect of Covid?