Chamber and committees

I believe that the convener is now back online, so I will hand back to him.

I take your point about the fact that ring-fenced money allows a specific route to ensure the delivery of Government policy. However, we are all aware that the needs and priorities of local authorities can vary across the country. Several questions have been put to me about the consistency of delivery across all local authorities. Is there a role—I imagine that there is a pretty strong one—for the Government in ensuring consistency across all local authorities in Scotland? What is that role, and has any work been done on monitoring and assessing the consistency of delivery?

Good morning, everyone. It has been an interesting and informative chat so far.

One of the reasons why we are all here is that we know that we need to upskill and reskill, but we also have skills shortages and labour market shortages. In the light of that, there are untapped human resources out there—women, for instance, but also people from black and Asian minority ethnic heritage and cultural backgrounds. I am interested in hearing about what actions are being taken to encourage people from those backgrounds to come into the skills market and the labour market using the national training programmes.

I put that question to Katie Hutton first, and perhaps Dr Colquhoun could come in and give us an update on the gender commission that is referred to in the papers.

Convener, the other one is “Nothing about us without us.”

Who is responsible for monitoring the application of those recommendations? What normally happens? I am not sure about that bit.

Where I am going with this is that good work has been going on for many years—I have seen that myself in the education system—but there are stubborn areas where there is a lack of movement. I do not want to pick on one area, because that would be unfair. However, let us say that a workforce or a type of business consistently had an underrepresentation of female employees. How would you monitor that? How would you break that cycle? We have been doing all of these other things in the past, but is there anything else that we, as a committee, could push for or suggest?

Thank you for that reflection. As I said, I think that there is an untapped workforce out there, so it is about reaching out and encouraging but also, I suppose, incentivising. People’s attitudes towards work have changed. They want fair pay and conditions, they want access to skills, and they want up-levelling and to increase their own repertoires.

Thank you very much for that. It was very helpful.

Your statistic of 2.7 per cent is interesting. I think that the last census figure was sitting at just over 4 per cent, and, 10 years later, we were expecting the figure to be much higher. There is quite a significant gap. It is also interesting to hear about the higher level in graduate apprenticeships. Do you think that, in certain communities, there is a problem with the perception of apprenticeships and skills development?

It is important that one size does not fit all. I am very keen that the decisions come from the young people themselves and that they see parity between the different pathways. What you have said is very helpful.

Dr Colquhoun, could you come in and tell me a little bit about the work of the gender commission?

Professor Logan, could you add something to that?