Chamber and committees

Good morning. As the Deputy First Minister said when he set out the draft budget on 15 December 2022, this budget is taking place in the most turbulent economic and financial context that most people can remember. Inflation is at a 40-year high, we are all facing rising energy costs and many Scots are being impacted by the cost of living crisis.

As the committee will be aware, the Scottish Government is not immune from many of the rising costs. In the autumn, we had to undertake an emergency budget review to free up resources to meet the increased costs of public sector pay and to provide further help to those most impacted by the cost of living crisis. We have not yet identified a full path to balance for 2022-23. That has meant that we have needed to make difficult choices as we move towards the new 2023-24 financial year.

However, through the draft budget, I am continuing to invest to ensure that Scotland is the best place in which to grow up and learn. We have made deliberate choices to tackle child poverty, to create a wellbeing economy and a just transition to net zero, and to ensure the sustainability of first-class public services.

For example, through the provision of £1 billion of funding each year, we are continuing to deliver 1,140 hours of high-quality early learning and childcare to all three and four-year-olds and to eligible two-year-olds. We have maintained our £200 million annual investment in the Scottish attainment challenge in order to increase the pace of progress on closing the poverty-related attainment gap. I have agreed that £50 million should be allocated to the whole family wellbeing fund, including for preventative holistic family support. We are also investing £30 million in activities to keep the Promise to our care-experienced children and young people.

We are providing a further £80 million of capital to support our expansion of the provision of free school meals. That will allow us to fund provision to all primary 6 and primary 7 pupils whose families are in receipt of the Scottish child payment, which is the next step in fulfilling our commitment to universal provision in primary schools.

In addition, the allocation provides support for the Scottish Funding Council, and for our colleges and universities, to support the development of well-educated and highly skilled individuals. It also supports delivery of the commitments in the national strategy for economic transformation and builds on the recommendations from the Scottish Funding Council’s review of tertiary education and research. Importantly, given the current economic climate, we also continue to provide support for Skills Development Scotland, as well as funding a range of skills and training programmes.

I will be happy to take questions from the committee but, in closing, I emphasise that our resources are finite. We have had to make difficult decisions and will have to continue to do so. We cannot fund everything that we might wish to do, either this year or in the future. Although I am sure that committee members will have suggestions on where else we should put our funding, for each proposed increase in spend we would need to make a corresponding cut. I will be happy to hear members’ suggestions for increases, which are welcome, but I also encourage them to indicate where any required reductions could be made.

There has been progress on that. You are quite right to point to the important role that classroom assistants can play in supporting both individual children and the learning that goes on in a classroom. I appreciate that there is more that we need to do and that there is an overall challenge to ensure that we deliver what is required on the ground.

There is separate ASN funding—£15 million, I think—that goes in to support the continuation of services and employment in that area. That is separate from the £145.5 million that we have already discussed.

In Scotland, we have an understanding that there is a space for every individual who comes out of initial teacher education to fill their probationary time, which is very important. However, in our current system, there is no guarantee that that will lead to direct employment either with the same local authority or with another. At that point, it becomes a matter for the local authority to decide whether it will continue the employment of an individual or for the individual to decide whether they wish to seek employment elsewhere.

I note that the numbers on that are of concern. There are a number of points around types of contracts, and the number of people who move from initial teacher education through probationary year and on to a permanent contract is a particular concern. We keep a very close eye on that when we look at workforce planning and the number of people who will go into initial teacher education in future years, to see whether those numbers need to change to ensure that we do not create a problem in the system. Decisions will need to be taken in the next few months on what happens with the next round of ITE, and we must keep all that in mind—those types of figures, in particular—when we consider the number of people to put into training, as that will affect their ability to get employment after they complete the training and their probationary year.

Sorry?

I will respond to that, because I think that it is important that I do. I will do so by telling you about some feedback that I got when I was at a teaching conference recently. During a question-and-answer session, a teacher said to me, “Why does everybody keep saying there is so much wrong with Scottish education when what I see is an education system that is good, with a lot of good things happening in it?” With the greatest respect, I do not think that talk of an education system that is in crisis helps us to have the type of discussion that I would hope we could have—and which the national discussion was all about—on looking at where we can improve. We should also take a little bit of time to celebrate the success, which is thanks to the hard work of our teachers and support staff who are delivering for our children and young people.

It is, and I am going to explain some of the suggestions for progress that the Government took to the SNCT.

We had discussed with union and local government colleagues whether we could introduce the reduction in class contact time in some areas before we did so in others. Was it easier and quicker to do that in primary school settings than in secondary schools? Could we deliver it in parts of the education system and leave until later those that are more challenging because of the numbers that we have still to recruit? A perfectly acceptable point was reached with local government and unions whereby they did not want to follow that process—they wanted to see the reduction happen throughout all education at the same time. I totally accept that they were not keen on the more flexible way in which we had hoped to introduce it.

You are absolutely right in saying that the number of teachers and the reduction in class contact time are inextricably linked. One cannot be done without the other. We will therefore continue to work with the SNCT to progress the numbers that we wish to see in this Parliamentary session, to allow us to deliver the class contact times.

In part, it depends on how others in the negotiating system want that to be delivered. They had a different view on that to the Government’s view. We will work with them to see how quickly we can get things through.

That is an important area of our work. It is important to recognise that it is about not just the Gaelic budget in my portfolio but how we use cross-governmental budgets and how we use what happens within Government to deliver on Gaelic language plans. There is a £1 million increase in the Gaelic budget in my portfolio in comparison with last year, but that is a capital increase to support the expansion of Gaelic.

As I said, the matter of how we improve the learning and, importantly, the use of Gaelic sits not only within that portfolio spend. For example, the work that I chair in the faster rate of progress group with public agencies such as Skills Development Scotland, councils and other public bodies is about how we can improve right across Government. Although the Gaelic budget sits within my portfolio, there is a responsibility across Government to deliver on the Gaelic language plan.

That is an important part of our work to expand the provision of free school meals. In Scotland, universal free school meals are currently available during term time for 280,000 children in P1 to P5 and in special schools, in addition to those who are eligible in P6 to secondary. We estimate that just over 300,000 pupils will be eligible once we have the expansion to P6 and P7 aligned to the Scottish child payment. That is a good increase that will benefit around 20,000 pupils across Scotland.

We are working carefully with COSLA to ensure that the money is spent, looking in particular at how we can spend the £80 million of capital in the budget this year to ensure that changes are made to the school estate that will allow us to deliver on the expansion in alignment with the SCP, while bearing in mind that we want to move rapidly on to universal provision.

The situation will vary from council to council. Some councils have greater challenges in the school estate than others, so we need to work with councils on where we are in that respect and how the money can best be spent. Work with councils is continuing around how best to spend the £80 million, in particular, and I hope that we will see significant progress. We anticipate being able to move forward with the provision of free school meals for those in P6 and P7 in alignment with the SCP very quickly. However, that can be done only once the changes are made within the school estate.

I am happy to provide further information on the £30 million, because what I have with me today is information relating to the budget scrutiny for next year.

When we are looking at how we can best spend that money, we will bear in mind the fact that some schools will need quite a small amount to get to the point of being able to deliver free school meals and the fact that there may be other, larger projects that some schools need in particular settings. The Government also has a responsibility to ensure that the money that has been allocated is being used as effectively as possible, because the budget is finite.

There will be a degree of challenging local authorities in order to ensure that the money that is being spent is delivering what we want it to deliver at a reasonable cost. For example, we would consider whether there were other ways in which schools could use their current estates or make other changes, so that the initial capital cost that might be suggested by a local authority was not the only available route. As the committee would expect, as part of our process around the £80 million as well as the money that has already been spent, there will be that challenge. The Scottish Futures Trust plays an important role in assisting the Government to look at how we can best use the money to get the maximum effect from it. Clearly, further work may still need to be done to get us to the point of universal provision of free school meals in primary schools, which we will have to deal with in future budget years, and that degree of challenge is an important part of the process as we work collaboratively with local authorities to ensure that we are getting the most out of that money.

Large capital projects are best and most easily done during the summer holiday period. We would hope that we could get into a position whereby that could be in place for the start of the academic year, though that might not be possible for all school projects. Obviously, there is a caveat as we work through the details of the expansion, but that is certainly our hope, and I think that everyone is keen to move forward as quickly as possible.

If a number of local authorities could proceed but a small number of local authorities or a small number of schools in different local authorities had not reached the point of being able to offer the provision, we would not want the whole project to be held back by a potentially small number of schools not having reached capacity. We might look to see whether there were other avenues that we could go down to bring in the scheme.

That is a long way of saying that we hope that it can be applied from the start of the academic year.