Chamber and committees

What I am doing is flagging up that, although it is not for us to scrutinise councillor complaints, given that your team can investigate both types of complaint, there are direct consequences—including some positive ones—and we may have to look at that in a bit more detail.

My final question is not about welfare, as I will let Mr Mountain lead on that. As performance and corporate governance are improving dramatically, we should look at the risk register. Perhaps due to my incompetence on the internet, I was able to find the risk register policy but not the risk register itself. Is that a public document? If it is, what are your top two risks for the organisation?

I am not trying to undermine confidentiality and privacy arrangements. Once admissibility has been accepted, if it is—and I know every case is different, so it will be difficult for you to answer—how long should a complainant or the individual complained about imagine it might take for a report to be forthcoming from your office? How do you get a baseline for that and how do you measure performance?

I apologise for cutting across you, convener. I would never normally do that, but Ms Callaghan made an important point about automatic enrolment. We might want to draw the matter to the attention of the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. When I sat on the Social Security Committee and convened it previously, it looked at the automation of benefits. Given the connection between our interest in the issue and that committee’s interest, it might be worth making it aware of any correspondence that we have. Apologies again.

The comments have been helpful, although they do not relate directly to the statutory instrument. It is helpful to highlight the fantastic work that the Scottish Government has done on free school meals and the approach to universality. The substantial increase to the school clothing grant has made a massive difference to constituents across the country.

Mr Kerr is right that we need to maximise uptake. Any correspondence to the Government that draws attention to the successes of those policies and asks what we can do to enhance take-up will be really welcome. We always welcome the qualifying criteria, which Mr Marra referred to, being kept under review—budgetary considerations to one side. On that basis, I am happy for us to write to the relevant minister.

I promise that it is not just an add-on to the previous line of questioning. My question is inspired by Bill Scott’s earlier comment that, in some cases, there might not be continuing costs because some young people will move on to positive destinations in further or higher education. However, at another point, he said that, once we have signed folk off as having reached a positive destination, we do not monitor the situation to see whether those positive destinations are realised for the period of time for which the statutory obligations exist. You cannot have it both ways: there is either on-going monitoring or there is not. I am genuinely a little bit confused about that.

I suspect that, if we debate that issue further, there will be a bit of mission drift. I should acknowledge that I am an Educational Institute of Scotland member.

Perhaps I had better keep things moving.

I acknowledge that answer, and I will weigh that up when we look at the evidence.

I see in the financial memorandum that it is assumed that many of the costs associated with the work in school will not require any additional resources. I will read from the Scottish Parliament information centre’s briefing:

“while the child remains at school, the costs of the guidance teacher’s, or other member of the school’s pastoral care staff’s, time would fall within existing resources on the basis that the local authority officer will already have existing pastoral duties for, and responsibilities for, the child.”

I suspect that teachers and their colleagues think that they are pretty burdened with work already, without all that additional work. Do you have any reflections on those comments?

I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy for introducing the bill. I also thank Bill Scott for his support, and I acknowledge the work of Johann Lamont, who I see is following the proceedings.

Even when we are dealing with a good bill, we still have to scrutinise it pretty robustly. I ask Pam please to take the questions in that spirit.

Members have asked about the financial memorandum. It suggests that each transition planning meeting will take, on average, two hours and will require an hour for preparation and an hour for follow-up action. It is suggested that there would be between two and four meetings a year. Andy Miller, from the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities, disputed those numbers and said that they were unrealistic and did not take account of the complexities that could be involved. On reflection, do you think that the numbers are a bit ambitious?

I want to drill down into the numbers a bit more. Scott Richardson-Read, from the Association for Real Change Scotland, talked about what the number of young people in the school estate who require transition plans could be. In 2019, 128,000 young people were capable of leaving school between S4 and S6, and 47,500 did so. He estimated that about 20 per cent of young people leaving school are likely to have some form of additional support need and, therefore, potentially qualify for a transition plan. That 20 per cent would be known to education and other services, but up to 37 per cent could require a transition plan. Those figures are dramatically higher than those in the financial memorandum—there is significant disparity. Do you have any comments on that?

Does that mean that every young person will have a named person within social work?