Chamber and committees

You have set the cat among the pigeons, and I commend you for that, but this is not the end of the debate. We need to return to the matter.

I am staggered by the admission that, somehow, those who work in the PVI sector are worth less, even though they are supposedly doing exactly the same job. I have some examples of pay rates. In Falkirk, a local authority head of centre is paid 71 per cent more than their private nursery manager equivalent, despite working fewer hours. In Glasgow, a deputy head of nursery is paid 87 per cent more than a deputy nursery manager in the PVI sector. Are you surprised that there is an exodus of staff from the PVI sector?

Yes. I am sorry—you have got the tough job today in having to defend this.

I agree. The letter that you sent to the committee was really helpful in clarifying a lot of the issues.

I am interested in what is motivating the change. Are excessive pressures on the court the driving force?

That is good enough for me.

Returning to the money, the funding is supposed to follow the child, so why is there not a straight formula that divides the total amount of money by the number of young people or places and then allocates the funding accordingly? Why do we have to have this elaborate cost-finding exercise? Why is it not just truly what it is supposed to be, which is that the money follows the young person?

I am interested in how we got here. What is your assessment of why the poverty-related attainment gap was so wide and why we got such a critical report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development back in 2015? What are the root causes of that?

There are several sections.

But we are in politics to improve things, are we not? That is why we are here. If we just keep going on about the positive things, we will not make any progress. We need to identify why things were going wrong in the many areas that the OECD highlighted. Do you understand why that was?

The reason why I am asking the question is that I have never heard any Government minister explain what went wrong. They always leap immediately to apparent solutions—and to quite radical solutions in some areas. It is quite a departure from past practice to have significant funds invested in addressing the poverty-related attainment gap, but nobody has ever explained to me what went wrong in the first place, and you have not been able to do so today. You have immediately leapt towards solutions. I do not think we will make any progress on that, but I would like you to reflect on it, because I think we need to understand what went wrong if we are going to fix it.