Chamber and committees

There is additionality in the budget of £16 million to increase pay in the PVI sector.

I do not agree.

Mr Kidd’s question is in a similar space to Mr Greer’s question about savings that were made during the current financial year and the detail of those specific programmes. I can include that in the written update to the committee if that helps.

The member quoted £23.5 million. I have the savings in front of me and I am not sure where he gets that number from, although I suspect that it is from the lifelong learning and skills budget line, perhaps with an addition from elsewhere. If the member is able to clarify that, perhaps after the meeting, I would be more than happy to include that detail in my written update, which will also cover the points made by the convener and Mr Greer.

Why did it happen? Why did the poverty-related attainment gap—

I might defer to Sam Anson in relation to the pupil teacher ratio. However, I am also concerned about the fact that some councils are choosing not to use the additional £145 million that the Government has provided to protect teacher numbers.

The point about the PTR is part of the answer, but it is not the whole answer. If the additionality that central Government has given local councils to pay for teachers has not been used for teachers, the question has to be what it has been used for and why it—

I cannot give Mr Greer a specific answer in relation to local authorities masking their school meals debt—I do not think that it would be wise for me to do so—but I take the point. The issue is one that Aberlour and others have made suggestions on, and I know that Mr Greer has previously done work on it.

We will administer the fund such that local authorities will have to apply, but they will also have to provide us with an evidence base in relation to the debt, so we will look at the granularity when it comes to claims about school meals debt.

However, I say to Mr Greer—as I think I said to Ms Duncan-Glancy on breakfasts—that local authorities already have the power to wipe out school meals debt. Many of them have done that and, again, I praise them for that action.

As I outlined in my response to Ms Thomson, part of it is about the Verity house agreement. It has to be about local authorities and Government working in a new way. To go back to Walter Humes’s point, that will mean challenge between Government and local authorities, but it will also mean accountability and honesty about where the responsibility rests.

We need to disrupt the poverty-related attainment gap. That has to be about a funded and well-supported education system, but it is not just about the education system; it is about everything in the round. For example, a number of schools have shared services, whether that is with social work or support services from the third sector, for example. That approach can be beneficial to schools, because they are trying to wear so many hats and respond to so many challenges, and they just cannot do all of it on their own. There needs to be greater recognition of that at a local level.

My response to Ms Duncan-Glancy’s question about what I am going to do about it would be that, through the reform process, we can look to give a bit more clarity and a bit more of a steer on the ways in which schools can be supported. It is not just about thinking narrowly, as we are understandably doing today, about the education budget; we need to think about the other parts of the budget—says she, during the budget negotiation process—that can help to disrupt some of the challenge.

I cannot recall who referred to the health secretary earlier—it might have been you, convener—but the health secretary could make interventions from his budget that would help to close the poverty-related attainment gap, and vice versa, I am sure. We have the opportunity to refocus on how we think about the role of education through reform.

Sorry.

That could be the case. I am trying to recall—and Mr Greer might recall—the name of the academic from whom we took evidence on that exact topic at this exact table in 2018-19. He was a former headteacher. Do you recall, Mr Greer?

I shall not comment, Ms Maguire.