Seòmar agus comataidhean

You said that you were looking to come in on the previous question as well. If you have something to add on that, feel free to do so—do not feel that we have cut you off.

That is a useful clarification. Sticking with Alasdair Smith for a moment, I am looking for a small point of clarification to your answer to the convener about your projections for the cost of the Scottish child payments. You said that those numbers take into account a slight fall in the number of eligible children. Is that because the population of children will shrink or because of an assumption about reductions in child poverty levels, or is it both?

Thank you. I will stick with the issue of demographic change but ask about a different aspect, following on from John Mason’s question about falling labour market participation by young people. In part, that is due to falling birth rate, which is a long-term problem that we are familiar with in Scotland. However, we will face a significant difference in the next five years compared with the previous 15 because of a change in immigration policy post-Brexit. To what extent are you building in an assumption of a change in the number of young people in the workforce based on immigration changes as compared with that long-term issue of birth rate that we are familiar with?

On another point, Susan, I recognise that you are dealing with different papers, but figure 3.16 in our papers looks at the changes in pay-as-you-earn employment between the start of last year and October this year. We have already discussed the significant regional effect in the north-east, where there has been a significant decline in the number of employees in the oil and gas industry.

However, the other area that is in decline is eastern Scotland. Can you talk a bit about the particular regional forces that are driving that? We are all familiar with what is going on in the north-east, but I am interested in hearing an explanation of why eastern Scotland is also in quite a different position to the rest of the country.

On another, wider point, we will be moving pretty quickly in a matter of weeks into discussions around the spending review and its remit. Beyond the obvious overarching question of how to close the gap between the cost of current spending commitments and the resource that will be available, what are the questions that you believe we should be asking? What, specifically, should the remit of the spending review include beyond the obvious question of how we close what is a significant gap?

I will move on to another area. About five years ago, our predecessor committee did a wide-ranging inquiry into personal and social education in schools. That touched on some of the soft employability skills and questions about whether schools were preparing young people with skills such as CV drafting and preparation for interview. We found huge inconsistency across the country. Some schools were excellent at that—young people were leaving at the end of their fourth, fifth or sixth years knowing how to draft their CV and how to prepare for and perform in an interview. However, in other schools, that simply was not part of the PSE curriculum.

I am interested in your reflections on whether the situation has improved over the past five years. Do you get the impression that young people are leaving school with those soft employability skills, or is there still inconsistency there?

Thank you very much. I am very conscious of time, and I have another question that I would like to put to Mark Logan specifically. Does anyone else want come in on the issue of engaging children, particularly girls, at the early primary school age?

This is slightly tricky because we cannot see whether anyone is gesturing to come in. As no one is coming in, I will move on to Mark Logan.

You mentioned the challenges of trying to keep the computing curriculum up to date. It has been 15 years since I started high school, but I remember that, even at that point, it was quite clear that the curriculum was dramatically out of date compared with the average level of digital literacy of an 11 or 12-year-old.

Part of the challenge is the digital divide, which has always been there but which the pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated. If we are to keep the curriculum up to date so that young people are not bored in computing, how do you manage that? If you are a computing teacher with a class of 20 to 25 young people, 20 of them might have computers at school, have their own iPad and smartphone, and have a pretty high level of basic digital literacy. However, you could have a handful, or more, who do not have a computer at home and who have never owned their own smartphone or tablet. How do we manage to keep the curriculum up to date so that young people are not bored being taught to do something that they learned years ago while managing to keep everyone in the room engaged when there could be a wide spectrum of digital literacy and access to digital devices in their own homes?

I will stick with the issue of gender imbalance in STEM. From a couple of studies that have been presented to the Parliament in evidence before, I am aware that negative gender stereotypes, particularly in STEM and computing, are generally pretty embedded by the age of seven or eight. An area that is tricky but which we need to focus on is engagement with the early years and primary schools. I would be interested in witnesses’ thoughts on the extent to which engagement is happening with business and how embedded it is in the education system. Is engagement happening with the early years and, in particular, the primary 1 to 3 early primary school age group? Perhaps we can start with Karen Meechan.

Thank you very much.

My first question is on Paul Mitchell’s point about apprenticeships. Do we need to rebrand foundation apprenticeships? That might sound like a slightly daft question, but hear me out. I have had a concern for a while that, for people who are my age or older, in education and skills terms, the word “foundation” is generally associated with the lowest of the three standard grade levels. However, a foundation apprenticeship is actually a really attractive opportunity—it is a substantial course and employment opportunity. My concern, which is based on feedback that I have had from young people, is that the brand that we have chosen puts them off—it sounds like something that they should not consider, and there are other opportunities that, superficially, sound more attractive. Do we have the branding right with foundation apprenticeships?