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I accept that that is anecdotal feedback from your members, but were the areas where there was pressure to downgrade disproportionately schools and areas that historically had lower performance that is typically linked with lower socioeconomic status and deprivation?

My final question is for Larry Flanagan, given that his union represents college lecturers.

The experience of college students and lecturers is a significantly underexplored aspect of the past two years, but I have had a college student get in touch with me recently to point out what they felt was the inequality of a system in which they were, in the end, graded on the same terms as any school pupil even though they had spent the entire year learning remotely. There were at least periods of time when school students were in school in a classroom, but that was not the experience of college students. How would you reflect on the communication that the SQA issued to both college lecturers and college students? What was their experience relative to that of teachers and pupils in schools?

Tara Lillis, were you in a similar position of representing a union that was not on any of the relevant Government groups?

That sounds wearily like the exact same conversations that we were having this time last year.

I will move to a question on the moderation system. Seamus Searson, you listed the various levels of moderation that provisional grades had to go through before they were approved, and you spoke about the workload issue that that created. I am interested in the feedback that you have all had from your members about how much moderation changed grades from what a teacher might have initially been minded to give. Did that moderation process result in much in the way of grades changing, and was there a particular level at which that was most common? Did grades typically change on the basis of the conversations that were taking place at the faculty level within a school, or was it on the basis of conversations at a local authority level? Did the RIC-level moderation influence grade changes? Was there much change as a result of that process?

Tara Lillis, what was your members’ experience of this? Did you get similar feedback, or was there a different experience?

Would you like to come in, Audrey? I keep firing more questions at Tony, but I realise that I have not given you a chance to respond.

I have a question on the two upcoming processes that will affect the performance framework, one of which is the review of national outcomes. The Government has also confirmed that the proposed wellbeing and sustainable development bill will have some effect on the NPF. Can you explain how those two processes will interact? Will it be sequential, so that drafting of the bill will take place only after the review of national outcomes, or will the processes overlap and interact?

My final question is on the role of transport in the NPF. The one obvious transport indicator is the active travel one that we have just mentioned. Transport is tangentially related to a couple of others: greenhouse gas emissions and public satisfaction with public services, for which public transport is mentioned. However, it seems to be the one major area of Government responsibility that is not directly addressed. Health education, environment and economy are all categories under which groups of outcomes are measured. Transport is not one of those categories. It has that one specific indicator on active travel but in everything else it is just tangentially related to an indicator.

Given the importance of transport for our net zero ambitions, in particular, and the challenges in reducing emissions from transport compared with all other sectors, do you have any concern that the NPF is perhaps not taking transport into account to the extent that is needed in order to reach those wider outcomes?

Given that both processes feed into the same framework, how do we prevent them becoming siloed?

Thank you. I am sure that we will want to revisit that issue.

My next question goes back to Michelle Thomson’s initial line of questioning about the top-line measurements of “improving”, “maintaining” and “worsening”. I accept completely that that is the top line of what is a very detailed process and that there is much more granular data at every level beneath that. However, I am concerned that it might be a touch too simplified even for a top line.

For example, the active travel measurement is classified as “improving”, although it is very far from hitting the targets that the Scottish Government has set: 4 per cent of journeys are now made by cycling, whereas the 2020 target was for 10 per cent. Is there a danger that the “improving” classification simplifies some of the measurements slightly too much, in that a whole range of them could be improving only glacially, and not be on a trajectory towards the targets that have been set?