Hansard

I agree with everything that Susan Deacon has said. A key decision that had to be made in the delivery of the original determined to succeed strategy was whether funding should go to education authorities or should be channelled through private sector organisations such as the Confederation of British Industry and the chambers of commerce. On balance, we decided—rightly, in my view—to fund local authorities. Since then, the scale of co-operation and involvement by local authorities and schools throughout Scotland has been considerable. I am not convinced that that would have been achieved if we had decided to channel funding through the chambers of commerce.

One really important point that Susan Deacon made well is that we must strike a balance between the role of teachers and schools, and the role of the private sector. I always want to encourage greater involvement by the private sector and business leaders; the 7,000 school-business partnerships to which I referred are really important to me. I thought that the initial target of 2,000 was ambitious, so to reach 7,000 is a fantastic achievement. Of course, not all the partnerships are of the high quality that we seek. That means that we must maintain and develop our close relationship with the chambers of commerce, the CBI and businesses to ensure that we get the sort of outcome that Susan Deacon and I wish to achieve.