 Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the 25th meeting of the Equalities and Human Rights Committee for 2017. Can I ask everybody to turn phones to silent mode? For our guests, there's no need to press your button for the microphone. The audio tech guys will come to you directly. I have a few announcements to make before we get into the substance of today's meeting. Firstly, I have apologies from our convener, Christina McKelvie MSP, who will not be able to attend this meeting or meetings for the next few weeks due to health reasons. As deputy convener, I'll be chairing meetings in her absence, and I'm sure I speak for the whole committee and the staff when I wish her a speedy recovery. Secondly, I'd like to welcome Linda Fabiani MSP here today as a substitute member for the committee. Before I move into our first item of business, I'd like to take a few moments to acknowledge the very sad passing of Ian Methvin, one of our official reporters who supports our committee. Along with his colleague Simon Eilback, Ian attended our committee each week to transcribe our proceedings. Ian was one of the longest-serving members of the official report, joining the Scottish Parliament with the original group of staff back in 1998. In fact, during one of the very first committee meetings of the Parliament back in June of 1999, the then convener decided to introduce all the support staff by reading their names into the record. Turning to the official report staff, there was some debate as to whether reporters should remain anonymous. One committee member playfully remarked that official report staff don't have time to have names, they just write. The convener did read the names of both official report staff present that day into the record, and one of them was Ian. All of us know that Ian and his colleagues in the official report do so much more than just write. Like his colleagues, Ian dedicated his career to making the Scottish Parliament a success. He worked daily to deliver the founding principles of this Parliament to be open, accessible and accountable to the people of Scotland through his high-quality reporting work. That work has earned Ian and his official report colleagues the respect of us all in this place. I know that it will be very difficult for Ian's colleagues to transcribe those words into the very official report that Ian worked so hard to produce. However, just as our predecessor did 17 years ago, I think that it is fitting that we acknowledge Ian's quiet and steadfast contribution to the work of the Scottish Parliament by reading his name into the record again here today. On behalf of the convener, Christina McKelvie, and all of the members and staff of the Equalities and Human Rights Committee, I offer our sincere condolences to Ian's wife Elizabeth, his family and his professional family and friends in both the official report and across this Parliament, who are grieving now at his untimely loss. I should add that Simon Neal-Beck of the official report has asked that we record the thanks to the committee of the official report for this tribute. We move now to our first item of business today, which is to begin our scrutiny of the Scottish Government's draft budget for 2018-19. Today, we look back to the recommendations that we made in our report on last year's draft budget on disabled students and BSL users applying to and studying at Scottish universities. The aim of today's session is to assess progress being made in implementing that report. The evidence session today will therefore have BSL interpretation. I thank them, and I welcome them to the meeting, provided for people both in the public gallery and watching online. To that end, I would ask committee members and the panels that we have before us today to consider that when answering and trying to speak slowly, where possible. I welcome first to the committee Professor Sir Peter Scott, the commissioner for fair access to higher education in Scotland. I welcome commissioner Dr Kemp, interim chief executive and Fiona Burns, who is assistant director as access and outcome agreement manager, both of the Scottish funding council. Welcome very much to you both. I remind the panel that they do not need to switch on the microphones. That will be done for them. I would like just to start with a quite generous open question first to the commissioner. You have been in post 10 months now. Perhaps you could tell us how you have spent that time? I have spent that time on three main things. First of all, familiarising myself with Scottish education, I was always fairly familiar with the universities, a bit less so with the colleges, and less so again in relation to schools. I have taken every opportunity to visit institutions, accept invitations when I have been given them to come and give talks and to meet people generally. Everyone has been very generous with their time, and that has been very helpful to me. The second thing that I have done is that I decided that it would be a mistake simply to concentrate all my efforts on producing one annual report, one shot a year so to speak, and that it was important to try and maintain a kind of debate about issues of fair access. On the commissioner website, we published a number of discussion documents on key themes. Two so far, a third one is about to come out, and two more are in preparation. The idea of these discussion documents is that they present all the data, all the evidence in as accessible a form, because I would like them to be read very widely, also as objectively as possible, because I realise sometimes they raise issues on which there are different opinions. Separate from the data and evidence, I have included commentary by myself, which inevitably expresses views to a greater extent, but people can separate that quite clearly from the data and the evidence, and they can take my views or leave it depending on what they think. That is the second thing I have been doing. A third thing I have been doing of course is preparing my first annual report, which is due at the end of the year. As it is my first report, I decided it should be relatively comprehensive and cover all the key issues, many of which should be familiar to members of this committee, but also some of the big controversial issues. I do not think I should shy away from those. I think they should be openly debated in a democratic society. As it is the first time, there has not been a commissioner before and there has been no annual report. I am salving literally the blank sheet of paper, so that has been quite a challenge. Those are the three major things I have been spending my time on. I emphasise the first, visiting institutions and getting to know people in the sector. Thank you, commissioner. I am sure that myself and my colleagues will come back to you with specific questions about your work in your remit. If I can turn to the funding council, thanks again for coming. I particularly thank you for your report. It was clear that you found a synergy with the views of this committee in the work that we have done around widening access to our universities, particularly around BSL and the wider disabled community. You seem quite open to the recommendations. Can you perhaps give us a flavour of how you intend to take that work forward following this session and indeed the wider work of the committee? First of all, I am glad that you see that there is a synergy between your recommendations and what we saw as important for particularly universities to be delivering. That is very much as you can see is fed into our guidance for outcome agreements. The way that we intend to take that forward is primarily through intensification of the outcome agreements. We were here, I think, in December last year and your report came out in the early part of this year. We have only just put out the guidance for the next set of outcome agreements, but in that time between your report and that guidance, we have been working quite closely on how we intensify the outcome agreement process, which has been something that is relatively recently introduced and has been on a trajectory of improvement. We have been keen to intensify that improvement and make sure that increasingly it is delivering the outcomes as fast as possible. We have been seeing this work as very much something that we feed into that process so that we are being very clear with universities about what it is that we all see as important to deliver, and we will use the process to do that. Fionnw, is there anything that you would like to add? I do not really think that I have got anything more to add to that. I would like to open it out to my colleagues on the committee, starting with Gail Ross. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Professor Scott, I would like to get a little bit more insight into your role, if you do not mind. Can I ask you where you are based? I am not based in Scotland. I have another day job in London, and I devote three to five days a month officially to this role. In practice, I have devoted a lot more time than that. When I am based, I come either here to Edinburgh or to Glasgow. I probably go to Glasgow more often than Edinburgh unless it is for an occasion like this. In your three to five days, which I have no doubt that you do spend a lot more time than that on it, in respect of the widening access, what would you say you have been concentrating on so far? Inevitably, I think I have been concentrating on the targets that were recommended by the commission on widening access and accepted by the Government. In particular, the 20 per cent target that 20 per cent of students in 2030 in higher education should come from the 20 per cent most deprived areas in Scotland, which is a very bold ambition. Of course, the interim targets and the specific institutional targets, but I have always been very mindful that disadvantage comes in many forms. As I have said in my written statement, I have always been very personally committed to the needs of adult students and part-time students, and I think also disabled students are another important group who also suffer disadvantage. It is important, while focusing on the formal targets that have been set, that we should always pay attention to the wider range of disadvantage and see it as a whole set of inevitably, because sometimes people will suffer multiple forms of disadvantage. For example, many disabled young people, because they have been disabled and because their needs have not been adequately met at earlier stages in the education system, will, when they come to entry to higher education, have other forms of deficit, which need to be addressed. Disadvantage comes in many forms, but, as I said, initially my focus has had to be on the targets. Do you think that three to five days a month is enough, because it's a huge remit? Well, I think it depends very much on how the role is seen. The role at the moment inevitably is one where I stand as a bit outside the system. I'm an observer of it, a commentator, a critical friend, all those things. I don't have any executive functions, I don't have any regulatory functions. I think that's probably a good model, but, nevertheless, I'm aware of the demands of my time. I think I have to accept that, because I'm the first commissioner, this is, in a sense, his work in progress. I'm sure after I've now been reappointed for another year, so after two years, I think that would be probably the time for me to make any more definitive statement about whether this role works, as it's currently constructed, or whether it needs to be changed. You touched a little bit on your annual report that's due out at the end of this year. Can you give us any indication of what inclusion of disabled and BSL users will be in that report? Well, I mean, I have to admit that they won't be covered in any detail, although there is a section, or there will be a section in my annual report, that looks at other forms of disadvantage, as opposed to those that are measured by the index of multiple deprivation. So, in my annual report, there will be certainly mentions of disabled students, but I don't think at this stage that they will go into detail. Not as much detail as your report inevitably did. Having said that, I mentioned earlier the publication of discussion documents. One of the future discussion documents that we plan is to look at the other forms of disadvantage. Age, gender, disability would certainly be one of them. Ethnicity might be another. We have to try and focus attention on those other forms of disability as well, and try to build a broader kind of agenda for the future. How do you anticipate supporting the Scottish funding council and other partners around fair access for disabled and BSL users? I suppose that I envision them supporting me the other way around, probably. John and his colleagues have been very generous in their offers, so that if there are areas that I need further investigation, or we need better research evidence that they are certainly prepared to help me to provide that evidence. I think that we have established a good working relationship, and I am very happy about that. Inevitably, I think that my role gives me, because I have a degree of independence, perhaps I have a right to be a bit more forthright than the funding council itself can be. I am not sure whether that will be welcomed by John and his colleagues or not, but I certainly think that that is part of my role, perhaps to push the boundaries of debate a little bit further. That is very much mutual support. We value the advice that we get from Peter. Our Access and Inclusion Committee has engaged with Peter. Peter spoke at our Access conference earlier in the year, but often there is a role about challenging us, which is part of what Peter's annual report should be doing. It should be challenging the Government, the SFC and the institutions about where they are in delivering on the priorities. I find a very valuable support role that Peter has experienced in this area. Bouncing ideas of Peter and having Peter help to join up bits of the system and see things from slightly afar is sometimes a useful role. We are often very much in the middle of discussions with universities about where they are on detailed issues, sometimes having the slightly more helicopter view that Peter can bring from looking from outside and saying that that is good enough or not good enough can help quite a bit. If I may add by supplemental to Gail Ross's line of questioning, commissioner, it is great to have you in post. There were a number of times during the inquiry that your position was referenced by people who said that, hopefully, that will be sorted by the commissioner for fairer access. I do have a concern from your report that you have rightly been focused on getting students from SIMD areas into higher education, but you recognise that this is a new seam that you need to tap into in terms of BSL and disabled users. Can I ask on behalf of the committee that you reflect as you go forward on whether your time is sufficient for that to that end and come back to us if you need more time, if we can lobby for more time being devoted to your work on that, because I think that it is a big area. We were surprised at just how big it was and we would like to take that forward. Final supplementary, if I may, we heard testimony from witnesses in the inquiry who pointed to other institutions where they are perhaps getting access right. The University of Lancashire was a good example of being seen as a centre of excellence for BSL users. To what extent is your role about disseminating best practice both between institutions in the British Isles but also from further afield in terms of identifying best practice internationally? I think that it is certainly important that I should take a very broad view. Just yesterday, a very interesting report on models of support for students with disabilities was published, which had been commissioned by the English Higher Education Funding Council carried out by the Institute of Employment Studies. That is really quite a detailed report and there are very interesting things in that covering the governance arrangements and budgetary arrangements for supporting disabled students, the actual organisation, the support services themselves, developing the idea of inclusive provision so that disabled students are not excluded in any way and inevitably monitoring and evaluation of those initiatives. I read that with a lot of interest. I think probably more broadly in Europe, although I am less familiar with official documents there. I think that that would be good. After all, this is an issue that we all have in common. I think there has always been a risk that disability is seen as a problem for the students themselves. They have disabilities. The problem, I think, really needs to be turned the other way around. The problem is our perception of them and our ability to actually accommodate the needs they have. I think that it is very important that institutions see it in that proactive way. I think, as you said, many institutions do already. There is plenty of good practice to draw on here. I believe that Mary Fee has a direct supplementary question. Thank you. It was about access to universities through the application process, and I am grateful that the convener is letting me in. We heard when we were taking evidence that there is a very standardised form of application process. Some students with disabilities have difficulty going through that process, because it is in one format. One university said to us that it would take applications in alternative forms, where it was considered an appropriate adjustment. The use of that language gives me some concern. It has pushed back to say that it should be UCAS that looks at different types of application processes. I wonder particularly when Professor Scott, is that something that you would be able to look at and make specific recommendations about? Clearly, to open access to young people with disabilities, the application process would seem to be the automatic place to go? There are probably two aspects to that. One is, as you say, UCAS is a UK-wide body. The procedures that it has adopted in a sense would have to be negotiated across the whole of the UK. Then, of course, there is the way in which individual universities would use those applications and any supplementary material that they might need. I think the point you make is of a fair one. I have to say that I cannot claim any great expertise in the actual form of admissions and how user-friendly they are for a disabled student. I know that universities make major efforts to accommodate the needs of disabled students when they have actually become students themselves in terms of accommodation, in terms of access to lecturers and tutorials and so on, but the point that you make is very important. They have to be there in the first place, and if there is unnecessary barrier created there, that is obviously highly undesirable. I do not think that there is any lack of good will, but when you have a distributed system where some responsibility lies with UCAS, some with the individual university and within the university between the admissions office and the actual way that decisions are taken by individual departments on emitting particular students, there is a de-scope for some kind of buck passing there and it is not clear where the responsibility is. That is actually one of the major points made in the report that I just mentioned to the English funding council that there should be champions, there should be a single source where these things are actually decided within institutions. Mr Kemper, do you want to comment? I agree with that point that Peter just made, there should be a single source. I would be concerned if too much was done at the individual institution level and there was too much different practice in different institutions, because most students applying through UCAS apply to more than one institution. It is a very standardised UK system, and one of the challenges that we have found in other aspects of the application system, particularly contextualised admissions, is that if the students do not know how their application is going to be treated, what special cases will be taken into account and so on, they will often not say it and the application might be unsuccessful. If it is very much down to the institution perhaps taking those things into account or not, the student might not necessarily know that. The more it is done through the UCAS formal system, the better. The challenge with that is that that is a UK-wide, very big, slick system where it is quite hard to tweak, so that makes quick change more difficult. In the long run, that is probably better for potential students and that they then have transparency and clarity about the system and what kinds of things will be taken into account that might not happen if it is done at an institutional level. That said, there are special cases at an institutional level that you would want to see them react to as well. I think that getting that balance right is important. We have been asked to set up a student group that we are in the process of doing it. It will be led by BSL users and will include BSL users, but my point of informing you about that is that UCAS is aware of that. We have regular updates and meetings with them. They are aware that this is an area of work that is coming up and they will more than likely be a key member within that group to take forward the very points that you raised. I believe that Linda Fabiani had his supplementary on this as well. Directly involved with this. First of all, a substitute to this committee has not been involved in much of the discussion, but there was something, Mr Scott, in your submission that jumped out at me when I read it, which was point eight about the committee recommendation of a connection between the institutions commitments and the outcome agreements with the Scottish Funding Council, which I thought was interesting and you agreed with that, Mr Scott. I would like both sides' view of how that could work, because one of my concerns—I can see that and I can also buy into the fact that we need to change the culture in institutions as well, which is also mentioned. I have a concern that I also have across many institutional walks of life, which is that, when you set something up rigidly, you can very often have all the boxes ticked and you are not actually getting a qualitative analysis of what is happening underneath that. Is that just a general view on your thinking behind that and how it could work? The specific comment that I was trying to make in relation to outcome agreements is that they really serve two purposes. I think that they are really excellent in terms of trying to get agreement between the institution and the funding council and, in a sense, the public interest more broadly about the overall strategic direction that the institution is going to take and its priorities. They work really well in that respect, but also they have a second purpose and that is to monitor particular areas, and this might be one, disability, fair access more generally is another. There will be other ones as well. There will be a whole range of them. Striking the right balance between the outcome agreement as an effective overall strategic setting document and a monitoring document in relation to particular initiatives and programmes struck me a difficult one to make. In terms of culture change, though, the outcome agreement is a good way in which I think one can gain the commitment of the institution at its most senior level to taking issues really seriously and therefore developing a kind of mechanism by which culture change can take place. There is a risk, as you say, that otherwise it becomes a kind of box ticking exercise. Have you assessed this programme? Do you have an action plan? Do you tick them all? It is not always clear what it adds up to. There was a very interesting article in Herod recently by someone from Clyde College. I am afraid that I should have checked the details before I came to this meeting. She was making the point that, from an institution's point of view, often there seem to be lots of different boxes. There is disability over here. There is recruiting students from areas of multiple deprivation. There are various other bits and pieces. It is not always clear how they are all added up together. Ultimately, that is a responsibility for the senior leadership of the institution, the principal and his or her immediate colleagues. However, at the mid-level of an institution or the grassroots of an institution, it can appear or very, very separated in a way. It is important to try and work towards a more coherent picture, which is the point that I was trying to make about being more proactive. Our outcome agreements are called outcome agreements. What we are keen to see is shifts in the outcomes for students in equalities and other areas. To some extent, in the ideal world, we would not need to worry about all the tick box or making sure that they have a policy and that they have done this and that they have separate returns and so on. We recognise that we are not in the ideal world, but we need to keep on thinking about outcomes rather than seeing success as an institution that has a separate beautiful glossy policy on every single aspect of equalities. They have ticked all the boxes and they have done all the awareness rays and they have done this and that. However, the outcomes for students still are not moving. That would not be success in my book. We need to look at the outcomes. Those things, which we occasionally require tick boxes and policies and so on in the outcome agreement process, need to be seen as stepping stones to changing the outcome. If they are not doing that, they are not doing the right thing. Very much what we have tried to do in the outcome agreement process is to see equalities as one big issue where access is not just about socioeconomic access. Gender is a huge issue in universities and colleges in a fairly complex way sometimes. Seeing all those things as one issue and trying to avoid a series of granular, separate policies where issues of gender are separate from issues of social classes, which are separate from disability, in reality, those things all intersect and should be seen as part of the same challenge. As Peter said, there have been issues about the amount of reporting that is required and the amount of separate reports on separate groups. We always need to keep an eye on that to make sure that we are not overburning institutions, but we also need to make sure that they are seeking to address all of the outcomes for all the different groups. It is a difficult balance to strike, but it is one that we need to keep on looking at, but we need to keep that focus on the outcomes. Thanks to the work of the committee and the latest outcome agreement guidance, we have made a real strong effort to make sure that the public sector equality duties are reminded that that is the starting point for any equality initiative or work that you are doing, that there has been a very strong and thorough mainstreaming process that has gone through at that institution. Once you have that at that point, you then consider your gender action plan, anything else that you are being asked through the funding council Scottish Government anywhere else, so that it has good intersectionality with it and ensures that it considers all of the protected characteristics and does not get focused away with just considering gender on its own, because that is certainly not what we want to achieve. Thank you very much. Thank you, Linda. Jamie, do you want to come in on this topic? Thank you, convener. It is probably very relevant to the comment that Fiona just made. Professor Scott, in your written submission, you used the phrase that you want to highlight the risk that focusing too tightly on the index of multiple deprivation targets may lead to efforts to tackle other forms of disadvantage being downgraded. In the future, I hope to be able to broaden out my work to cover all forms of disadvantage. This might be a good time to expand on what those other forms of disadvantage might be and, indeed, how you think we could combat that risk of those being lost and the narrow focus on the index of deprivation. Yes, well, I do not want to be misunderstood. I may have exaggerated. I mean, I think that SIMD is a very good index of multiple deprivation. It is certainly superior to the equivalent one that is used in England, although it is available across the UK. The polar system, it is much more fine grain. What I have really had in mind is that the focus is very much on young entrants. If an institution has to meet its targets, its focus or its efforts on meeting a particular target, inevitably it will prioritise recruitment of certain groups of students and, by definition, pay less attention to other students. I am very aware, for example, that there are many people who seek to enter higher education, say, in their mid-twenties. They may have caught up a bit on any deficits they had in school education. They may have been remotivated for a whole number of reasons. The risk is under the current targets, so they do not really count. That is one group. I am very concerned about the needs of part-time study. To some degree, I think that the definition we currently have between who is a full-time student and who is a part-time student is a pretty artificial one. Increasingly, I think that students want to study in more flexible ways. Again, there is a risk that we have imposed a rather rigid template here. If you fall outside that, again, you do not count to meeting a target. Although targets are very important in terms of measuring progress and particularly measuring comparative performance between institutions, there are always unintended consequences of targets. Those were the kind of issues that I had in mind. Disability would be another group that is currently not covered by those targets, although care experience students are included in that target. I am simply saying that, although one will always have to define the areas that one is focusing on in the short run, one should always keep that under review because there may be other groups that their needs should become more prominent and should be reflected more fairly. Those are the kind of ideas that I had. If I may, we will move on to another line of questioning now. I would like to bring in Annie Wells, who would take us there. Good morning, panel. The route that I want to get down is out of the mental health route, because we know that students who disclose mental health issues have the lowest outcomes when it comes to it. I want to find out that there are two sides to it. What is being done to create parity between the support provided for those with mental health issues and those with physical disabilities? How does that extend into staff training? I will put the next question there. What is being done to encourage those who have not disclosed mental health issues to come forward and get the support that they need at university or college? There are quite a lot of questions in there. I think that the reason we are being a bit hesitant is that some of those about staff training and so on are probably better addressed to the universities themselves. What we have been trying to do is focus on the outcomes for those students, which, as you say, can be particularly challenging. Fiona, do you want to talk about the outcome agreement guidance and how it covers that? We monitored it very closely and we are, as you say, very aware that that group has the lowest outcomes and that is consistent for both colleges and universities. We are very concerned about it. As a first step, we have been working with ARC Scotland to see if we can work with them on some possible training. They have put a funding proposal into it that has not been considered by my senior management team but has all my fingers and toes crossed. I believe that training will be the most impactful thing that you can do to try to help people with mental health and to seek the help that they need as and when they require it. We have done a lot of work in the college system and we need to replicate that within the university system. I hope that the college system will start to see a turnaround in the outcomes, because we are investing heavily in that area. The last point is that we are working with anybody in the Scottish Government who is working in this field. We are part of the framework for disabled young people and children. We have become involved in the disability delivery plan. We want to connect up more with the Scottish Government's mental health strategy. We have real hopes that that will start to turn things around culturally and socially, as well as within colleges and universities. We are trying to tie in to other work. I am really hopeful that this training is a first point to try and address the point that you raised. Would anybody else on the panel like to cover that? A general comment, I think. Disability covers a very wide range of conditions. Some are very obvious and visible. Blind people, deaf people and physically their movements are restricted in some ways. They are a very clear group. There is no difficulty about identifying them and beginning the process of meeting their needs. There are other areas where we are much more conscious of dyslexia among students nowadays and deal with that much better. Mental health is still a more difficult area because it covers a spectrum of people who are really seriously, mentally ill. That becomes an issue of how universities work with the health service in dealing with that. At a perhaps lower level, many universities suffer from stress and depression, which can be a prelude to more serious mental conditions, not always. That is more difficult to identify and there is a risk that that might be taken less seriously. However, I am certainly not from conversations with students. I think that is an emerging issue among students, the levels of stress and depression among students. I think that this is a topic that we should pick up with the next panel as well and hear from institutions themselves. I would like to move on and bring in Mary Finoe. I think that my question is… Oh, you've already asked your question, I understand. David Torrance, then. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Can I ask how the Scottish Findled Council and all our partners are supporting the commissioner? I'm supporting Peter. Well, I hope. When Peter was appointed, I met Peter and basically said, you tell us what help you need, and we will try to ensure that we deliver it. Now, Peter is supported by some colleagues in the Government, as well as having access to support from us. I think that Peter will probably say this as well. Peter has the dual role of joining things up and spreading good practice and being a critical friend, but the critical friend is important as well. Peter needs to report annually on how the system in Scotland is doing, how my organisation, how the Government, how universities and colleges are delivering access. We need to be careful that we are not supporting Peter to the extent that he is not free to criticise us. We try to keep that correct balance between being here to help Peter in any way that he asks for, but recognising that part of Peter's role is to say that the funding council is either doing enough or not doing enough or is doing the right things or the wrong things, and similarly with Government. We've had an open door. Anything that Peter wants Fiona and her team to work on, we've been open to that. We've been seeing our work through our access and inclusion committee and our annual access conference as something that aligns with Peter's work and Peter's being to these forums. I think that we'll be interested to see what Peter's view is. No, I feel that I have a very good relationship and good support from John and his colleagues. As he says, it may well be that in my annual report I will make recommendations which, although not necessarily directly critical of the funding council, might push them in a direction that they don't particularly want to go just at this moment. I think that I will also make recommendations to the Government and they may also feel the same, I'm not sure, and of course to institutions. I think my role requires me to strike a balance of pushing at the frontiers all the time, trying to push thinking forward, trying occasionally for people to think outside the box, think that things are actually possible, which they previously thought were not possible, while not being so unreasonable that my views are totally ignored by people. I have to say that I've had a lot of experience as the head of an institution. I was a member of the Board of the English Higher Education Funding Council. I chaired the equivalent of the Access and Inclusion Committee, so I think I have a good sense of the balance between being rooted in what is possible and what's practical, but nevertheless being trying to be adventurous and innovative at the same time. In a sense, you and others will judge. Totally on a different subject, Brexit and the effect that it will have on university applications, how do you think that will pan out, especially if it could be a possible erosion of all the quality laws that we've fought for? You mean that the longer term effect does not have European law? That would be an issue that would be very much for Governments, both in Scotland and the UK, to decide which bits are in the long term. Once things are repatriated, what happens to those? It's not really an area that I'm that well qualified to speculate on, not least because there's quite a lot of uncertainty about how these things will happen and when and what the impact would be. There are quite a lot of potential impacts of Brexit on the university system to do with research funding and work is being done to try and reduce that uncertainty. Given that around about 10 per cent of the entrance to Scottish universities are from the rest of the European Union, excluding the UK, that number in the most recent UCAS figures has gone down a bit. Actually, in the context of access, it went down by almost the same number as the number of students from MD 20 went up. There are a whole series of consequences there that weren't necessarily ever thought through as something that was going to be a consequence of Brexit. However, as we work through this and some of the uncertainties go, some of the issues that you've raised about what are the equality laws that we're working with, they'll be very much a matter for the UK and Scottish Governments. At the moment, we're continuing to work within the current laws, but we see, as Fiona suggests, equality and access is all very much part of one philosophy rather than something that's very granular. Thank you. It's just a very brief supplementary. You raised a very interesting point about the loss of research funding from the EU, because it would seem to me—and I may be taking quite a simplistic view—that, if we lose the research funding, that has the potential to have quite a significant trickle-down effect on a number of different things—research development, applications and even job opportunities for young people in Scotland. Is that a fair point? Yes. The implications of changes to the level of research funding, some of which come from Europe, could be—the research that happens in our universities does help to drive the economy through the innovation centres and so on. If you're doing less of it, that's potentially a bad thing. However, work is being done at the moment through the Scottish and UK Governments to look at how that can be protected so that, even if it's not coming from Europe, there are some schemes that the Government could potentially pay a subscription to be part of. There could be other ways of replacing some of that research funding. There's quite a lot of uncertainties there, but we're very keen that the capacity of our universities to do research and have access to staff, some of whom are from Europe, to do that research continues. I could probably give a slightly less diplomatic answer than John, as I'm more independent. Obviously, Brexit will have a whole series of very negative consequences. One thing that is very unclear is that a lot of our laws to do with many of the issues that relate to the work of this committee are ultimately rooted in European law currently, although the plan apparently is to incorporate all those into UK law and things will continue, at least for the moment. There was a risk that some of those gains that have been made as a result of European initiatives in the past 40 years might be lost. The greater risk, I think, is that this might be rather imperceptible. It might be in small details here and there. It might be quite difficult to pick up the larger picture. That's a general threat, I feel. As John says, in relation to research, it would be open to the UK to continue to contribute as Switzerland does, as Norway does. It would actually make very good economic sense because the UK institutions currently get more out in terms of research funding than the UK puts in substantially more so. Whether the other European Union countries would continue to agree that, I'm not sure, but the major area, I think, is, of course, the implications, the climate of public opinion. If the UK is seen as a more xenophobic country, less welcoming to people from other countries, there will be greater reluctance for other Europeans to come and make their careers here. Never mind those who come as students here. Finally, there is the issue that the Scottish Government will have to face that currently other European Union students, apart from those from the rest of the UK, are included in the cap of funded places. They will no longer be included in that, so the Government will have a series of decisions about what to do with those funded places that have become free. Thank you for risking the wrath of the Daily Mail there, Sir Peter, and your candour in that. I think that you'll find synergy with many of the panel members here, the committee members here. As we move into our last five minutes or so with you, I wonder if the panel could reflect on an issue that we covered quite extensively in our inquiry, and that's the subject of contextualised admissions whereby grades are weighted against particular social challenges that individual students might have faced. Whether those are being applied universally, whether there's consistency in how the contextualised admission process works, and whether it can be improved. Perhaps John, if you could kick off on that. Yes, SFC published a report on that earlier this week, which was a report that we'd commissioned some time ago from the University of Durham. It was looking at how contextualised admissions are used in Scotland and what the scope is for improvement. In some ways, it was trying to answer the very question that you set there. We published that report this week, and what that report says is that there is scope for improvement. It provides, I think, a very robust evidence base for why contextualised admissions are a way of ensuring that you get the students with the greatest talent into universities. Where you have to make decisions about which students to take in and which students you can't take in, I think it should be based on those with the greatest talent and potential. Contextualised admissions is a way of doing that. We would want universities to be using that to the fullest extent. Some are doing that. I think that there is a nervousness among many universities about how to apply that, because it's a controversial area. If you've got high demand for your courses and you're having to say yes or no, saying it purely on exam grades looks fair and transparent, it's nice and easy to understand. If you're saying that you're weighing those exam grades differently for different students, to the student who might have the higher exam grades, who's going to find it difficult to get in, that will look unfair. You will need to have a robust evidence base underpinning that to explain why you've taken that decision. I think that there is now an evidence base there that allows us to do that. Many institutions would want to see that in their own context and how it applies in their own universities and so on, but sometimes that evidence is hard to get because they don't have many students who they've admitted with the lower entry grade. Part of what our research that we've published this week does is give them that. We will be, through the outcome agreement process and discussions with universities, asking them to do more on contextualised admissions. Particularly in the more selective institutions, that is a way of widening access and getting the best talent in. Universities Scotland have also done a lot of really good work in this area on the back of the commission on widening access report and are looking at more consistent measures that could be used right across the system. They're also considering a better language that could be used right across the system as well, appreciating that it's really difficult for individual parents and their children and families to understand contextualised admissions and what it might mean for them and what that means in individual institutions. There is a real movement of travel that's happening that can be started with the commission on widening access. Hopefully it's helped by the research that we have published and can be progressed through the outcome agreement system. Sir Peter, would you like to? Yes, I think I would support everything that's been said. Contextualised admissions are a key issue. I think we should always remember that the responsibility of universities where they admit students is to try and assess their potential. They're not actually rewarding current levels of achievement because there are lots of reasons why people have different current levels of achievement. I think three points about contextualised admissions. First, I think that there should be a fairly common agreement about what standard indicators should be used. I don't think that every university should make up its own system weighing different things in different ways. I think that that makes it extremely difficult for applicants to understand. Secondly, I think that it should be much clearer what use this contextual information is put to. There's a risk that it becomes a bit of a black box. Students know that these factors have somehow been taken into account, but has it helped them? I mean, has it guaranteed them a place? Has it guaranteed them an interview? Has it simply guaranteed them some consideration? Often they don't really know. My final point is that—and it was an important issue raised in the report from the University of Durham, which John just referred to—I think that we need to look at the issue of risk. If we expect all students, regardless of their current levels of attainment and their current previous experience of secondary education, to continue to progress and to get exactly the same degree outcomes as a student who comes from a very privileged background who's had a really excellent secondary education and had really excellent grades, that's probably unrealistic. We have to assess what is a reasonable risk that an institution should take. I sometimes feel that in Europe generally, certainly compared to the United States, where I spent some time, we are obsessed by wastage. We regard any form of wastage as waste. I think that in the United States they see it very much in terms of the glass half full, rather than the glass half empty. That experience, although the student may not have completed their immediate goals, is something that they can build on for the future. I think that we need to adopt much more of that approach here in the UK and in Scotland. Thank you. That brings us nicely to the end of our time. I would like to thank each of you for your time this morning and for your contributions. They have been very illuminating. As ever, if there is something that you would like to have told us but forgot, or if there's something that develops over time, please do keep in touch with the committee. We'll be keeping this dialogue open, so thank you again for your contribution. I'd like to suspend proceedings for five minutes to allow to change a panel under comfort break. Thank you.