 Welcome and good morning to this, the 12th and final meeting of the Equality and Human Rights Committee of 2016. Can I make the usual request that mobile phones are switched off or on to flight mode? Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Our first item of business today is to consider whether to take correspondence from the Commission of Parliamentary Reform and review of our work programme in private and future meetings. Does our committee agree to do that? Excellent. Thank you very much. Moving on to agenda item 2, which is our substantive piece of work today, which is on the draft budget and the focus of our evidence today is to hear from the Funding Council, which provides funds to 19 universities in Scotland. We will be hearing from the Scottish Government a bit later this morning. I am delighted to have on the panel with us this morning Dr John Kemp, who is an interim chief executive executive and Fiona Burns, who is assistant director of access and outcome agreements management at the Scottish Funding Council. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for joining us this morning. You will have a clear insight, because we are almost at the end of our budget scrutiny of where we have been going with the issues that we have been looking at. We have obviously been looking at the budget as an equalities with an equalities focus. The issue that we have been looking at is widening access specifically for people with disabilities and people who use BSL as their first language. John, I think that I will kick off with you first, if you do not mind, because one of the things that we need to set the scene from the Funding Council is about outcome agreements and how outcome agreements come about and where you are in that process, because you are just at the stage where you are renewing them now. What aspects of those outcome agreements would require universities to ensure that they have widened access, and it is not just about some of the softer aspects of disabilities. It is maybe some of the more complex aspects as well, John. Okay. Outcome agreements were introduced around about four years ago, and they were a way of linking the funding that we give to universities and to colleges too. There is a very similar system in colleges with priorities from the Government and from the SFC. That includes widening access for people with disabilities. We issue guidance to universities on what we would like to see in an outcome agreement, and that contains some measures that we would want them to use in demonstrating how their meeting priorities are. On disabilities and other protected characteristics, what we used to do was ask them to reflect on the protected characteristics where there was an imbalance in their institution and where they felt and we agreed they needed to take action and then reflect that in the outcome agreement. In recent years, in the most recent guidance, we firmed that up a bit because it used to be that institutions very much could pick and choose whether a particular protected characteristic would lead to a measure in their outcome agreement. We felt that that needed to be firmed up a bit more in the current guidance so that there was more of an impetus on them looking at all the protected characteristics and being clear of that. The latest guidance is a bit clearer on that point that we want them to demonstrate that they are looking at all the protected characteristics and taking the correct action. The outcome agreements that are being negotiated now in Fiona is an outcome agreement manager, as well as head of access. Our ones for 17 to 18, but also probably in most cases the subsequent two years, have a slightly different set of guidance from the ones that we have heard up until now. We have the early drafts of those outcome agreements in, but we have not finalised those with institutions that are done after the budget setting process. In some ways, those outcome agreements are very much a way of linking the shared priorities that Government, the funding council and others have on equalities and other things with the funding that we give to universities. One of the things that we have picked up quite clearly is that in some universities there is a bigger focus on equalities than others. You are right when you drill into that, what does that actually mean? I know that the funding council took a very proactive role in this summer about gender balance in colleges and universities. I am wondering how you could incorporate much more closely to some of the outcome agreements that are required in order to provide access to people who may have different or complex needs. It seems to be for the evidence that we have heard that there is very good provision if you have dyslexia, for instance, but if you have got something that is a bit more complicated, whether that is physical access to a building for some universities, that is posing to be a problem for others. It is not. For people in particular, one of the aspects that we learn is people who use British Sign Language as their first language. How do we ensure that the policy that is going forward creates the opportunities for people to have that access at the need? You referred to the gender action plan that we launched in the summer. Perhaps that is the kind of approach that we need on other protected characteristics, but in this particular disability. There are areas of very good provision in the universities, and there are some cases where they have picked up the issue and are running with it themselves. You are correct, and it comes out of the evidence that the committee has had submitted as part of this investigation, that it is a mixed picture that some particular disabilities and particular institutions in the story are less good. It is perhaps something that we and the funding council need to reflect on, how we give a bigger push to making the best things more common across the sector and ensuring that some of the more tricky issues. We have to acknowledge that they are tricky. Sometimes you are dealing with quite small numbers and so on, and part of the reason that a lot of the action is perhaps on dyslexia and so on is that there are big numbers in dyslexia in a way that there are in some of the other groups. We need to think about how we give a renewed push to this particular aspect of equality and making sure that it is something that is at the forefront of institutions minds as we refresh outcome agreements now. The current guidance does a bit of that, but I would accept that there are other things that could be done. The key things that we heard last week and the week before was about the differences even between schools and faculties within universities as well. One aspect that I had spoken to some of the universities about last week was about staff training. Whether that staff training was mandatory and what was the take-up like? There was an admission, yes, some people go and staff training, but a lot don't, especially a qualities trainer or specific training around about specific disabilities like BSL. I wondered whether there was any space on the outcome agreements to ensure that elements of staff training like that become mandatory because some of the evidence that we have had in written evidence seems to be about academic staff, not really the ethos of the institution, or the student bodies or whatever, but it seems to be direct one-to-one academic staff. In my mind, that can be fixed quite easily with a decent staff training programme, but it needs to be mandatory. I accept that that would be a useful way forward. The challenge for the funding council is that we have outcome agreements that we try to keep as strategic documents that are agreed with the institution. The question would be whether the most appropriate way to make staff training more mandatory and get more of it is through the outcome agreement or some other method. What we in the funding council can do through the outcome agreement is to focus on the outcomes that we want from that. I would be slightly resistant to be too specific in the outcome agreements about the numbers of staff through training. One of the risks is that you can put measures in an outcome agreement that do not tell you how much that is affecting your students and so on. I am very open to the point that staff training is part of the solution and we need to look at ways of making sure that it is happening. We need to think about how we put that in the outcome agreements in a way that is meaningful and does not lead to just loads of numbers about people who have been on training but not necessarily looking at what outcome that is having for students. Fiona, do you want to add anything? Reflecting on that point, we undertook a full review of the college system and what was called extended learning support funding. The main finding that came out from all of that was people that help people. That is where you will get the biggest impact on any finance that you put in to help people with disabilities. Another finding that came out from that was sometimes the complexity of conditions that are being presented, particularly in the college system. It means that on-going training is essential for academic staff to enable them to best meet the needs of increases in autism, for example dyslexia or the combination of the two or other conditions on top of that. I absolutely agree that good CPD is not the way to go. The needs are increasing at such a rate that is essential. I get the sense that the university sector is investing in that in the system and are very aware, particularly around mental health, of the increases in that and the need to invest in their staff to make sure that they can provide the best teaching possible. We have some very good examples of that. Willie Coffey. Good morning, convener. I wonder if I could take you right back to the start and to the admissions process itself. Our students spend maybe five or six years at school getting their higher advance higher and so on and then they apply to university and then they encounter this personal statement process that they have to get through. Is there any monitoring of that process to ensure that it complies with the principles of equality of access, not just for people with disabilities but right across the population? You mean of the personal statement aspect of it. There is no monitoring by SFC of how that particular part of admissions is used. Recently, as part of the work that the commission for widening access was doing at Fiona might want to come in later on this, we did look quite closely at how admissions was working, particularly because we were interested in knowing the extent to which institutions were using contextualised admissions and looking at the circumstances of a student so that they weren't just looking at the number of hires they got but were looking at the context in which the student got those hires. That usually means in the context of, are they from a school with a very low progression to university or are they from a particular postcode and so on, but it can also be something, the context in which somebody got a particular set of hires can be affected by disability as well. What we found was that the personal statement was not always used by every institution that often it's a part of the UCAS system and many institutions are using it. It's not a huge part of the selection criteria in most. If you're going to operate a contextualised admission system that looks at the whole student and understands the context in which they got the grades they got, then perhaps it needs to be done more. As part of the implementation of the commission for widening access work, we will be working and the Government will be working with institutions to make sure that contextualised admissions becomes more widespread and the factors that are taken into account are broader than the ones that are currently used. We don't currently monitor how admissions are done in institutions. Fiona, do you want to say any more on that? Just that it is a recommendation of the commission on widening access that we take forward, a full review of what they call non-academic factors. I was part of the secretary for the commission on widening access, so I was aware of the work that went into that. There was an expert group that was around admissions, so it was admissions staff. Just as John said, there was variance of how that particular element was used. I'm also aware from a student perspective how much time and effort can go into trying to provide a good personal statement. It is important that all that effort is being put in, that it is being considered equally across all our institutions. On the other side, there was evidence that was given to suggest that quite often private schools etc. I know exactly the right information to put into a personal statement to give somebody an edge. Therefore, there was a bit of unfairness comparative to other students. It needs to be looked at to make sure that personal statements can be considered fairly equally. It provides additional information to help consideration in the admissions system. We are looking forward to that work and we fully agree with the recommendation that the commission came up with. Some universities use personal statements in the admissions process. For those who do, how on earth can we be sure that what they are doing and who they are admitting and who they are not admitting? How do we know that that's fair if there's no analysis of this? The best kinds of contextualised admissions systems will be based on evidence that shows that if you take in a student who might have a couple of grades lower than other students that you're taking in but they're from a particular type of school or whatever, there is evidence that, by the end of their university course, they will perform as well as ones with a couple of grades higher from a different type of school. In the perfect world, there is evidence that that works and often institutions have done it for their own entrance so that they can be quite clear they're being fair in taking that student who's got lower grades than this student because they know the outcome will probably be the same because they have evidence that, in the past, when they've taken people with those grades from that type of school, they've performed well. You will have seen from the submissions you had in your own call for evidence it's not at all widespread and I'm not sure that any are doing that. Universities are using the personal statements and issues about disability in making contextualised admissions decisions. Part of encouraging universities to do that would be building the evidence base of the kind that I've talked about which tends to be about types of school rather than the personal statements. It's more challenging to do that but it's worth exploring whether it can be done so that you can then make very robust contextualised admissions decisions that can be taken on board that kind of background information. Sometimes it will come down to the training of the people making the admissions decisions and how they use the information that's in the UCAS form to its full extent and they're not just looking at the higher grades. My last point on this, convener, is that two students, for example, who've got exactly the same passes, hires, advance hires or whatever, applying to the same university from different towns in Scotland and one gets accepted and one doesn't. The only basis in which they can conclude there's a difference is the personal statement. How on earth do those two students and their families know that one was treated fairly compared to the other if their passes are exactly the same? Where it's working well, a university will make it clear as part of the admissions process that it has a contextualised admissions system and the flags it will take on board that might make it. Universities have hard decisions to make, they can't admit everyone and even when they can admit people it's not often to the course they want. They do have hard decisions to make, but if you have a contextualised admissions system that is based on evidence that if I take somebody with four A's and the higher from that kind of school, somebody with two A's and two B's from a school with very low progression or whether there's other flags you can attach to the student, the evidence is that somebody who's done that well from that school is likely to thrive at university. When it's based on evidence, universities will publish that up front and make it clear that they make contextualised offers based on that kind of evidence so it's very open and transparent. In that case you might get two students who have exactly the same set of grades and one gets in and one doesn't because they're using contextualised admissions. Where it becomes more challenging is if there isn't a contextualised admissions system where you monitor externally how the personal statement is used as opposed to something that's more evidence based on the postcode or type of school. The other thing that we're also doing is we've commissioned some research to look into contextualised admissions in much more detail because we're aware of excellent provisions at universities who do contextualised admissions, most do these days, who do contextualised admissions, but one of the issues is this is not necessarily entire transparency and consistency across all of them. So one of the things we wanted to develop was a map of contextualised admissions right across Scotland and to advise us as to which were the best factors to use, the best factors to take into consideration so that we can then advise our university sector accordingly. So that work is being undertaken at the moment and should report early next year. OK, thank you very much. Mary. Good morning to you. I wanted to follow on and ask a few questions about support packages that are available because in the evidence that we've heard and the sessions that we've had, there is an acknowledgement that equality for all in fairness and support should be freely given and everyone should be supported. But that's where it ends. If you have, for example, dyslexia, you are supported through university. If you have more complex needs, it's far more difficult to get the on-going support, the package of care that you need. And often people are put off by going through that whole process. We've also heard that the application for additional funding for support can't be made until an offer from university has been made and accepted. So quite often the funding doesn't come with entrance to university. What can be done to ensure that universities fully support individuals, do proper assessments and regularly assess to make sure that people are constantly getting the support that they need? I'll let Fiona come in with some of the detail later. Some of the support packages that you've talked about aren't ones funded by us, they're funded by SAS. But I think that the issue about timing and making sure that there isn't a huge gap between the acceptance and the kind of covering the package in place is something that is important and should be looked at. The more complex area is how you make sure that every student is supported. Sometimes we are talking about relatively small numbers because there are people with complex conditions or combinations of conditions that might not appear in that department of that university every year. Having a responsive system is partly about making sure that the institutions are prepared and trained for the generality of issues if there is a real generality, but also a responsive system if you know some students are coming with particular needs that you can put in the training in place and sometimes adaptations as well quickly in order to prepare for those students. That is about having systems in the university that are geared up to do that so that it doesn't come as a surprise halfway through the year that you suddenly notice that that student needs a ramp or that student is blind. It is planned for and prepared for. There are some very good examples of courses being designed, the deaf performance course that Conservatoire and so on, specifically designed, but in most cases people will be choosing courses that aren't specifically going to be designed for students with disabilities. It is going to have to be a responsive system in universities where they are using the resource that they get from the funding council in order to make sure that every student's need is met. I think that that needs to be responsive as well as preparatory on the wider range of needs. Sometimes you will have to respond quite quickly to Cosh. We're going to have to do something about where that course is located or what we're going to do to that building because we now do have students who have different needs. Fiona, do you want to say more on that? I suppose just to reflect that we are members of the new student support review group that's looking into issues such as this. We've already fed in quite a lot of detail in relation to students with disabilities, particularly the point that you made yourself about the time gap between them getting the support that they need once they're in the university system. On the whole, our system is about a rights-based model. There is an assumption of need there that there will be students with need and that is the university's duty by law, obviously, to meet those needs. There are, of course, the examples that you outlined where that is particularly tricky and how that can better be done. I really look forward to working with the student support review group on that to see that time gap. It seems almost from the evidence that we heard that most educational institutions and universities are reactive in the support that they give rather than being proactive. It's about encouraging them to become more proactive about what they do. I think that it needs to be a bit of both. They need to be proactive and prepared so that they have systems that assume that they can meet need and often that is something that's always there. Sometimes you will suddenly have a couple of students with disabilities that weren't there last year and you do have to react. Reacting quickly, being proactively prepared to react if that doesn't sound like a contradiction, but if you know what I mean, so that you are looking at what the need is each year and are able to get things in place quickly is important. Can I just ask you that the submission that you've given us has been very helpful? In paragraph 6, you say that under representation is likely to be the result of a number of factors such as lower attainment at schools for pupils with additional support needs. When I first read that, it seems a bit of a sweeping statement. If you have additional support needs, you will have lower attainment. What other reasons are there, or have you done any work to find out what other reasons there are for the lower attainment levels? Is it just about the support packages that are put in place for young people when they are at school? No, I think that there will be other reasons. Interestingly, we fund both colleges and universities, and the figures are different in the two sectors. I think that some of them are just about displacement in a lot of people with disabilities. The numbers are higher in colleges, so because of that, they are obviously going to college instead of university, to some extent. That is a sweeping statement. I accept that. It is one that we probably need to dig into more deeply. Some of that is about the data that we do not, as far as I am aware, have very good data on individual types of disability at school and how that relates to flow-through to university and college. It is an area that we need to look more closely at the data and accept that that was a bit of a sweeping statement. The actual reference relates to students in the school system, according to the Scottish Government statistics, where the student has an individual educational learning plan or a co-ordinated support plan of some nature, and when you look at the attainment of those students comparative to their peers, it is quite significantly lower, but it does not actually break it down by type of disability. I am aware that those figures are available in the Scottish Government, and we have been working with them, particularly in the college system, to see if there is a way that we can link the two sets of data up better so colleges can future-proof themselves, if you like, for the students that are coming through the school system at the moment. There is absolutely no reason that that same process could not happen with the university system as well. To make the data more available to both sectors about specifically who the pupils are in the school system at the moment that they are coming through and what they may or may not need from the college and university system if they choose to stay in Scotland, of course. Obviously, a young person that is in the school system that has additional support needs and has a package in place of support that they need to get them through the school, I am not sure if it happens and if it does not, I am not quite sure why it does not. I understand that there are concerns about the sharing of data, but it would seem that if the support plan that is in school is used almost as a basis for the support that they need when they go on to higher education and then that support package could be built on. Would that not streamline the process slightly? Absolutely. One of the key issues that happens is that when you leave school you are an adult so you have the right not to declare and that actually is quite common that students will choose not to declare and I am presuming that it is not a visible disability but they will choose not to declare and sometimes it only becomes apparent when they start to really need the support. Particularly when it comes to exam time for example and the pressures come up and there is a recognition that I need help at this point and that is always a difficulty and universities do a lot of work to try and encourage as much declaration as they possibly can so that they do not have that last-minute problem and issue because obviously they will do everything that they can to help but if it is being left too late it is very difficult for them to overcome that. So we do work with the universities on that. Okay, thank you. Good morning and thank you very much for coming. Just a couple of areas I would just like to explore a little bit further. We obviously have the outcome agreements and you talked John in your initial comment about how you are trying to maybe make them a bit more proactive in encouraging universities. I suppose the question I have is what happens if a university, it may pay lip service to it but in practice nothing is changing. What sanctions would you think of and have you ever considered that in the last four years? It is a very sensitive issue with universities that one. Where we have put in place specific funding for example for things like widening access and universities have not been filling these places with widening access students we have taken the places away and moved them elsewhere. So our main sanction would be about how we use our funding and it is not an area that we have gone into yet on any other protected characteristic. We have only used that sanction with additional places for widening access. In our outcome agreement guidance we do refer to the kind of things we might do where an outcome agreement is not to be met and the ultimate sanction is not funding bits of activity. However, that was something that we would only do in extremist because what we would want to do is use the system to get the institution to respond and to meet needs. In the case of protected characteristics and disability the institution has a legal obligation to do things as well. Our funding is part of the suite of things that will encourage them to do it but it is not the only one. That is a real dilemma for us sometimes. If we were to say that institution X is not very good at meeting the needs of disabled students we are withdrawing X amount of funding and moving it to institution Y that is far better. In the long run that does not help the students who might want to go to that first institution to need to do the courses that that first institution does. Our primary aim is to encourage that institution to improve rather than to use a primarily sanctions based approach but that sanction exists and has been used where additional places have not been met. On something like equality then if an institution were that bad we would not be meeting its legal duties either so that would put it in a very bad place so we need to be encouraging institutions to improve to better meet needs. I think that we all acknowledge that while there are some very good examples of what institutions are doing there is room for improvement as well and we want to encourage that improvement rather than use a sanctions based approach. You want to say more on that Fiona? My experience as an outcome agreement manager the outcome agreement is essentially just the document itself it is the whole process that sits around that so there is an element as an outcome agreement manager of support to your institutions but there is also a huge element of challenge consistently throughout that academic year so if they have committed to achieve a certain target that has been accepted by the funding council your job as an outcome agreement manager is to continually ask for progress updates on where are you with that and if you are not achieving it why not and what you are doing about that because you are invested in it too so you want by the end of that time period to come in and show that they said they were going to do that they've done that and it's worked and it's achieved so there's so much more to it than just getting the actual document kind of agreed and there is an awful lot of challenge on outcome agreement managers to really deliver within the funding council as well. Okay, thank you. I suppose just going back to a widening access issue which I think clearly all of us are signed up to and want to see happen I suppose one of the unforeseen circumstances with a cap number of students is what happens to the person who goes to the school that gets before it is but doesn't get the place and how do we end up not having discrimination the other way that because I go to a certain school I don't get a place because I seem to be getting advantage academically have you done any work around how we level that off or are we not at that stage are we so far behind the curve that that's not really an issue? I think the issue about well there's one admissions should be about fairness we should be if there is any limitation and actually even if everyone who applied to university could get in there would still be issues that some courses are more popular than others so there does need to be a system of ensuring that the fair system of ensuring that the right students get on to the right course and that has to be about I think ensuring that the students with the best potential get on to these courses and that as I've talked about earlier is about more than just exam results contextualised admissions is part of having a fair system if the number of if we are to increase the number of applications from the groups that are currently not going to university that will unless something changes with the groups that are currently going lead to a higher demand and the UCAS figures out yesterday that indicated that not everyone is getting in and the proportion that are not getting in has been going up and there are a number of solutions to that however, I think that the solution that we should be exploring most closely and I think that the solution that gives you a better outcome for most students is looking at how we use the capacity in schools, colleges and universities together to improve the learner journey so that there are routes into higher education through college into university and that we use those to the maximum extent and use the capacity of both sectors so that increasingly everyone who wants to get into higher education can but while that is working we need fair admissions so that even within that system people getting on to the right course are getting it for fair reasons I suppose that I declare the interest that I did happen to go to an independent school I was interested with Fiona's comment that the private schools seem to have this kind of slight edge in regard to how we maybe fill out the form but I presume that it's not rocket science someone's told them how to do it so why are we not telling every school how to fill out and I presume that it's not a kind of you go off into a secret room if you're a private school and told something that nobody else has told the mistake sector so why has that information not been shared I mean I felt it does seem slightly unfair I mean that may not be your area but are you encouraging people to work out how you should fill out the form to the best way I'll go first some of the work that we support with schools projects is about both encouraging more people to apply to university from schools that traditionally haven't but also supporting those schools in exactly that kind of thing but then it's a thought experiment if everyone was writing the perfect personal statement and everyone had four A's and their highers you still need to make choices so they need to be done in a fair evidence based robust way so that we are getting the right people into the right courses and universities I was just going to highlight that we do have access initiative of the school to higher education programme for example that works with low progression schools we've got access to the high demand professions as well which is medicine law creative that works with pupils who are interested in that to help them get the best application process that they can and it's also the reason why we're investing in this piece of work and the research that I referred to earlier because the contextualised admissions process is so so important to making sure that the admission process enables us to have the best talent in the university sector but the talent that best reflects the population of Scotland as well that reflects the full nature of that so hopefully those three things together and I think that the work that the commission on widening access has asked us to do in relationship to the non-academic factor so the personal statement is absolutely crucial because we need to get if we are going to use that we need to make sure that it's used fairly and by all universities in the same way and that everybody knows when they fill that in that it's going to be considered equally right across the range of universities as well because the personal statements are used in so many different ways and it's quite subjective in its very nature I mean just fairly briefly my final question I noticed on the BBC website coming into work this morning that British University have taken a view that they are now going to have different academic results depending on what school you come from is that a model are the universities that we can point to here in Scotland that have that policy as well or is that something that you are looking to move forward on? Yes, Bristol University has been doing that for some years and they were the pioneers in contextualised admissions and yes increasingly universities in Scotland are using it in fact I would say the majority of universities use some form of contextualised admissions which looks at comparing what a particular set of hires might look like from different schools now sometimes they use low-progression schools sometimes they use other flags that would identify a student that might have different circumstances but that system exists I would say in the majority of Scottish universities We are looking forward to the announcement of the Commissioner for Fair Access who will presumably help us to take forward the recommendation in the Commissioner for Widening Access report about the access thresholds as well and the next evolution of those admissions if you like Thank you Anyone else? Last week last week in the previous week we were speaking about admissions again and we had a witness in who was BSL who went through university now he had said it was very difficult for him to do his personal statement in written English because that's not how we used to speak in to people who maybe written English isn't their first choice and we were asking other ways of admissions so could a BSL admission be accepted as an application could video or something like that be used as an application because people might feel more confident in putting their personal statement forward like that and it's just something that most of the universities last week hadn't considered it and I've read the evidence of your earlier hearings and in that particular one I was thinking about could that be done UCAS run the admission system rather than us but clearly we have an interest in making sure that that is fair and that it's effective I think it's something we should explore whether there are changes that can be made to allow that I would think it would be challenging to do I mean the UCAS system is a fairly big streamline system which takes a huge number of applications and dishes them out to lots and lots of different universities and so I think there might be technical challenges within that but I think it's worth exploring whether they can be overcome and of course quite a few institutions that don't recruit through the traditional UCAS system there are variations for the conservatoire and the art schools because they use portfolios and auditions so it's possible to do some of these things so I think we'd be happy to explore whether that would be feasible but I'm not sure I could give a categorical answer at the moment and then obviously a side of it is if we can look at doing something like that how do we then look at assessments and exams so if someone's BSL can we look at that side of it as well that's immediately the question that would arise if somebody is admitted based on something that doesn't include written English but the course requires written English then we need to take the sense well is it reasonable to then change the course or I think these are valid questions that do need to be looked at so I think we'd be happy to with UCAS explore that and see whether it's feasible we're also members of the national advisory group as well for the development of the plan that will be coming out of the national plan and are kind of feeding in that information into that thank you thank you for coming to see us today I'd like to look at the issue of admissions through a slightly different lens that's about when pupils and students with additional support needs or disabilities how they choose to come to which university and the barriers to that decision making based on the fact that we've had a myriad of evidence of the last couple of weeks from people who talk about things like the wider student experience with their additional needs in terms of society life and the wider social elements to university but also the physical access to buildings and we've having gone to an ancient university myself I remember tutorials four flights of steps up in a windy garret that absolutely would have been inaccessible to people with mobility needs now some of this requires just an astronomical almost prohibitive amount of expenditure so as a funding council in particular what are you doing to help universities box clever and disseminate best practice as to how we get round the significant obstacles both to the wider student experience and to the physicality of access to the university estate first of all I've read some of the evidence of the previous sessions and I was struck by the point that was made by several students that even when access was arranged to the academic part of the course that some of the wider student experience was less accessible as well and it's something that we do need to consider how it isn't just about that tutorial room it's about the student union and all the other things that go round it in the evidence that I read I think that there is evidence that some of the universities are boxing clever and if their whole estate isn't accessible and can't be made accessible straight away then they're making sure that things are located in the parts of the estate that are but it was evident from what I read that often that wasn't happening as neatly as it could people were it was only after people had climbed up the four flights of stairs that they realised that there was an issue and then changes were made and it wasn't always happening so part of in the ideal world what we could do is fund universities with enough capital that they could resolve all of the really difficult issues I mean realistically in the current financial climate it is going to take some time for that to happen but nonetheless students are going to university now and knowing that in 10 years time somebody will have an accessible building there's no use to the current students so we do need to encourage universities to as you say box clever and I within the evidence I thought there were some very good stories about how that was being handled and there were some stories where that wasn't happening and I think part of the task of the funding council and other bodies is to disseminate and make sure that that is the standard and that the bits of bad practice aren't happening but the bit that I think is more challenging and I think is important is universities will react to the tutorial rooms of the labs being accessible and make adjustments for that but some of the stories that I read about what's happening in the refectory and things like that that's important too and we need to best practice in that too but our role is I think using the outcome agreement system and other interactions with institutions to promote best practice and working with some of the other organisations that you've heard from as part of this investigation I'm glad that you mentioned outcome agreements at the end there because that brings me neatly into my second question because I'm very interested in the application of outcome agreements in the university sector I think it's a fair criticism leveled at the local authority single outcome agreements in a lot of cases since they were first envisaged in 2007 that they sat on a shelf in a local authority and gathered dust until the next iteration of the single outcome agreement was to be published there was no sanction deployed against local authorities that didn't meet their own outcomes and very little scrutiny very little consistency as well so I'm really interested to hear how you get universities to take those outcome agreements seriously how you measure them, how you measure success and more importantly how you measure failure against the delivery of them Our outcome agreements certainly don't sit on a shelf we have a system where while outcome agreements usually have a three-year time horizon they are refreshed annually so there's an annual cycle where we issue guidance making it clear what we think the outcome agreements should contain and then there's a process of agreeing the outcome agreement between SFC and the institution but once that's done we then have a process where we ask the institution to do a self-evaluation of how it's done against the previous year's outcome agreement including all the targets and to reflect on whether it's done well or badly or it could have done better and we then assess that self-evaluation also using a whole range of data that we collect through the Higher Education Statistics Authority and other things so that as well as their self-evaluation we're looking at their performance on winding access and a whole number of other things and engaging with them throughout the year but particularly at the time of the self-evaluation and we use that self-evaluation to feed into our consideration of the next year's outcome agreement so I'm actually round about this time year a council will meet tomorrow and will consider the evidence from the self-evaluations and the current performance as a prior decision making process before it decides what to do about next year's outcome agreement so there's an annual cycle of preparing the outcome agreement having the guidance for the next year's assessing performance but also as Fiona said earlier the outcome agreement is partly the written piece of paper and the assessment of how well they're doing against and that is in its essence a funding contract with the institution but it's also about the relationship between the outcome manager of whom Fiona is one and the institution so that there is somebody who is constantly challenging the institution and supporting them sometimes if they're saying we're having trouble doing X are there ways you can help a supporting challenge function which goes on throughout the year and there are particular points where that feeds into the outcome agreement preparation but there are other points where it's just on-going challenge so they certainly don't sit on a shelf there is an annual process and cycle round about them which we pursue fairly vigorously There's also access team within the funding council so a key element of our job is to assess every one of the outcome agreements through an widening access lens and provide feedback to the individual outcome agreements and that is shared with at director level and also at chief executive level so that's all documented in terms of how the quality of each individual won and how they compare to each other and that again feeds into the guidance for future years and to the individual institution where that is necessary Mary Just to follow on from the line of questioning that Alex started in 2004 the University of Edinburgh conducted a study on disabled students in higher education and there was a number of points highlighted and in the evidence that we've heard in the last few weeks many of the points that were highlighted in 2004 that caused problems for students with disabilities have been raised to us again and I appreciate that there are a number of outcome agreements and that you monitor and work with institutions but it would seem that very little progress has been made in a number of areas and while I welcome the appointment of a commissioner for widening access there must be another mechanism for ensuring that more is done to widen access in your thoughts on that One of the things that is key to this is a disabled students premium and the criteria for how that's set the strategic funding programme that is used for and how universities are either encouraged to use that or to use it better and how that's monitored because that ties into Mary's question about what we're doing but actually there's funding streams here to make sure it gets done and how is it getting done I would accept your point that a lot of the issues that have come up in this investigation are ones that have been about for some time I would contend that there has been some progress if you look at the particularly the retention rates for students generally they have been improving over the years and that the gap between students who are declaring a disability and all students has been narrowing so I think there has been progress and I think in that time there have been some very good examples like the Conservatoire's deaf performance course of your institutions doing very good things I would accept though that there is still a journey to go and that part of further narrowing the gap between students with a disability and others is about how you correctly apply the funding that universities have to support all students part of the reason we several years ago put the disabled students premium in effect into the main pot of funding because it exists as a separate line but it used to be that an institution would get it based on the number of students with declared disabilities that it had but we felt that that was probably over supporting some institutions and under supporting some others because dyslexia is such a big part of the declared disabilities in universities it was skewing it towards particular institutions and our view was that all institutions have a responsibility to be prepared for students with a disability and a number of students not just the ones with bigger numbers so we quite deliberately put it in proportion to the main pot and while we hold institutions accountable for what they're doing on disability through the outcome again we expect them to use all of the funding that we give them for students as part of that same theory clearly not all of it it goes for all students but in looking at what pot of money they have to support disabled students they should be looking at the whole pot not just that the proportion that is identified as a disabled students premium because it's a legal responsibility that they serve all protected characteristics so our philosophy has been that the important we don't want this to be an area where we're trying to work out exactly what the cost of each particular student is because that leads to the lumpiness of reaction that means that institutions aren't responding quickly enough we expect institutions to see this as core business and build it into their core funding as I've said earlier where we do need to up our focus a bit more so that we are clearer about expectations and about making sure that good practice is happening in a more widespread way but I think there has been some progress the fact that the retention rates have been narrowing the gap between all students and students with disabilities is positive it's not fast enough some of these things do take a while to fix and we should be pushing for it to be faster just bumping up against our time when we have another panel this morning but just very quickly on the back of that John that the Scottish funding council reports on destinations of university graduates we want to know whether you do actually we know that colleges report destinations and one of the measures and maybe measuring where students have been successful in their higher education is to determine their destinations whether colleges report on that but whether universities do and whether that would be something that you would consider building in to the outcome agreement we do there is a report on destinations of leavers from universities do you have the figures in front of you Fiona? yes yes I do I'll ask Fiona to come in and explain what they are report with us that would be helpful absolutely I do I stress though that these destinations are six months after graduation and quite a lot of students I mean all students not just those from protected characteristics will will not have settled in their final career by then so there's a bit of a health warning about these statistics but we do they are collected by the higher education statistics authority specific elements of young people or people who have left university is it broken down in that way a very similar story to that that's in the college leaver destination survey so there is a gap which is obviously not what we want we should share that data with you that would be really helpful I thank you both for your attendance at committee this morning and your written evidence and future evidence that you've agreed to share with us we appreciate your responses this morning and I think we've got some way forward with some of the inquiries that we're doing so thank you so much and if you go away and you think you should have told us something else please get back in touch I'm going to suspend committee for about five minutes for a very quick comfort break and then we're back in with the minister and the cabinet secretary good morning and welcome back to the equality and human rights committee our second panel for this morning on our inquiry on the budget we have with us this morning Angela Constance who's the cabinet secretary for communities social security and equality good morning cabinet secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville who's the minister for further education higher education and science good morning minister and I believe this is your first appearance at a committee excellent we'll be gentle with you and supporting both of those this morning we have Leslie Irvin head of equality policy and Leif Fitzgerald who's the policy manager higher education division with the Scottish Government good morning to you all to committee now this is essentially our final session on our inquiry on the budget and we decided to focus on a part of the budget on equalities about widening access and specifically about people with disabilities and who use BSL as a language in accessing university so that's why we needed both of you here today in order to address some of the equality issues and to address some of the widening access in the policy functional issues in university as well so we're really delighted and I know your busy schedules mean this is not always possible we're really delighted to have you here this morning you'll have maybe heard some of the evidence that we've already had but I believe maybe both of you have an opening statement you want to kick off with cabinet secretary would you like to go first okay thank you convener and good morning committee grateful for the opportunity to appear before committee as part of your scrutiny process of the 2017-18 you will appreciate as the draft budget will not be published until this afternoon the committee will be aware that I'm not able to comment or reflect on the government's spending plans I can however confirm to committee that as in previous years equality analysis and assessment has been undertaken as part of the budget preparatory work the results of that work will be published in the eighth equality budget statement that will accompany the draft budget and also as in previous years we've been supported in this process by the equality budget advisory group so I want to put on record my thanks to its members for their expertise for their insight and of course for the challenge that they bring as we continue to look for the best ways to ensure proper consideration of equality right across the Government I of course understand that the committee is very keen to focus on disability and access to universities my colleague Ms Somerville is best placed to engage with the committee on access to university and matters relating to disability and education but I would like to say just a few words about disability equality more broadly and actually I think it's a great idea to have ministers from different portfolios actually appear before committee because it's important that it's a Government that we're demonstrating that joined up approach and that equality is for every portfolio and not just the communities and equality portfolio it is 20 years since the disability discrimination act was introduced that's now being replaced by the equality act yet whilst progress has been made we know there are still many disabled people who are unable to live their lives as they want the barriers they face day in, day out prevent them from making their full contribution to daily and to public life so the way our public services our workplaces, local environments are designed to operate can exclude people and this is just quite simply not acceptable committee will be more than aware that on 2 December we published the Ffairer Scotland for disabled people delivery plan to 2021 the plan draws on the views of disabled people and those who participated in the consultations and discussions and the plan has five long-term ambitions and a wide range of actions that we will take over the lifetime of this Parliament and we are determined to make meaningful progress for example in reform and adult social care so that we shift the focus to achieving independent living promoting independent advocacy so that we know about and can claim the rights and mental health for example and conducting an awareness raising campaign to tackle negative attitudes as part of the one Scotland campaign next year in the coming periods we will be very focused on addressing the employment gap for disabled people and our new devolved Scottish employability programme will give high quality support tailored to the needs of disabled people and we will be placing dignity and respect in the very heart of our new social security system and our ambition that Scotland should be the best place in the world for our children and our young people to grow up has to apply to all of our children and we will be developing a national framework for disabled children and young people to ensure that they get the best provision and support possible our fairer Scotland action plan will also work to ensure a fairer and more equal society for all of Scotland's people at the heart of that plan is 50 fairness actions for this parliamentary term that will help us meet those ambitions and again this ranges right across all areas of government responsibility and my final word is that we all know convener that creating a fairer Scotland actually requires all of us it requires government it requires communities it requires listening to people with that lived experience of poverty and disability it will require business and industry public and third sector to work together to achieve change we know that government cannot deliver change on its own and nor would we want to so we will continue to work with anyone and everyone to make these actions a reality and one final note convener I just want to highlight to committee that we have maintained our commitment to equality investment over this period of public spending constraint and we will continue to support and work with a range of organisations that represent disabled people it is important it is vital that the voices of disabled people are heard and that disabled people participate in shaping the decisions that affect them so I very much welcome this important inquiry and would be very happy to consider incorporating recommendations coming from the committee into the disability delivery plan which will be monitored to ensure progress and to take account of emerging issues because at the end of the day convener we all share the same aim that disabled people should be able to study at universities without experiencing discrimination and barriers which could and indeed should be removed and I very much look forward to a discussion this morning thank you very much cabinet secretary minister thank you convener and good morning can I reiterate the point that the cabinet secretary has made that due to the timings of today's statement I will also be unable to answer questions around the detail of the budget that will be given later today but the committee is aware that widening access for higher education is a key priority for this government and indeed the 2014-15 programme for government set out a stretching ambition that a child born today irrespective of socioeconomic circumstances should have an equal chance it's a policy objective very much in harmony with our wider vision for a fairer more equal Scotland that is driven by inclusive economic growth the commission on widening access was established to advise us of the steps necessary to meet that ambition and the commission made 34 recommendations which taken together represent a bold and ambitious agenda for change indeed I would argue that it is perhaps the most radical set of actions being undertaken anywhere in the UK to tackle the issues that have been regarded as an intractable problem in our education systems across the world the committee has already heard evidence that the commission's primary focus was on tackling socioeconomic inequality however I would echo Russell Gunstan's evidence that there are intersections between those issues and disabled access I was struck for example by the common themes emerging in the evidence heard so far by the committee issues such as cultural barriers and the need for enhanced pastoral care commission's proposals to have a naturally positive impact on the participation of disabled learners perhaps especially those relating to the reform of admissions more rigorous support for access learners and progression from college the commission also recommended that the new commissioner for fair access should consider whether there are further barriers for learners with protected characteristics and to make any necessary recommendations to ministers similarly in October I announced an independent review of FE and ITCH student support and the aim of that review is to assess the effectiveness of the system for student support for all students engaged in further and higher education in Scotland and make recommendations for change. The review will consist of a number of subgroups and one of which is around support available to vulnerable students and understanding the needs of students with disabilities will be an integral and core part of that work so there are a number of mechanisms through which we can ensure that the evidence specific to this cohort is examined thoroughly and that any necessary policy interventions are tailored to meet specific needs and in this regard the work being completed by this committee will form a crucial part of the on-going discussions. It's important also to have in mind that institutions have clear statutory duties in relation to disabled learners and I'm sure the committee shares my expectation that they be very proactive in responding to the evidence that emerges from this work too. I will close by highlighting that, although by no means perfect access for disabled learners is improving, the proportion of undergraduate entrants with a declared disability has increased year on year and, as of 2014-15, stands at 10.8 per cent of total entrants. Retention is also improving and it is a significant to note that the gap with all learners has closed to just over one percentage point. The disabled student allowance in Scotland has been protected and continues to be demand led meaning that the budget is determined purely by student need. It is all positive and indicates at our policy direction together with the more practical interventions of the funding council and institutions are delivering outcomes but we are very much not complacent as with all areas of access we are ambitious and sharply focused on securing a more equitable distribution of opportunities for all and I look forward to working with the committee to achieve that. Cabinet Secretary, in your opening statement you mentioned the disability delivery plan and the work that is being done on that and specifically on the work of this committee we are very interested in that but you will realise just as well as I do that and I think the figures around about 50 per cent of households who are in poverty have someone in that household with a disability I think that's the figure and that's a huge proportion so in order to have that inclusive economy that we want we have to create the opportunities for people in order to lift themselves out of poverty and to have those opportunities is a university education because it then leads to a higher paid job and more opportunities in that respect how do you see that playing out in the disability delivery plan and I can see quite clearly how the two portfolios can work very very closely together on this with the policy being right and the delivery being right you could make huge changes life changing opportunities for people here but I just wonder whether there's a specific area where you could address that specific issue and whether you can give us some insight into that this morning absolutely convener and it's important to note that the longer young people spend in either education or training so some of what I'm about to say applies to FE, HE modern apprenticeship programmes in that all the evidence shows that for any young person the longer they spend in education and the better their career prospects are and therefore the better that their income is there are many actions in the disability delivery plan and actually also the fairer Scotland action plan because the fairer Scotland action plan has a huge focus on income inequality and some very specific measures in and around tackling inequality or economic disadvantage in particular I suppose the one action that I would draw committee's attention to is the action 20 in the disability delivery plan where it talks about that all-encompassing approach that we need to work with schools local authorities health and social care partnerships further and higher education institutions and in particular transitions transitions for young people with disabilities starting school going from primary to secondary school going from secondary school to their post school destinations and then crucially going from university or college into work because we know that even where young people are making significant educational achievements that isn't always being translated into the workplace so that focus on transitions is crucially important and that requires a change of mindset continuing to evolve a ways of working it's easy to talk about partnership working but partnership working in terms of tackling transitions is absolutely crucial so while there's many actions in the disability delivery plan that are indirectly to pursue their dreams of participating in higher education there are particular actions and action 20 and that focus on transitions is crucially important I wholeheartedly agree with you there Alex Rowley Good morning minister Cabinet Secretary, thank you for your time this morning Cabinet Secretary I complimented this Government in debate in Parliament last week for children and families affected by disability in absolutely high time I'm interested very much in the content of that and what that's going to look like in the resource behind it nearly 10 years ago England and Wales got its own strategy for disabled children aiming high for disabled children and with that came a consequential of £36 million but because the presumption against ring fencing grants and didn't go to children with disabilities I think we still have a way to make up on that regard Can you without obviously wanting to pre-empt the stuff that you can't talk about in terms of the budget or financial settlements around that can you reassure us that this will be adequately resourced? I firmly believe that the disability delivery plan will be adequately resourced I certainly have read Mr Cole-Hamilton's speech that he made in the debate led by my colleague Jean Freeman last week because it had been highly commended to me along with Mr Balfour's speech so I went back to the official record and read both speeches and I was particularly struck that Mr Cole-Hamilton spoke about that life stage, that life span approach which is absolutely important so while I will point to the fact that as I said in my opening remarks we protected the equality budget I can also point to the fact that over this period of tough times we've also protected the third sector budget and I actually believe that the Empowering Communities Fund has an important role to play here as well in terms of participation and in terms of changing that mindset about who should be making decisions about how resources are spent is important but the point is that if one in five people have a disability the question is about what we are doing with all our resources so while as the equality minister I can point to the equality's budget I can point to the third sector budget but it's actually about the spend right across Government in education and in health and ensuring that particularly with social services that those who are disadvantaged in some way are getting their fair share of core services and core resources so that the additional resources we have in terms of equality budget that that actually adds value so I wouldn't for one minute demure from the importance of investment and continued investment but there is something quite fundamental about this is what we should be doing anyway we all want more of the resource but irrespective of the size of the resource this is about attitudes it's about culture it's about how we deploy resources it's about how we prioritise resources and I suppose what I'm trying to delicately point at people can't say we're not doing this unless you give us extra money actually we all have to do this and we have to ensure that all the arrows across the massive investment that is made across the public sector that that is all directed in the right direction I think that therein lies the rub it's about matching rhetoric with reality and this is an issue which really we do well to take party politics out of and try to work together on I think one of the challenges for us and you mentioned it in your opening remarks particularly those transitions and in particular moving young people with disabilities from education into employment is one of the biggest challenges in our community a significant metropolitan authority who I won't name in Scotland declared in its 2011 single outcome agreement that it wanted to get 200 17 to 19 year olds with a disability into the workplace by the next iteration of its single outcome agreement and it only succeeded in managing to get 11 17 to 19 year olds with a disability into employment but nothing happened that's a separate problem with the single outcome agreement process there was no sanction there was no accountability for that but I think it elegantly delineates the problem before us that we all agree in the political classes that we need to do more to break those barriers down to contribute even though they may have a disability into the workplace but that is a significant challenge I just wonder what can we do differently that we haven't been doing so far that we'll close that gap one of the things that myself and Jean Freeman have worked very hard on when we were pulling together the fairer Scotland action plan and the disability delivery plan was to ensure that the actions were indeed actions because it's very easy to talk about our ambitions our philosophy, our approach and what you will see in both the fairer Scotland action plan and the disability delivery plan is actions that are about doing things and in some cases doing things differently and in terms of other partners in terms of the various types of outcome agreements that there are within the university sector or indeed local authorities it's important that they evolve over time where we're actually focused on what it is we're going to do as well as what we're saying and there is something important about scrutiny about saying what is your ambition, what you're going to do and not just publishing a plan and then moving on to say what's next you have to stick with it and you have to stick with it you have to be on-haul you have to be monitoring your progress you have to understand your data because that leads to transparency so we know that in that particular instance for that local authority that they've not met their ambition so therefore there is scrutiny about that there is transparency about that which I hope will lead to redress of that and it leads people to think about what more they can and must do Thank you Thank you very much for coming I think there's cross-party support on this whole issue around transition and I think what the cabinet secretary has said this morning is very helpful and I think particularly for those with a fairly severe disabled learning difficulty or physical disability how we work with them and their educational school to get them in I think it's something that we do need to do work on for the comments that she's made this morning my question is actually aimed at the minister we've heard quite a lot in the last few weeks that universities I think are trying to open the doors more to roles with disability but there does seem to be almost a hierarchy of disability that if you have a certain disability it's reasonably easy comparatively to get in where if you have a more complex disability it's really quite difficult to get in and I wonder without committing any financial money to this whether there would be some kind of research that the Government would be looking to do along with universities of saying not just disability how many disabled people are in we've got the breakdown already of the different types of disability but what can we do then to help those who have that maybe complex disability get into university or into college and how do we encourage colleges and universities to do that you raise a very important point about the good practice that is going on within higher education institutions and I saw from the submission from University Scotland that they detailed some of that good practice I think what we have is good practice and I think that needs to be embedded across the board part of that lies out with being a university and actually on to some of the aspects that the cabinet secretary mentioned about a cultural change and also the statutory obligations that a university has it's anticipatory duties to look at what they are delivering and how they are delivering it so I think there's a lot more that can be done to question and to analyse what's going on and not only help those with a disability but will also help students from different backgrounds caring responsibilities and so on so I think there's an obligation within each university to actually take a step back and analyse that I think they're doing that and the statutory obligations that they have should ensure that that very much happens and where the Government should facilitate that discussion and to ensure that that good practice is shared I think there's a very important role in that but I also took a lot from the evidence that you heard from committee about that it's not just enough to speak to those that are at university but those who feel that they are unable to apply or unable to receive sufficient support when they get there and I think we have lessons to learn on all of that some of which are for the universities as autonomous institutions and some of which are very much for Government to take on board We have outcome agreements and we've just been talking about them this morning with a panel before you they feel slightly somebody who's very new to us lots of carrots but not many sticks and I do wonder whether we need to maybe rebalance how we address the outcome agreements but yes we want to encourage and yes we want to show good practice but maybe there needs to be a bit of a stick there if institutions and particularly faculties I mean again I think that she seems to be at the top level, the principal the co-et, absolutely by into it but you go down to the lecture in what subject there that's the individual which is causing the problem to a disabled student so again looking at this going forward without being too cruel can we have some sticks Well I think outcome agreements are quite a new concept still I think they've delivered a lot both for universities and colleges to ensure that we are looking at the outcomes and to have that baseline analysis which is very very important it is because it's new I think it's only right that we periodically take a step back and review those and we're going through that process with the funding council at the moment to see whether there's a necessarily a different way of doing things and to see where they can be strengthened it's also very important that they are effective Mr Balfour is quite correct they shouldn't just be a document that sits on the shelf and that we have discussions about but that something follows from that and the funding council and the Scottish Government have a variety of funds which we can give to different universities for example on widening access and if we need to learn from how we facilitate those funds and how those funds are distributed amongst the institutions then the outcome agreements and how those are actually implemented is very very important that so I do take his point there needs to be both carrots and sticks and I'm open to during the review of the outcome agreements to see whether we've got that balance right or not because I think it's only right that we do take a step back and have a look at that Do you have some comments here? With your indulgence I thought that it might be quite useful to say something about public sector equality duties because the general duty under the equality act talks about how public authorities and in this instance it includes universities that whilst they're exercising their functions they have to be eliminating unlawful discrimination they have to be in the business of advancing equality of opportunity as well as fostering good relationships between those with and without protected characteristics that all of that points to the need for a proactive response and the public sector equality duties that are listed within the specific duties regulations for example say undertake equality impact assessments on new or revised policies and practices and to publish results and I think that's an important strand of the duties that all education institutions are subject to in terms of transparency of what they're doing and to assist with the evaluation of that in terms of the Scottish Government's responsibilities our responsibility is to help public authorities exercise their responsibilities in terms of the equality outcomes and we do have a project SNP Scottish national equality improvement project and this is about our partnership with the EH RC close the gap, the equality network about how we can bring forward a programme of work that helps the public sector to fulfil their duties so we're currently considering the work plan for 2017 so as well as a Government reflecting on what we need to do in terms of our disability delivery plan in result of committee's deliberations there's also the opportunity in terms of SNP in terms of what we do as a Government to help aspects of the public sector comply with their very clear duties so there is a stream of work that Government and partners need to be very focused on. I think it's also worth saying that it's the equality and human rights commission that are the regulatory body for the public sector complying with their act as well so there's a lot we can do as a Government but we also have to respect the role of the EHRC as well. Mary Can I echo the comments that my colleague Jeremy Balfour has made because I too would like to see a bit more stick and a bit less carrot because if I reflect the evidence that we've heard in the last few weeks there is a recognition and acknowledgement that universities and higher education institutes need to do more they recognise that they have students that have a varying range of disabilities and they should be supporting them but unless it's a soft disability it becomes very very difficult and the length to which students need to go to get the support they require is simply not acceptable and I welcome the words from the Cabinet Secretary this morning around the disability delivery plan when you talk about actions and I come back to the carrot and stick because if you have actions you must have consequences and I wonder if you could perhaps expand a bit on what you would expect those consequences to look like because if I reflect on a question that I asked in the previous panel the University of Edinburgh did a study in 2004 on disabled students in higher education and many of the things that come out of that study we have heard in our evidence in the last few weeks there have been a number of action plans published there have been a number of recommendations made but 12 years down the line things have not improved so unless a disability delivery plan actually has teeth and sticks it would appear that nothing much is going to change so I would like a reassurance and perhaps an indication of what those consequences might look like I mean that's a very broad question and we'll have a different shape and scope depending on the different portfolios that are involved in delivering the delivery plan and that will be reflected in the different statutory responsibilities that colleagues across the government have I'm very clear about what the law says and although it's the equality and human rights commission that is the regulator for non-compliance with the equality act I think it's important that it's government in our work with our partners that none of us are defensive about this that we all accept that there is more to do that we all look for the opportunities to pick up the pace it's quite difficult to talk about sanctions without being specific about specific actions and acknowledgement about where the specific powers on specific things rely I suppose we have to be conscious that sanctions can of course be counterproductive but sometimes they can be effective there are a range of activities that you can undertake as a Government it's not always about financial sanctions which tends to be what springs to mind but if I can say to you Cabinet Secretary for Equalities I'm very clear about what the law says that applies to the Government we are under scrutiny about that there are things that we need to do better on this journey in terms of incorporating a human rights approach to all our actions in terms of how we take forward our programme for government commitments about how we engage with people about how we can embed further social and cultural rights and some of this journey won't be comfortable either for Government nor our partners but a light needs to be shed and we need to face up to our discomfort and to focus on actions that will make life better I think that the minister wanted to come back in Minister on the back of Mary's question this morning I asked the funding council how the students premium how those decisions are made and how the funding is allocated and whether it is ring ffenst or not and on the back of Mary's question could that be a carrot and a stick and used to enable change? I think that the premium is an interesting budget that again with the review of student support going on which is looking at for all students including those with disabilities I had already said that I was open to that review not just looking at the student support in terms of the allowance but does that premium support students with disabilities and if it doesn't we need to question if it's going in the right direction if it's being used correctly so that message had already been given from me to the review to when they were looking at the support for disabled students to analyse that premium so more than happy to see what comes out of that review and indeed feed anything in that comes from the committee's work where they feel that questions have been raised about that I think that the review group it's an independent review it's not for me to set their work plan but it's already been highlighted to them as an issue I also thought it might be helpful to look at one of the specific action points that is in the delivery plan went to do with SASS and the workings of SASS now one of my first meetings as a minister on one of the first visits I went on was to the students awards agency and heard a presentation there from Who Care Scotland and someone from a care and experience background who went through how SASS had discussed with them how they had changed their entire application process to ensure that it worked for them and it was very much the change was very much led by users of the system and Who Care Scotland were therefore a lot more happy with the outcomes and the way that care experienced young people are dealt with through SASS now there's an action point about disabled students going through that application process and SASS looking at that and analysing whether anything needs to change in that and I certainly was greatly heartened by the work that that agency had done with people with care experience background and we'll look very closely at what they do when it comes to disabled students with that action point in mind but I certainly took great heart from the work that they've already done and the very proactive way that they engaged with individuals and with people to see whether that system worked and really tested it out and I think we've now got a system where in that aspect it's much better and we can look at that for disabled students going forward so that's one action point but I'm very confident that SASS will deliver on Mary I mean I'm sure nobody that's sitting round this table wants to think that in 10 years time another committee will be looking at this issue and we'll be talking about the things that we've talked about in the last few weeks and that's why it's so important that any delivery plan actually does deliver meaningful change so I appreciate the comments you've made thank you Willie Coffey I wonder if I could go back to the admissions process itself I've raised this every meeting of the committee that we've had and the part that the personal statement makes and has in that process John Kemp from the funding council just before he came in and said there's no direct monitoring of that aspect of the admissions process so that we can see that that meets all our obligations in respect of equality of access but then Fiona Burns who spoke after John said that we are there is some process under way to examine that process non-academic factors in the contextualised admissions process so I wonder could you tell us a wee bit more about this so that we can get some kind of understanding of how and whether that aspect of the admissions process is actually a fair process I think it would very much help for the entire admissions process to be a lot clearer and more transparent and it's one of the aspects which I think would not only help disabled students but would help students or potential students from a variety of backgrounds whether that's from a socio-economic perspective or a variety of different demographics so I think there is a requirement for more transparency to allow those who are looking to a college or university to be able to understand the options that are open to them and they can make a choice where they would like to study based on the best information personal statements were looked for by the commission for widening access and it is something which is an area of concern because they can often be difficult for those from a socio-economic deprived background to be able to complete in a way that those from a more advantaged background would be able to complete so personal statements and non-academic statements do have to be looked at and we do have to be very clear about what role they should or should not play and I would expect the commissioner to look at that when they are looking at the admissions policy contextualised admissions are somewhat broader than that personal statements are only one aspect that could be part of a contextualised admissions so you can therefore look at different gradeings for example for the same course depending on what a person's background is and that's a different type of contextualised admission that does and should play a more important role in admissions but Mr Coffey is very correct to say that that should be done in a very transparent way there is no point any institution having a process that people don't understand and therefore they can't take advantage of that transparency is very important the admissions process for each university as an autonomous institution is up to that university but we do have a certain basic understanding about what that should look like and that should be open and transparent easily understandable and allow a fair process of admissions so that people can access university Do you think we'll be able to see per university data perhaps being gathered over the next few years about how they are treating this process so that we can have a look and see that there come to a view that there is an objective and fair method of treating this Do you think we'll see that? I think we'll have to and I think part of the work of the commissioner as they go forward will be to challenge the Government and to challenge the institutions and admissions is a very important part after all the kind of gateway into the university so that will play a very important part of the commissioner's work going forward I'm sure Remain may correct me from wrong but the target by 2021 is that 10% of students should come from 20% of the more disadvantaged backgrounds and that's at every university and there was some good news reported this morning where the figures 10.9% but that's overall when will all of those universities meet this target if you look at the data that we have presently four of the universities Robert Gordon's Aberdeen, Edinburgh and St Andrews have never reached 10% in the previous 10 years so what work will the Scottish Government be doing to encourage those universities to meet this target and deliver on that particularly for students in that category? You're correct to say that the figures that were released today show that we are at a historic high for those that are coming from the most deprived communities but we're by no means complacent about that because we are by far still short of the targets that we've set both for higher education in general and for each institution every institution is coming from a different starting point some of them will find it more challenging than others but they are all obligated to reach those targets and they have all signed up to it now there are some aspects that will be easy for them to be able to put into place there will be some aspects that will be more challenging and I think that that was one of the very important reasons why the commission report suggested that we did have an independent commissioner that can drive that forward independent from Government and will be able to challenge both the Government and the institutions to do that so asking for a timescale about when each individual institution will be able to reach that target I wouldn't be able to give for each institution but we have set that target for each of them to reach that 10% and all the sector has signed up to it and we will very much work towards the establishment of that without becoming a reality now we do fund widening access places but this I go back to one of the points that Russell Gunston made in his evidence about this being an attitudinal and cultural change that is required within higher education and that will require a greater step change than we are seeing at the moment at an attigater pace and for some institutions that will be challenging but they are obligated to do so could I just finally ask that if they don't meet this target and it's by 2021 and that's five years from now but my friends are interested in carrots and sticks today I mean if they don't meet the target what would be likely to do would be thinking about funding arrangements and making adjustments there or just exactly what would be because we have to be serious about this this is an equalities committee we want to see progress on this and we don't want to be sitting here in another five years with the same messages to make sure we deliver the target I fully appreciate that we need to deliver the target this is an important priority for the government and for the education ministers in particular there are carrots and sticks to this approach we do already fund widening access places we do have a number of policies in place to support that but we will see over time whether that needs to change I think for some institutions as I said it will be easier than others and we will have to look at the different outcome agreements that we have and the different arrangements that we have in place for those universities but I hope the committee can be in no doubt about how serious the government takes this as a political priority and how passionate the commissioner will be to drive this forward as well thank you it's a question from this morning as well we're saying we want equality for everyone especially in the application process to get into universities what we don't we had a witness in who was a BSL user who said that he found it very difficult to complete his application in written English because it's not how he communicates with people and when we're looking at personal statements would there be an opportunity for those personal statements to be made either using BSL or in other forms like video or something like that for people who have other disabilities and that would make it a fairer process for people to actually get into university courses I think that the cabinet secretary has already mentioned some of the statutory requirements that are on the universities and applications is very much an important part of that we simply can't have a process which is by all means closed to certain parts of the population because of the language which they use so the application process needs to be open to all and I read with great concern that the personal statements and some of the witnesses that you've had forward from me about their difficulties of filling in the application process but also actually the stage before that about not even feeling that it was for them that they should bother trying to apply so there's a cultural change that we need to do within our schools, not just within the universities but within the schools, within careers advice and a systems change that we have to look at to ensure that disabled pupils when they're still at school do feel supported and encouraged to know that they can apply to the universities but then that the universities fulfil the obligations to ensure that the application process is open to all Maybe just to add this Parliament is well aware that BSL by law has to be treated and respected as a minority language and in terms of the overall public sector and general equality duties we have to be very proactive and actually flexible about how we make sure that we turn words into actions as well and I'll just point to a couple of specific actions in relation to higher education from the disability delivery plan one is the student awards agency will work in partnership with disabled students and stakeholders to deliver and it says an increasingly accessible application process so that should include a range of methods of enabling people to communicate and they will improve the advice and guidance in and around that area for all students with additional support needs and in particular students with a disability there's also from 2017 the Scottish Funding Council that their outcome agreement guidance again is mentioned in the disability delivery plan will require colleges and universities to produce an access and inclusion strategy that will define their inclusive practices so that's about being quite specific again about what you will do to reach your aspirations just on the back of that how would we measure that how will it be measured again that's part of any outcome agreement process that the plan is clearly articulated it's helpful if it's specific it's possible so it's therefore easier to measureable it needs to be published any evaluation or progress report so that there is transparency as well and in terms of that balance between carrots and sticks it's very festive, convener you know I mean I think we could change it to mince pies and snowballs if you'd prefer I think it's important that we need to be keeping an eye on the ball considering our options both in terms of carrots and sticks as we move forward carrots and sticks are not just for Christmas and you know actually at the end of the day be focused on what works what will work and as a Government we have the right to be considering on a case-by-case basis you know what sanctions would be helpful in actually moving a particular agenda forward I can just add to that as well that one of the other aspects that we're obviously looking into is having discussions with UCAS about the application process from their point of view too so I think between the different stakeholders that the Cabinet Secretary is pointing to there there are discussions on going particularly on this issue so hopefully that gives the member some reassurance that those discussions are on going and that we are looking to ensure that particularly with the legislation that's went forward in Scotland with BSL that we have a process that fulfills those obligations and those discussions with UCAS can continue as well The other side of that argument that Annie Wells had brought up this morning as well is about exams and being able to do exams in BSL if English isn't your first language so I'd hoped that would be something you could add to your extensive list just a very final question to both of you the predecessor committee of equal opportunities committee in session 4 commended equality impact assessments I have to say I've got a bit of a bug about equality impact assessments because they're only as good as the quality of the information contained in that process is used to ensure that anything that is contained in the draft budget doesn't then have a negative impact on the equality programmes going forward In terms of a broad approach in terms of our equality budget process it's something that we've gained considerable experience on now this is the eighth year that we've included as part of our budget process the quality budget statement we are helped in that process by independent people this isn't just internal government people COSLA are involved academics are involved the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are involved and I agree that equality impact assessments are dependent on the quality of information the precision of information that is contained in them and some stakeholders would say that Scotland is a world leader in this process but I have absolutely no doubt that as we progress that it's a process that has to evolve it has to be refined and we have to learn from the experience of doing it in the past and apply that to the future I think that exhausts our evidence to this morning right on the button for timing because I know that you have questions in the chamber soon just at the end of the session we are obviously the focus of this inquiry is about the budget and how the money spent and the outcome of that money being spent and whether it actually works or not obviously that's the very narrow focus of this inquiry but the broader focus of the committee around equalities duties, human rights rights based approach we have risen from the evidence that we have taken that we would pursue in a wider context are you all okay for us to continue to write to you to seek clarification or information and advice on some of that work Always happy to oblige, convener always Merry Christmas I thank you both for your attendance at the committee this morning I thank your officials too we really appreciate your attendance here this morning Thank you very much and that allows us to move on to agenda item 3 which is scrutiny of the draft budget and we'll take that item in private so I'll now close this session of the committee