 Good morning and can I welcome everyone to the sixth meeting of the education and skills committee in 2018? Can I please remind everyone present to turn on mobile phones and other devices onto silent for the duration of the meeting? The first item of business is the decision on whether to take agenda items 3 and 4 in private, as everyone content in agenda items 3 and 4 are taken private. The next item of business is an evidence session with the commissioner for fair access. The committee is keeping a watching brief and work towards widening access following the Government's endorsement of the commission's work. The committee heard from the commissioner when he was very new in his post last year, and this session will be an update with the commissioner on his work over the past year and planned work. It will also be useful context for the evidence session with the Minister for Further Education, Higher Education and Science, who is giving evidence to the committee primarily on widening access on the 7 March. On that note, I welcome to the committee Professor Peter Scott, the commissioner for fair access, and here in the support capacity is Lynn McMillan's strategic lead access to higher education in the Scottish Government. Professor Scott, I understand that you will make a short opening statement. Thank you very much for inviting me to meet the committee today. I will keep my opening statement very brief because I have submitted a written statement. I will just emphasise one or two key issues within it. Some of the issues that I raise are ones that are potentially raised and will be raised by you, I am sure, in questions, so I will refer to them very briefly. I think that I would like to start by emphasising how successful Scotland has been in terms of higher education. It has the highest rate of participation in the UK, 56 per cent, as opposed to 49 per cent in England. Generally, I think that there is very little to apologise for in terms of the commitment that Scotland has made to its colleges and universities. Of course, there is always more to be done, and I have tried to summarise the comments that I made in my annual report. I will not go over them in great detail. I see in the briefing document that one of the concerns expressed potentially is that I have made rather too many recommendations, and I am very happy to deal with that if I am asked that question. My overall assessment of progress is that progress has been steady across the higher education sector as a whole. I think that it has been impressive. Obviously, some institutions have been much more committed to achieving fair access, largely for objective, rather than reasons of choice. It is important that all institutions make a substantial commitment to the fair access agenda. Having said that, I think that it is wrong to focus so strongly on the role of the ancient universities that the very important contribution made by the colleges is somehow downgraded. Most of the matters that I cover in my annual report are issues that were raised with me in discussions with people in institutions and other agencies, and cover a fairly familiar list of admissions and progression, particularly contextual admissions and making adjusted office to students for more deprived backgrounds, articulation particularly. This is one area where I would potentially be a little bit more critical of the record of college students with higher nationals not being given sufficient academic credit if they transfer to degree programs. In addition to my annual report, I published four discussion documents that were available on the website, and I have given references to those. I particularly highlight the last of those, which was published just last month on retention outcomes and destination, because I think it does bring new data into the debate or certainly data in a more accessible way. The only other final things that I would like to mention are the issue of my independence. I think that it came up last time and I am sure that it will come up this time. I have given a brief summary of my written evidence of how I feel about that, but again I am very happy to be questioned about it. The second concern that I think I expressed a year ago when I appeared before the committee was the question of a budget and other forms of support. Again, I am very happy to answer questions on those as well. In conclusion, I think that I would just like to thank everyone who supported me in my work as commissioner for fair access. As I say in my written statement, it has been a privilege to be given an opportunity to make a contribution to a cause that I very strongly believe in and always have been strongly committed to. I think that I will stop and listen to your questions and try to answer them. Thank you, Professor Scott. I will now open questions to the other members and I will start with my advice convener, Joanne Lamont. Thank you for coming along today and for providing a very interesting written report on your statements now. I want to ask you about the series of recommendations that make me clearly the original report on widening access produced a series of recommendations. In your first year, you have then produced a further 24, I think, 22. I found them very interesting reading and I may be highlighting a couple of them in a moment, but I wonder what is the standing of those recommendations? Where are they now? Who is the responsibility for implementing them and how will you measure progress in terms of implementing those recommendations? I did make 22 recommendations and I know that, in the evidence submitted by University of Scotland, they felt that perhaps that was rather too many, in addition to the recommendations that are made by the Commission. Of course, University of Scotland itself has undertaken work in this area and produced recommendations for themselves, so I think that they perhaps feel that they are rather being weighed down under the load of recommendations. I had a meeting with the University of Scotland two weeks ago and I tried then to explain what I saw as the status of many of my recommendations. Most actually are in areas that are already very familiar and covered by other recommendations, so there are really variations on recommendations that are already being made in many cases, I think, urging rather faster progress. Other recommendations, I think, are more in the nature of suggested topics for discussion issues, which I feel should be debated more widely in the sector. For example, I raise a potentially controversial recommendation about whether we need to look more carefully at measures of success and whether the current measures of success we have are focused very much on the experience of traditional students and therefore may not always be sufficiently sensitive or flexible when it comes to students from different backgrounds. That is an example of something that I think is an issue for debate. It is not a recommendation that I would expect anyone to be able to implement in the short or even medium term. Most of my recommendations I think either cover very familiar territory and really just try and advance recommendations that are already being made by the Commission or by University of Scotland themselves or, secondly, are matters for which I would like to see a wider debate within the sector about. There are, of course, one or two recommendations that I make, which are potentially more challenging. I think that one is potentially more challenging to the Government itself when I ask them to suggest that they should review the total number of funded places available. I hope that at some point there might be some response from the Government to that. I wonder if we could expect more than hope that sometime we might get a response. I think it would be helpful if there was an expectation in Government to respond. I noticed that particular recommendation in the context of the debate that we are now having across the United Kingdom about funding students, the idea of a cap and the implications of a cap on Scottish domiciled students. I mean, I have been told that it is more difficult for a Scottish domiciled student to get into university now than at any time in the last 10 years. I don't know if it is true, but it would be useful to find out. Will it be reasonable for you to, or would we encourage you to, expect Government to respond to that particular recommendation, if I might ask you maybe to reflect also on your last recommendation, which I thought was very interesting, which was that we shouldn't just be looking at widening access specifically to what happens to somebody when they're 17, but somebody who's been denied the opportunity when they're 17 may want to go when they're 25, when they're 30. I wonder how you think that should be taken forward. On the first one, I mean, there's obviously been quite an important debate about the issue of displacement, about whether in a cap system if you recruit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds, other students may potentially lose out, be squeezed out by that. The evidence, I think, is so far is relatively unclear about whether that's happening on any significant scale. Nevertheless, that is a strong perception and therefore is an important issue. Clearly, it would help if there were slightly more flexibility in terms of the funded places available that would address some of those fears about displacement. I did say in that recommendation that there are opportunities available to increase the number of funded places without necessarily increasing the budget for higher education, although, of course, there's someone who comes from higher education and we're in favour of that as well. Sadly, one of the effects of Brexit, if it happens, will be that European students, except from the rest of the UK, would no longer be within the cap number. That's currently a total of almost 4,000 students, so a significant number if you compare that with the number of students that would be required to meet the targets in 2021 or even 2026, the numbers would be significantly less than the number of other EU students. I also think that there are opportunities to make savings in terms of what I call smarter articulation, giving HN students more credit if they transfer to degree programmes. There are other reasons why that's desirable, but one of the effects, of course, would be that he would actually release more funded places. I, in my recommendation, hope that the Government will look carefully at how these opportunities might be seized upon and if there is an opportunity to increase funded places, the total number, without a significant increase in the higher education budget, would clearly address fears of displacement. It would also give institutions the headroom to recruit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I think that that's an important recommendation, so I accept that it's a difficult one for the Government and there will always be competing pressures for public spending. The second point that you've raised about older students and students with other forms of disadvantage is that I deliberately include a recommendation in my report, because I think that there's again a widespread perception of, I think it's a mistaken one, that the targets are only focused on young adults. In fact, if we read the commission's report and the way that the Government has expressed the targets, that appears not to be the case. They're talking about students of all ages, although they're initial entrants to higher education. I think that it's important to emphasise that the needs of adult returners should be given equal weight. Can I ask then what is your expectation in terms of timetable responding to these recommendations? We wouldn't want to come back in a year's time, God willing, and find out that we're still hoping for a response. The last thing that I want to ask is just about the coming year. I'm very interested in what you say about articulation, because I know that from the colleges that I've spoken to, there is an issue about valuing some of the college courses. Would you look at articulation from what is now a very substantial work that is done in S6 in comparison to when I was teaching and a lot of young people who maybe do huge amounts of work in sixth year, which is really replicated in first year at university, and is there a place to do that kind of work too? Do you see that as part of your role? Just simply in terms of freeing up the system around opening up opportunities for students? Yes. On the first point on when the Government will respond, there was a meeting next week of the Fair Access delivery group, which is chaired by the minister, which I attend. I've been told that after that meeting, there will be some kind of response by the Government. I have no idea how much detail the Government will go into or whether it will respond to all the recommendations that I make, but I am confident that there will be a fairly prompt reply by the Government. That response will be made public? As far as I understand, that's my understanding. I think that it will be in the form of ministerial statements, so I think that it would be made public, yes. On the second point on articulation, that is an important issue. One of the areas in which I push a bit harder than University of Scotland might itself care to go is that I do think that it's important that there should be precise targets for articulation, and I do think that of students who are doing HNs who transfer to degree programmes, and I do think that the default position, the starting position, is that they should be given full credit. This is after all two-year higher education qualification, so logically they should enter into year three of a degree programme. I know there will be reasons why that's not always appropriate, particularly if they're changing their subject significantly and so on, but I also included under the head of articulation the interface between the final year and secondary, S6, and the first year in undergraduate, because I think that there probably is a significant overlap in some areas, and although I would defend very strongly the principle of four-year undergraduate degree, which, after all, is the international global standard, it's England that's out of step there, I would defend the four-year degree. I do think that better use could often be made of the first year of undergraduate education. Perhaps there should even be some co-teaching back into the S6. I don't know. I just think that this is an area that should be considered. I know that the Government has the learner journey initiative, which is looking at that issue among others, but, again, I think that that would help to produce a better transition. I'm very conscious that in some countries, particularly in the United States, a lot of attention is focused on the first-year experience in university, and here in Scotland and more generally in the UK, there's not the same emphasis on that. I was going to ask you questions around that first-year experience, I believe, but that's pointless. Professor Scott, we could turn attention to the relevant data. You mentioned when you came last year that there are issues about whether we have the right data in front of us. When we had an evidence session with Petra Vend, Susan Stewart and Sally Mapstone, it was quite a big issue there. I note in the University of Scotland paper for this meeting that there is concern that we don't necessarily have the most relevant and effective data in front of us, and therefore that makes policy decisions really quite difficult. Could you tell the committee whether you feel that there has been progress in identifying that data or whether we need to do a lot more to provide it? There's always a need to do more work, but I know a technical group is looking at improving the data, and they have a meeting next week. I think that Professor Wend particularly referred to the unique learner number, and clearly that would help. I think that there are many different measures of disadvantage, and the more accurate fix you can get on, the better. Having said that, I know that there's a lively debate about whether the current dominant measure, not the only measure, but the current dominant measure, SIMD, is the best marker of deprivation. In my report, I think that you will see that I, on the whole, defend it. First of all, although it's an area-based metric, it's quite a fine-grain one, certainly compared to Polo, which is the UK-wide system, which covers larger populations. Secondly, I think that the intention is to try and focus on deeply entrenched community-based forms of deprivation, which is reproduced generation by generation. If that is your primary focus, I think that SIMD is probably quite a good measure, but, of course, other measures should be used. I answered an earlier question about adult students. I've always felt very strongly that adult returners and adult learners are probably, to some extent, disadvantaged by our current higher education system, so I think that that should be the case. I think that we should be aware of a proliferation of markers of disadvantage. I think that I was told by both St Andrews and Edinburgh that up to half of their new entrance, Scottish entrance, had at least one marker of disadvantage. I think that that's rather too many. I think that that diffuses the whole thing. I think that we want to keep the focus relatively tight on deprivation. I understand that point, Professor Scott. However, if the real focus has to be on schools to ensure that we make things better for colleges and universities, there's a very strong argument in fact that it's schools that matter most in this. Therefore, to pick up the students in schools who are most likely to be in need of help, SIMD does have its failings in that respect, because obviously it's a neighbourhood measure and there are children in that who will do a lot better, but there are obviously children in non-SIMD 20 who will have difficulty too. I think that the point that some of your colleagues are making is that we're not quite clear about the relevance of some of the data set that we need at University Scotland to make this point very strongly in their paper. I just wonder if you have any ideas about what we can do just to improve our knowledge of who is most in need of help. Therefore, where the policy could be directed and that's very much a school's policy. A lot of the data that we have, there's often a trade-off between its relevance and its accuracy. I'm clear that there are some unambiguous indicators, I mean eligibility for free school meals and so on. I think that those are widely used by all institutions. I think that coming from a school that has a poor record of sending people on to higher education might well be another indicator, although again it's a group indicator rather than an individually focused indicator. There was some excellent research commissioned by the funding council specifically on the issue of contextual admissions, where there was a very good description of precisely this, the most reliable forms of data and the most relevant forms of data and trying to get the balance right. I think that there has to continue to be an important debate about this and I think that we do need to focus as much as possible on improving our data. Having said that, and I hope that this will be misinterpreted, I think that in a way that a lot of the evidence and data is available. We sort of know what the problem is. I mean the issue is whether we have the will and the resources to address the problems. With respect, I don't think that that's quite the argument that University of Scotland is making, that they're arguing that they don't actually have some of the data that they believe they need to pass on to their institutions. I was just going to ask, in the context of your huge experience with the sector and obviously your knowledge of the international aspects on higher education, do you feel that there is information or data that they use that might be helpful in Scotland to progress the policy? Well, I mean the absence of a unique learner number is an issue and I think that can and should be remedied. I think one of the other forms of data that University of Scotland is particularly concerned about is individual attainment levels and I realise that that can't always be available in as complete a form as they would necessarily like. Having said that, I think that occasionally the absence of data can be used as a kind of blanket excuse. For example, I think that University of Scotland in discussing the issue of setting minimum entry standards say that it would be helpful to have more data, for example, on individual attainment levels. I don't completely accept that because setting the minimum entry standard is really an academic issue. It's about the knowledge and skills that a student needs. I agree then that they need to go to the next stage and try to map whether an individual applicant has that knowledge and skills, but setting the entry minimum and entry standard itself, I don't think that it is necessary to require detailed knowledge of individual attainment levels by applicants. My final point would be on that. I think that they feel that when it comes to thresholds, they have more relevant information there but not when it comes to minimum entry requirements because that's a different point. I think that if we are going to resolve matters, we would have to have good data for both, if you would agree with that. Yes, one can never have enough data. I think that's clear. I'm not sure that I completely agree with that. I'm going to commit to your point. Tavish. Thank you. I have to confess to be a bit confused by all this from Liz's line of questioning because ultimately, as you say, an individual in the university chooses student by student who they're going to accept. If the criteria is the SIM20 analysis, the two don't compute, do they? Well, I think that universities in making offers have always taken other factors into account apart from the actual formal attainment level achieved by that individual applicant. They've often looked at the school the applicant has come from. They've looked at other kind of data or information about that applicant. For example, UCAS applicants make personal statements and universities attach some weight to that. Interestingly enough, some recent research by the Sutton Trust on the UK basis showed that personal statements, if anything, worked against access because the people who are best able to write a convincing personal statement probably were the students or applicants who already had a good deal of support. Universities have always, in a sense, had to balance the formal criteria, the attainment level of the individual pupil against these wider kind of surrounding factors. I don't think the task that university being asked to undertake now is a new one. It's perhaps just taking other kind of hinterland information, I can put it like that, rather than the ones they've traditionally taken. Therefore, in your research over the last year or so in Scotland, have you found that universities are just taking a different approach university to university in how they do exactly what you've just described, make an individual assessment of a student's ability to join that particular faculty? All universities in Scotland clearly take contextual data into account in making individual offers. They tend to have their own customised systems, although, if you look in— Light by light is quite difficult, in that sense. It is, although if you look in detail, many of the indicators that they use are the same, as you would expect. One of the recommendations that University of Scotland itself has come up with is that there should be a consistent agreed core of indicators that all universities take into account, and I strongly support that. I think that the problem, as I said a year ago, is that the current system can be a bit opaque, a bit obscure to someone who is actually applying for a place or the people advising them, so the greater transparency we can have, the better. Can you just set out for the committee your point about the unique learner number in the context of someone from five years up? What are the principal advantages of having that approach to how we ultimately make these judgments at application time? Clearly, a unique learner number, you can then, of course, look at other—you can look at their individual time levels, you can look at their specific individual attributes, and so on, and that does get over the kind of SIMD kind of neighbourhood problem, really, that you're grouping people in a neighbourhood rather than as individuals. So that would be a better system in the long term? I think it would be useful alongside SIMD. I do think, though, that the primary focus on looking at community-based deprivation, which is reproduced across generations, is still an important principle. Thank you. I was going to ask something relatively similar to Tavish Scotland, so you've kind of covered the point. I just want to pin down, given that the Government's ambition is that by 2030, students from the 20 per cent most deprived background should represent 20 per cent of entrance to higher education. There is a controversy over the use of the Scottish index of multiple deprivation in Scotland because it doesn't capture rural deprivation and rural poverty. So, in light of what you've just said there, do you think that it's quite urgent that we review how we do capture rural deprivation in terms of your work and indeed wider work in identifying that we are taking into account the needs of rural communities? Well, of course, the original target was set on the basis of communities. It was saying that people from the most deprived community should have the same opportunity to enter higher education as people from the most advantaged communities. So, it would require, I think, the Government to actually change its mind about how it defined that target. And, as I say in my report, and as I've said briefly now, to a significant degree, I do support the idea of focusing on communities. Nevertheless, I do think that it's really important when it comes to individual universities, making individual offers to students, that they shall have as much information as possible. And that doesn't necessarily contradict a wider obligation to meet a target denominated in SIMD. My hope, perhaps it's too hopeful, is that if you get it right on the first, making well-judged, very finely nuanced decisions about individual applicants in terms of disadvantage, you will also get it right on the second in terms of meeting targets for recruiting more students for more deprived backgrounds. Okay. I mean, it's quite a complex area. I guess my fundamental point is that the phrase communities has to be identified in some shape or form, and it's the Scottish index of multiple deprivation that's used generally to identify communities and deprivation, albeit you're looking at different ways of measuring that. So, I'm just trying to work out whether universities and higher education institutions will automatically focus efforts on certain parts of Scotland because of the easy way of doing that, which is through the existing index that they use, if that makes sense. If universities are looking at a numbers game, they've got to achieve certain percentages by a certain date. They will focus on certain communities in Scotland, which are thrown up by the current indexes that are used across Government. But if those indexes don't take into account rural poverty, then presumably their focus will be in certain parts of the country and not all of the country. Yes, yes. I mean, obviously, that's a strong argument. And clearly, universities sometimes complain that the current system obliges them to focus on recruiting students with a particular marker, even though a student with apparently the same degree of disadvantage who lives two streets away somehow is not so attracted to them because it doesn't help them to meet the target. And I suppose that might happen at the margin. There's also the argument that because there are not enough applicants from SIMD-20 areas in the first place that the most urgent priority is to try and expand the number of applicants, well-qualified applicants from that area. And I absolutely agree with that as well. And I cover that quite a lot in my report. I mean, a lot of the work that's being undertaken by the Access Framework Development Group, which is now currently at work and is going to produce a toolkit and also try and develop a community of practice, is focused on that particular issue itself, trying to increase the number of people from those areas who actually wish to apply to university in the first place. I'd like to ask you about the priority given to retention. University Scotland in their submission to us have said that they believe that widening access and retention should go hand in hand. And the committee heard some interesting feedback from universities on our visit to the Conservatoire. I was particularly struck by Glasgow Caledonian, who, under their corporate patenting responsibilities, provided accommodation for care-experienced young people throughout the year because, obviously, that's one of the things that's a huge challenge. So I'd just be interested to hear your reflection on that. Well, the two do go hand in hand, access and retention, and not just retention but success. However, as the discussion document that I published about three or four weeks ago shows, there nevertheless is an attrition at every stage. People from SIMD areas who are admitted are still more likely to not to transfer to the second year. They are rather more likely to receive an ordinary degree rather than an honest degree. They are rather less likely to get a good degree, a first or a two-one honours. Rather alarmingly, even if they do get a good degree, they are less likely to get a graduate job. So there's a very complex picture of discrimination and disadvantage at play here. I do think that all needs to be taken into account in terms of access, just getting people admitted and then leaving it. That's not enough. However, I do open up in my report the issue of whether we need to look more closely at how we define success. For example, all universities will have quite strict academic regulations which determine whether you are eligible to move from year one to year two into subsequent years. The funding council will currently have criteria to find whether these students continue to be eligible for funding, and all this is necessary. However, there have always been, these criteria have been established, these regulations have been made against a background of a very unfair distribution of students. In other words, it's made essentially with students who are well qualified, well prepared, coming on the whole from advantage social backgrounds in mind, and it mirrors their experience, their progression through, and maybe we need to actually develop a bit more flexibility. Now, this is a very tricky territory because the memory you start talking about is people think you're conniving at dumbing down and so on, and that's the last thing I want to do. But I think it's a point I made a year ago. I mean, in the UK generally, progression rates are incredibly high compared to the United States. The United States Americans generally are much more relaxed, I mean, about success. They think people, they talk about step out, they don't talk about drop out, and it would be really good to be able to move to that and have more flexible systems. So I think there are lots of issues that need to be addressed there, and anything we can do to free up kind of rules about progression and so on, which give people the maximum of what opportunity to progress, to make sure that we really do have good criteria when it comes to degree classifications that aren't in any way biased. I mean, perhaps this is slightly mischievous, but I mean, the university generally in the UK and here in Scotland have substantially increased the proportion of good degrees they offer, two ones and first. Now, I wonder why that's happened. I mean, we can all speculate why that might have happened, and it might have something to do with competition and league tables and so on, but it does show that universities can be flexible in certain contexts. Well, maybe they need to be flexible in bearing in mind fair access considerations. It would certainly feel like that's a priority, because I think none of us would want to set people up to fail and the disadvantages that young people or adult returners have experienced don't just go away when they get a university place, they're still there, so it would certainly feel like a priority. Now, I absolutely agree with that. I mean, I think there's a lot of research evidence that shows on the whole that people who go to university and then drop out are left with a sense of failure, and often they are more disadvantaged as a result of that than they would be if they hadn't gone to university in the first place. But that, I think, raises another issue about whether we have a flexible enough system. I mean, one of the recommendations I make very much as a point for discussion rather than the kind of recommendation needs to be implemented is that I think we should move towards a kind of more holistic tertiary view of a more integrated system, which would allow people who perhaps had dropped out of one stage to come back at another stage in a different kind of area. We need a much more flexible system generally. I think that's acknowledged, it's just the difficulties of actually achieving it. Thank you. Good morning. I wanted to pick up on a couple of issues, one that we've already discussed quite briefly is contextualised admissions. I also sit in the Equalities and Human Rights Committee and you recently came to that committee and we discussed the issue of contextualised admissions there. That's where grades are weighted against certain social factors to help to level the playing field for students. You made three specific points in relation to contextualised admissions. The first was about common agreement, about the indicators that should be used. You've touched on that briefly this morning, but I'd be grateful if you perhaps could give a bit more detail on the progress towards that. The second thing that you picked up on, and again I'd be interested in your comment on progress, is the way that information is used and the clarity how aware students are of the weight that's put on different factors that they highlight. The third area that you highlighted was a report from Durham University, and they talked about the issue of risk. In a particular-like phrase that you've just used, where you said, step out rather than drop out, and it's how success is measured. I'd be grateful if you could perhaps reflect on that and tell me what progress has been made towards those things. On the first one, the identification of core indicators that everyone would use. This was a recommendation made by University of Scotland themselves, the workgroup chaired by Sally Mapstone. That work is being carried forward by University of Scotland. I'm content that they should do so. I think that there's general agreement on that, that we do need to focus on a certain number of core indicators that all universities would use. Having said that, I think that the University of Scotland reserved the right to have their own subsidiary, secondary indicators as well. Provided that doesn't detract from the focus on the primary indicators, that's fine, because particular universities in particular regions might have particular needs, which they, for instance, are addressing more rural communities. I could see that that could be a relevant indicator in one university. It wouldn't be a relevant indicator in a university in Glasgow and so on. Generally, I'm reasonably satisfied that progress has been made on that. On the second one, I'm less clear, frankly, about how universities intend to carry that forward. I do think that it's extremely important that people have a good understanding that if they do have a marker of some kind, an indicator, what weight is going to be attached to that? Does it guarantee them an interview? Does it guarantee them a place? Or does it simply guarantee them some rather nebulous extra consideration? I think that that should be made as clear as possible. I accept that there are limits to that because, after all, these are individual decisions which universities are making about individual candidates. I mentioned personal statements earlier. Universities have always taken into account individual information and to generalise that and to say exactly how what weight is going to be attached to it can be a bit difficult. I think that there should be a better understanding of the relative weight that is attached to these considerations. The final issue of risk, I think that occasionally we should be prepared to take a few more risks. I think that if we only admitted students to universities, when we were absolutely sure that they were definitely going to succeed and getting a good degree and getting a graduate job, we would admit a lot fewer than we do currently. I think that opportunity requires some element of risk to be accepted. On the issue of risk, when we talked about students who leave university for whatever reason sometimes feel as if they have failed, do universities have a view that the number of students that drop out is also failing? There probably is a default position across the whole of the UK that, if someone drops out, they have failed. Again, in contrast to the United States, they would think that someone has achieved up to that point. They can put that in the bank and they can bring it back at some other point. In four more terms, we have all these systems in this country that have created transfer. You can often transfer your credit and bring it back at some latest age, but in practice it happens a lot less than it should do. It is more of an approach, a kind of mentality that is the issue rather than the actual details of the systems themselves. Before I move on to the second point, I wanted to ask you about—I will be very quick. Do you think that, if we move towards a set of standards where contextualised admissions were looked at, that would help to do the almost—that would move on to being better able to assess how those factors were used? If we had a set of standards, we would be better to assess how they were used. That is difficult, I think, really. I think that university admissions and college admissions are always going to be a complex business. You are always going to take a range of factors into account. We should try to shift the balance towards greater transparency and, away from what is sometimes a rather obscure process, why decisions are taken. I think that you will never be able to achieve an industrialised process where somehow you tick these boxes and it can be done by a computer algorithm. I do not think that university admissions should ever be like that. I think that the individual has to come into it and personal decisions are important. That will never be involved with a degree of subjectivity. As I said, we should try to shift as much as possible towards greater transparency. It is in relation to students with disabilities. While it is mentioned in the report, there is not a huge degree of focus on young people with disabilities, particularly young people who are BSL. I would be interested in your comment. Again, I heard from the Equalities and Human Rights Committee evidence that, if a young person has a disability and they go through the application process, there is a disconnect between the application process and the process they go through to ensure that they have the funding and the support they need when they get to university. It quite often prevents young people from going to the university that they want to go to. I think that, particularly of our older universities, it may be more difficult for the older universities to provide the physical and emotional support that young people would need. Do you intend to make some recommendations or progress in relation to that? In my first annual report, I focus very much on the current issues that, to somebody who has been set by the commission's report itself and also by the response from University of Scotland. I addressed the same list of things. I did try to flag up other issues that I would like to come back to. One was looking at other forms of disadvantage. Disability is a very important one. Disability itself comes in many different forms. You mentioned physical disability. That raises a particular set of issues that are often very concrete in terms of the provision that needs to be made. There are other forms that are perhaps the most common form now, and a growing form, of course, is dyslexia in some form or other. Institutions that, in the past, were probably rather insensitive to that and are now much more sensitive to that and will make the kind of adjustments. They are relatively easy adjustments to make in that case. Each form of disability needs different remedies, as different forms of social disadvantage probably need different remedies. Again, it is a complex picture, but I would like to certainly come back to that in my future annual report. It is interesting that you picked up dyslexia, because dyslexia is something that universities are quite willing to accommodate and assist. However, it is young people that have perhaps a more profound disability who are being prevented and excluded, and it is an area that I would like to see more progress being made in. I would support that. Obviously, the issue of cost comes into it, and particularly if you have old buildings, making them accessible to people with physical disability can really be a very expensive business as well. While making the adjustments that are required for dyslexic students is probably much cheaper, universities will consider that as well. There is also a role for legislation. Many forms of disability are covered by legislation, and all organisations and institutions are required to make appropriate adjustments to meet the needs of disabled people. Good morning. This is a pretty simple question, but it is probably a minefield in itself. The whole idea that we are talking about SMID 20 and for top disability, many people with disabilities will probably be in the SIMD 20 category as well. Universities, such as in my constituency in Paisley, the US and Glasgow Calais, are constantly getting the over-the-20 per cent mark. It is not just the 20, they are not just ticking the box, they are getting over it, and they have been doing for a number of years. Compared to other more established universities, the question is quite simple. Why is that? Why are they doing it in other university teams to struggle? There is your right to point out that there is quite a variable record between different institutions, but I think that you have to take into account the degree of demand that a particular university has. If you are forced to be really quite selective in terms of the students you could admit, apparently making exceptions for students because they have certain social characteristics is probably more challenging than for a university where demand is more limited, where essentially they will admit all reasonably well qualified students. I think that the challenge is, in a sense, harder for more selective institutions like the ones you mentioned, UWS and Caledonian. Having said that, there clearly are examples of institutions that are pretty selective, quite research-intensive, which nevertheless have done rather well in terms of meeting SIMD 20 targets. It is probably rather invidious to mention them, but I think that Stirling, Strath Clyde, Harriet Watt to some degree, Glasgow School of Art, which you would not expect naturally to be that good at that. There are other institutions that, on the face of it, there is a less clear reason why they have not made so much progress, and I think that probably they need to be challenged a bit more. In my time in the committee in the last term, in this term, we seem to go around circles where certain universities will bring out. Here is our young person from a disadvantaged background, whereas Glasgow Caledonian, UWS, is hinting at the figures and doing it. On that argument, there has been an argument made by, in most cases, post-92 institutions that the funding support is possibly because those young people who are coming from poorer backgrounds are maybe chaotic lifestyles, not so much on their side but within their family. We have all these other challenges that they are dealing with day in and day out, but after a year one where the drop tends to happen, that lifestyle of everything that is involved is still there, and they would make an argument for funding that there should be some way that we look at possibly supporting the institutions that are doing that. What would be your opinion on that scenario? I am right to say that, in the past, the funding council did make some financial adjustments. It is a difficult issue, really. It could be seen, I suppose, from the perspective of an ancient university that they are somehow being penalised because their students do not have such chaotic lifestyles, but I agree that we should take into account the extra costs that are sometimes involved in the support of those kinds of students. I think that needs to be addressed in a twin-track way, through institutional funding but also in financial support for the students themselves. I know that the Scottish Government, of course, did a commission report that was published on student finance last November. I think that a response from the Government to that report will presumably be forthcoming fairly soon. That is an issue that I would like to come back to. Generally, though, I think that the approach has always been not just in Scotland but across the UK, in a way, funding for teaching students should be relatively formulaic. It should take into account the cost of teaching for that subject, so that you could get more from medicine than for history. Apart from that, you should not take into account different characteristics of the student body. Of course, you could make the counterargument that they should take into account the kind of students you recruit. If they are more expensive to teach because of some of the reasons that you mentioned, that should be reflected in a premium for the institution itself. Could there also be a situation where someone might be academically able to go to one of the ancients but not necessarily apply because of their own background and call it inverted snobbery or whatever else? You might find a situation where they are more comfortable in certain institutions. Would that not be down to the recruitment and maybe something as simple as not so much all-pound shillons and penned? How are we going about recruiting young people into certain institutions? That, again, is a very difficult issue. Take the University of St Andrews. It is very proud that it was established in 1413 and makes a lot of that. On certain occasions, there are students paraded around in red gowns. This is probably not the image that some people necessarily want to be associated with. It is quite a strong cultural message that is being sent there. A university like that, of course, prides itself on its traditions, does need to take into account the fact that that might act as a bit of a put-off for certain kinds of applicants. They need to work a bit harder to prove to those people that know they would fit in and they would be welcome there. That is difficult. I would like to look at the wider issues that affect access. We are all very well aware that rising public transport costs and issues with the private rental sector can affect retention, in particular going back to Ruth Maguire's point. How able have you felt, Professor Scott, to address the wider issues that fall out with education portfolios? There have to be some limits to my remit. You are right to say that people's lives are not self-contained. Issues of public transport are crucial in terms of how easy it is to get to university or college and what it costs you. It has a big impact on whether you are going to go there in the first place or whether you can afford to stay there. I am not quite sure what boundaries could be set. There are so many other factors that would be taken. Health is obviously an issue as well. I do not think on the whole that I should find myself trying to feel obliged to comment on issues of public transport costs or health policy in Scotland. I think that my role would then become to diffuse. I think that you are probably right in that regard. How do you feel that the Government should take a holistic approach to that? Obviously, tremendous progress can be made in the work that you are doing and falling through on the recommendations from the commission, but I think that you yourself used the word holistic beforehand. Unless a holistic approach is taken to that, we will not reach the targets that we really want to see. How should that holistic approach be taken forward? As you said, it is not just for yourself and what you are doing, but this affects a range of Government departments, agencies and public policy areas far out with what your remit could possibly reach. However, there needs to be some level of connection there. I think that the way that this role of commission was conceived is that holistic, in my terms, means the education system. I agree that there are no firm boundaries to the education system, but I am very aware that to focus too much on colleges and universities and particularly on traditional universities, you would miss the bigger picture. It is really important to understand what is going on in schools and what the issues are there. That is one of my priorities in the current year, to focus more on issues in schools. If you look at many of the outreach initiatives taken by universities, some really try and address students at a really quite young age, in primary school, and try and involve their parents at that stage. On the whole, I think that the evidence such as it exists shows that that is pretty effective on the whole because it familiarises people with the idea of going to university as not being a strange experience after all. I certainly think that it is important to look holistically across the whole of education, inevitably that will bring in some aspects of social care, I suppose, as well. Again, I have to set some limits, otherwise I will be ending up commenting on why society is unequal. Although I have personal views about that, I am not sure that they are relevant in that context. We could have an exception. The committee will be having an exceptionally long discussion about that at some point. On the making an interesting point around schools that has been discussed a lot about already, universities that have that outreach from an early age see success from that. From what you have seen so far, does that require a certain level of buy-in at a local authority level? Does it vary from local authority to local authority, or is this something that is happening with individual schools, universities and individual headteachers, which is essentially showing the initiative? I think that local authorities are very important. Local authorities, obviously, are very important in terms of raising school attainment levels. I mean, I am very struck by the success of schools in Glasgow in terms of raising educational attainment levels, and inevitably that has a knock-on effect in making the fair access easier for the universities based there. Interestingly enough, in the UK, if you look at London, exactly the same has happened in London. School attainment levels have increased substantially. I think that you do need to look at these local variations and look at the role of local education authorities and find out why, in certain areas, school attainment levels seem to have been increased substantially through concerted efforts. In other areas, there has been less success, because that clearly sets the platform on which then fair access to higher education is built. I will follow on a little bit from Rossker's questions on transport and housing and things like that in the sense that I think that there is a role for you to take in terms of student support, and I was just interested in your thoughts and reflections on that, particularly in relation to how student finance impacts upon the access targets and people's desire to undertake studies. No, I am certainly not saying that these matters are unimportant, and I referred to the review of student financial support, the report that was published last November. That focused very much on direct financial support to students in terms of loans or grants and so on. That is an important matter, but other things like the availability of housing and transport are crucial as well. Universities clearly invest a lot in student accommodation, but a lot of it is addressed to the needs of young adult students, 18 to 21, 22-year-olds. That is what is in mind, although increasingly, of course, they bear in mind the conference business as well when they build accommodation. And if you are commuting from home, the availability of housing is not important, but the availability of transport is very important, so different groups of students have a different balance of needs, really, and it does make a complex picture. My point was really that if you have got the right financial support package in place, some of the issues around housing and transport become that bit easier, and it was really your thoughts in terms of the review and in terms of how important that student support was to ensuring that people from the targeted backgrounds actually want to feel able to go to university. Yes, I think that finance is crucial. The discussions that I have had with students have always mentioned money in a way that is not surprising, but, clearly, that is always at the forefront of people's minds. I think that financial stress is often a significant factor in dropout, or lack of success by students. Clearly, the perception that this might be expensive and you do not know where the money will come from to pay for it will discourage people from applying in the first place. Finance is important. I deliberately did not say very much in my annual report, because there had been a separate report on that. It was published only a few weeks before my annual report, and the Government has not responded, and it still has not responded directly on that. I think that it is right for me to wait to see what kind of response the Government makes. If I could make a general observation, one of the complaints that has often made is that poorer students end up when they graduate with higher levels of debt than students with more advanced bank grants. I think that, with any loans-based system, that is almost inevitable. Exactly the same happens in England. It happens in all countries where you have a loans-based system of student support. The only way that you could address that would be to have a very generous support of student grants, as I benefited from when I was a student, but that is a very expensive business, and Governments have competing priorities. I think that these are the issues that I would like to come back to when I see what response the Government makes to the specific recommendations that are made in the student support review. I want to come back to the things that you have mentioned. Certain universities do not recognise higher national qualifications. As a former college lecturer, I have spent a lot of my life complaining about that. The fact that some colleges are not doing any kind of access to type programmes or bridging programmes or outreach, as has been mentioned before, and you make some recommendations about the SFC's role in that. You are making recommendations, but I am sensing that you want the SFC to take a role in identifying the universities that are not making the inroads that others are and saying that this is not acceptable. Do you feel that they have the heft to be able to do that? That is why I made the recommendation. I think that our starting point should always be as the default position that an HND is a two-year full-time higher education qualification if you transfer to a degree programme, it should be into year three. I know that that will not always be possible. You might have changed subject. The approach within the HND might be different from the approach taken in the degree programme, but I do not think that we should start with all the difficulties. I sometimes think that these discussions say that it is all very, very difficult. I think that we should start from the other end and saying that this should be possible. If there are difficulties, let us discuss them, see how valid they are, and if they are valid, how do we address them? I think that there are good examples of universities and colleges working together across HNs and degrees to make sure that there is better compatibility of approaches and content and so on. There is good practice out there. It is just a question of generalising it and perhaps adopting a slightly more positive approach rather than, oh, it is all very difficult. I do not think that it is difficult. I think that there is evidence there in the universities and the colleges that are working together that the success of college students with a higher national actually do quite well at university. I reckon that evidence is there, but why are some universities not recognising that evidence? What is the sticking point? What are their arguments against it? I think that the issue is often subject-based in areas such as engineering and business studies and management. I think that there is a better understanding of how HNs and degrees fit together, while in other areas it is more difficult. Obviously, there are other areas in which there is not an HN equivalent. Someone would be changing subject entirely if they came to university to study a new area. Partly, it is due to the tradition of the institution. I mean, some universities, for instance, Strathclyde and Harry Watt, come from a kind of higher technical education history—that is their history really—a professional education. Therefore, their links and understanding what goes on in the colleges is probably naturally rather better than it would be in the cases of Andrews, which does not have that kind of history. I think that there are lots of explanations, but it is not enough just to look to history and say that we can understand why more people in this institution understand HNs well than in that institution. We have to find remedies for it. In that case, I thank you for your attendance. That was a very useful session, and it brings us to the end of the public part in the meeting. I suspend the meeting while we wait for the public gallery to clear.