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