 Good morning, everybody, and can I welcome you to the 25th meeting of the Education and Culture Committee in 2015? Can I remind everybody to make sure that they switch off all electronic devices and keep them off throughout the meeting? Moving on to agenda item one, our next item is an evidence session on skills development in Scotland, which is the last session on examining the spending decisions made and the outcomes delivered by some of the key public bodies within our remit. Can I welcome to the committee this morning Damien Yates, chief executive, John McClellan, CBE chair, Katie Hutton, deputy director of national training programmes and Daniel Oogue, operations director all from Skills Development Scotland? Can I welcome all of you to the committee this morning? Thank you for coming along and giving up your time. I believe that you wish to make a short opening statement. Well, one of you does, I hope. John. Okay, thank you. Thank you, chair, and good morning. We're pleased to be here today and to have the opportunity to contribute to your important work. In our recent submission, we provided a comprehensive overview of our work and an outline of our corporate plan to 2020. I'd like just to highlight a couple of our goals. One is that we want to ensure that employers are better able to recruit the right people with the right skills at the right time. We also want there to be opportunity for all and for people to have the appropriate skills and confidence to secure work and achieve their full career potential. In short, our ambition is to see Scotland's economy fuelled by a highly skilled workforce, with each one of us able to contribute our talent skills and commitment. Our staff seek to deliver that ambition within the framework of our skills planning model, which follows a systematic approach to skills planning and development. Working closely with industry leadership groups, we gain a comprehensive understanding of current and future skills demand by industry sector, by region, and those we respond to with skills investment plans and regional skills assessments. Those plans include critical actions for our learning systems. Annually, Scotland invests nearly £7 million in schooling, further and higher education and work-based learning programmes such as modern apprenticeships. It is therefore vital that this substantial investment is aligned with the needs of Scotland's people, its businesses and its economy. The skills investment plans are helping to do that. We really do want to make skills work for Scotland. Another very important part of doing exactly that is our own daily working schools, where our dedicated career professionals help young people to build their career management skills and inform them and inspire them to choose the right careers. In our 47 customer-facing locations throughout Scotland, we provide careers and skills support for all people, regardless of age or need. Our skills needs are particularly urgently developed and implement interim measures such as skills academies. The recently established digital skills academy is an example of our responsiveness. That urgency is also evident in our leadership of a group of agencies working in pace, where our staff are physically on site within hours, sometimes even prior to the formal news or potential redundancies. At Skills Development Scotland, we are never happy with the status quo and take pride in our innovations such as our online services, my world of work and our skills force. That natural tendency to innovate is also evident in our recent securing of funds to deliver enhanced career guidance to younger school pupils, pilot new foundation and graduate apprenticeships. Given the equality and diversity at the very heart of our work, we do even more to drive change that will make an enduring difference for those at risk of being marginalised. Everything that we do is characterised by partnerships, engaged directly with individual employers, employed bodies and 17 industry leadership groups. We also work closely with every local authority, have partnership agreements with nearly 400 secondary schools and membership of every CPP or one of its committees. We also work closely with the third sector, trade unions, job centre plus and, of course, our sister agencies within the Scottish Government. We assure that commitment to partnerships will stand as in good stead as we now seek to make substantial contribution to the shape of the newly evolved and integrated employment service in Scotland, which I am sure is of great interest to the committee. Thank you very much, John, for that statement. I am just going to move straight to questions from members and we are going to begin with John Pentland. Thank you, chair. Good morning. In 2014-15, the main focus in the ministerial letter to yourself was to see what activity you would do to meet the national outcomes and how you would respond to the recommendations from the work of the commission for developing Scotland's young workforce and the importance of partnership working with relevant bodies. Could I perhaps ask to what extent is the SDS able to influence the priorities set by the Scottish Government rather than simply being the delivery vehicle for the Scottish Government? I will respond to that. One of the areas that we spend quite a bit of time looking at is best practice and what works well both in Scotland and elsewhere. I could give a number of examples in terms of policy areas that we have, I think, had quite a significant influence on actual implementation and plans going forward, and specifically in respect of developing Scotland's young workforce, so probably three areas. The first would be in careers advice and guidance. We have shifted significantly in the last number of years away from a notion that careers is about a simple choice at a point in time to one that is about building the skills, the career management skills of young people, recognising that in the future they will typically have up to 14 different career paths in the first 10 years of their working life, so the ability to migrate and jump between jobs and progress is really crucial. That work was embedded within building the curriculum for as part of the curriculum for excellence. As part of that, we then made a strong case to the commission for developing Scotland's young workforce about SDS doing a lot more work in early years. Through that, we have secured funding to support young people from P7 to S3, specifically around subject choice and the degree to which subject choice can be supported in making much better career progressions thereafter. The second area of work that is quite transformative is around work-based pathways. The committee may be aware that there has been a significant shift over the past 50 years in progression into the workplace, so if you were born in 1958, there are many of us around the room who remember that, you came out of school in 1976, then back in those days, if you were 18 in 1976, 74 per cent of people went directly into the labour market with a wraparound skills programme and typically apprenticeship or professional apprenticeship type programmes. Fast forward to 2013 and it is just about 20 per cent of young people are going directly into the labour market. A vast majority are going into FE and HE. There is a sense that, somehow or another, as we look ahead, there is a bit of a disconnect between the choices that young people make and the world of work. We are currently trialling through the developing Scotland's young workforce new work-based pathways. What we have proposed to the Scottish Government is that, during S5 and S6, young people, in addition to core hires, would undertake the first year of a modern apprenticeship. They would have a sponsoring employer and the employer would take them through on-the-job and off-the-job training over S5 and S6 and that this would have really beneficial outcomes. At the minimum level, it would have the outcome of helping in the young people who have a view about a career path to actually experience that job and be in the workplace. If a young person wants to progress in an MA, then it should allow them to progress into year 2. If they want to go to university, we have examples where the university of a stratglide is saying that, if the chair of a convener of the committee has got his higher maths and physics but has done higher geography and I have got my higher maths and physics but I have done the first year of an engineering apprenticeship, then I will get in before the convener to stratglide university. The tariff of the work-based pathway has both very strong academic tariff but equally it has got very strong work-based tariffs. This work was based on research that we did right across the globe in respect of economies that have very strong work-based learning programmes. I will not continue. I guess that there are two good examples for work that we have done to influence policy going forward. Obviously, the money that you received from the Scottish Government has got to be used in a strategic direction. How do you answer that and how do you report that? So, we would report that on quite a number of different levels. Clearly, we align all of our outcomes with the national performance framework. We specifically support about eight of the indicators in the national performance framework, so indicators around the confidence and learning capabilities of young people, successful transitions from schools, the acquiring of qualifications and having a skilled workforce, supporting young people and those in the workplace to progress and secure jobs, a major part of the apprenticeship programme, and responding to large-scale redundancy programmes, ensuring that those who are on the threat of redundancy can positively return to work and sustain their careers beyond that. Right across the suite of the national performance indicators, we have mapped exactly what we do to contribute to those. Beyond that, we look at what we are doing in respect of our own programmes. We undertake both internal and external evaluation of our own programmes. We report on the activities that we deliver. We report on the impacts that transpire out of that. We can tell you that of the 26,000 apprentices that we would support every year, we have completion rates of between 74 and 78 per cent. That is among the best that you will get in any work-based programme. We have sustained employment at 92 per cent six months beyond completing the programme, so we can report extensively both on internal and external measures in respect of the investments that we deliver. Obviously, much of your funding comes from the Scottish Government through grant and aid. Could you perhaps tell us to what extent would Skills Development Scotland be able to generate other income streams? It is probably not too many areas that we could actively look at developing income streams. One area that has emerged as a case of international best practice is around the use of my world of work. We have had interest from New Zealand, Wales and Norway in respect of the ability for those nations to acquire infrastructure around my world of work and deliver a similar service. We are actually in advanced discussions with the Norwegian Government about potentially transferring that expertise and looking at a reciprocal relationship there. With those areas, it would be very difficult to identify areas that we would generate income specifically. Could you perhaps advise the committee the reasons for the in-year transfers of funding to SDS from the Scottish Government in both 2014 and 2015-60? What specifically are they? The reason for the in-year transfers? Typically, we would get a grant in aid at the start of the year and then at autumn budget review or spring budget review, we would tend to get additional income based on commitments against our priorities. Pretty much it is just the way that money comes to us to deliver our services. They come at the start of the year in respect of grant in aid and then they come by way of top-ups through ABR and SBR, but that is the method that we get our money. To be fair to John, his question was why is that the method? What are the reasons for the in-year transfers? You get to around £180 million and then the rest is in the in-year transfers, or most of it. That is a matter for the Scottish Government. That is how we would get our money, so I am not sure. I could not answer that. That is to do with the Scottish Government. You have never had any discussions or engagement with the Scottish Government or officials about the way that your money comes to you. Yes, we regularly do, and it is more directive to say that you will get this money through grant in aid and you will get this money through ABR or SBR, and it will depend on the type of commitments. For example, typically the ABR and SBR is for maybe one-off spend, so we may get spends in respect of support that we got for the digital and ICT sector to support the response that Government would have to that sector. We would maybe have a one or a two-year funding cycle, but it would not be part of our core grant. It would be an exceptional additional amount that would come over and above grant in aid. I am sorry, I thought that it was more technical. No, but does that type of process cause you any problems? What would happen, for example, if the Government did not agree to give you the mere digital money? If we had already made commitments in respect of investments and they were legal commitments and that money did not come through, clearly there would be an issue of liability in that respect. That has never happened. We have never had a situation where Government has not been in a position to honour the liabilities that we have set out. Audit Scotland had a report in March last year on modern apprenticeships and you were in front of the Audit Committee of which two members here, including myself, were also members. At that time, we were quite intrigued as to looking at the background of the cuts in college funding, huge cuts in college places and at that time we were really very concerned that only 10 per cent of apprenticeships were trained through further education colleges. When I saw your grand plan today, I looked through and I was expecting to see maybe 20 or 30 per cent of your modern apprenticeship training going to further education colleges. However, instead of 10 per cent going to colleges, it is now eight. It is getting worse instead of better. Given the quality standards and the robust testing and inspection regimes in colleges, why are you giving them less modern apprenticeships than you did two years ago? I will ask Katie maybe to give a fuller answer. However, just to say to the committee, any provider, whether they are a college or a private training provider who today would have the opportunity to provide a level 3 apprenticeship in a STEM area for a 16 to 19-year-old and who can deliver against a 74 to 78 per cent completion rate and a 92 per cent retention in employment six months after, we will guarantee that we will fund those places. So whether it is a college or a training provider, we will guarantee that we can deliver those. I will maybe ask Katie to… That the colleges did bid for 44 per cent more places than they were allocated at their briefing, so it is quite a significant amount. Colleges are a valuable partner in the delivery of modern apprenticeships. There are direct contracts with colleges and, as well, there is an indirect contract through other providers who subcontract part of that to colleges themselves. The key thing is that we operate a procurement approach to this, which is open and transparent and it is competitive. Every single provider, whether it is third sector, private or college, are treated in exactly the same way. A key determinant of that is achievement rates in terms of a measure of quality. In the previous year, the providers delivered what they said they would set out to do, because it was quite a balancing act getting all the numbers in terms of achieving the 25,000 target. Colleges, who are great deliverers, sometimes you find that with some of them, not all, you find that the employer links are there. We have had lobbying from certain colleges during the year to up the numbers and then you find that they have been handed back at the end of the year. That can sometimes happen. We also have some feedback from employers from time to time who will say things like, well, the mode of delivery is not flexible. The main thing is that it is a market brace approach that is competitive and that they are treated in exactly the same way. I would say also that the foundation apprenticeship model that has been developed by SDS in moving forward will see a greater role played by colleges because they are the main delivery agent for it, too. You might see that that is a methodology of gaining greater employer contact when the young person is at school and then continuing when they progress on to their modern apprenticeship. Given that you both mentioned achievement rates, is there a problem with colleges? What do they have to do? They are bidding for they get 8 per cent of your work, they bid for 44 per cent more than that and do not get it. Is there a problem with the college's achievement rate? She mentioned flexibility and I do understand that one. Is there a problem with the college's achievement rates compared to the private sector? In some cases, yes, and it gets down to looking at the achievement rates relating to the different frameworks that are available. That is not the case across all colleges and you cannot generalise. You have to look at every single bidder that is bidding and judge them on the basis of, as I say, achievement rates and whether or not they delivered to the contract levels previously that they were given. As I say, a number of providers, not just colleges, can let us down and say that I am going to have 50 engineering places and then you find the weight to the end of the year and then they hand a lot of them back. We just cannot have that, which is why we manage our contracting process very tightly. The other point in terms of operational activity that came from the Audit Scotland report, they were very critical that your performance measures did not look at whether the apprenticeships were valued for money, but it was also the link between national outcomes. Not clear if there were details of the number and types of apprenticeships needed to meet employer needs. The Wood commission in the same report said that modern apprenticeships needed to be better aligned with government priorities and skills priorities in order that people can get jobs. What have you done in order to ensure that modern apprenticeships are aligned with employer needs and government priorities and economic growth? A couple of responses to that. One would be to say that all the work that we do through our skills investment plans to understand the future demands of key sectors—we now have 10 of those—looks specifically at the stock and flow of skills through apprenticeships for their education college and universities and specifically ask the question, have we got enough flow in the system to meet what we anticipate the future demand to meet? We have specific shifts in the apprenticeship programme to respond to that. A good example was recently that we had year-on-year increases of 500 apprenticeships into the energy sector at a time when the sector was in growth, so that responsiveness is built in. In terms of the long-term evaluation, I think that the recommendation from Audit Scotland wants to ask the Scottish Government to have a look at the longer-term impacts of the programme, so we have engaged the OECD in that work. Strangely enough, there are few countries in the world that do long-term evaluations of the outcomes of investment in work-based learning, so we are right at the start of agreeing a framework with the OECD. We have funded a PhD student to work with the OECD and ourselves to put in place the longitudinal studies that will track the long-term benefits for the participants, for the participating companies, for those who engage in industries and for the economy, so we will be able to provide Parliament with a comprehensive set of econometric and social data that underpin why you would invest £75 million a year in a programme such as the apprenticeship programme. To be quite honest, the econometric longitudinal OECD study that will all be sitting here getting very excited about seeing, you were asked to bring something forward two years ago, and what you are telling me today is that you are going to start looking at longitudinal econometric. Given that you have answered that question, you are now doing what Audit Scotland has asked you to do, and we are very critical about not aligning modern apprenticeships with jobs, which is what we all want to see. What have you done, in particular, on IT and computing, given that there is a critical national shortage and given that your careers advisers are in schools? What have they done within schools to ensure that pupils get the qualifications that they need in order to go on to do HNC, HND— I ask Katie to come back on the evaluation question on what we do here and now today, and I will then come back to you on the ICT in digital. I asked you questions two years ago, so I do not want jam tomorrow. I am looking for a follow-up on, say, March 2014, rather than two years' time longitudinal studies. As regards the long-term econometrics, we have actually been working on the interim. I do not know if you have ever worked with OECD before, but it actually takes quite a bit of time to work with them, to put forward a proposal, etc. The other thing that we have done is working with the Government around the nirvana of this whole thing about long-term evaluation is to do it in a way that is cost-effective. It is very, very expensive to survey people, as you will appreciate. We have been working closely with the Government. There was a bill going through Parliament about access to things such as HMRC data. Mr MacArthur, last time, said that he was a bit concerned about that. It would be anonymised, but what you would do is to use all the publicly available information to match data together. We have been developing a new system for modern apprenticeships, which will also match the data that is sitting in things such as the careers databases. We have been doing an awful lot on the infrastructure that is required to support long-term economic evaluation. The other thing that you asked specifically about was IT. Since the big jump from 20,000 to 25,000 apprenticeships from 910, the other services, which is IT frameworks, have jumped by 1,000 per cent in terms of the number of starts. It represents about 15 per cent of the growth that took place from the 20 to the 25,000. On the ICT, we completed the ICT skills investment plan with industry, which looked at the future demands of the sector, predictions that we will need 11,000 jobs year on year over the next five years, largely made up of replacement, but some with new and additional, identified what are the critical areas. The critical areas tend to be in support sectors such as finance, creative industries and so on. We have co-financed, through support from Scottish Government, the establishment of code plan, which is a very specific programme to retrain individuals who have a STEM or a science background into being skilled workers over a 20 to 26-week programme. It is a very rapid programme. It has been established as an industry-owned academy, so a lot of work will be done in responding to that now. Are chair engaged in discussions with the funding council? John May might want to comment on that. I think that it is fair to say that, because of the demand for ICT skills and having spent most of my life in the ICT industry, I can probably say that the industry itself recognises that they were all to play in this, both in the context of being involved in the Skills Academy, and in helping as they have done in arriving at the right forecast for skills, and also in helping to attract young people into their industry. We have a real push in terms of more college places, more university places and more apprenticeships. There is also a significant effort being placed on encouraging young people to pick up and take up the opportunities that digital offers, not only through our career centres and through our schools activities, but also through a major marketing campaign, you might call it, both in print and on TV. We have seen some quite significant interest, even in the past few weeks in that, in terms of people taking time and taking more interest. It is very clear that the combination of having, you might say, the learning provision available, having knowledge and an awareness of the demand is very, very important, but also what we need to do with industry, with us, is to encourage more people to take an interest in that particular area. I have to be honest, and we get so many reports at the Audit, Committee, NHS 24 and various others, and IT Scotland is at a critical, critical level of demand for people. I had hoped that, even with national fours and fives this year, there might have been an increase. However, 29,000 fewer school pupils did national fours and fives. There have been falls in every single stem subject, so whatever the promises that you are making and those problems have been highlighted to you in the past, longitudinal, econometric, OECD studies in a few years' time is not going to do it. My final question is that it is also very disappointing that disabled modern apprentices in Scotland remain at 0.7 per cent. I am sure that my colleagues would all agree that we would like everyone in Scotland to get the opportunity to do a modern apprenticeship. Zero point seven compares with eight per cent in England. They do not always do things better than us, but if they can manage eight per cent of modern apprenticeships to disabled students, why can't we do a bit better than zero point seven? We have done a lot of work with stakeholders on looking at available evidence on the Holy Qualities subject. The issue around disability is that there is a focus early on with people about what they cannot do. Our stakeholders talk about negative stereotyping, particularly in the labour market. One of the big issues around that negative stereotyping is the University of Edinburgh report that shows that there is a real fear of rejection if you disclose your disability. People lack confidence to do it, and there is a lot of unconscious bias, which all of us are party to as well. Our figures are self-declared. If you look at the quarter one statistics, it is taking a jump this year to 3 per cent in quarter one of this year. We used the Equality Act 2010, which, in comparison to England, is not comparable, because it uses a much wider definition of disability. We have done some work in that, and we looked at matching our MA start database with details that we have held of individuals in the career database that we hold, our individual database, and we think that we are actually in the range of the annual population survey, which is at 8.1 per cent. A lot of it is about disclosure. We believe that why we have had an increase in the numbers disclosing this year is because of the training that we have undertaken with training providers about helping around disclosure and other measures that we have put in place. The other thing that is happening at this moment is that, because of the definitional issue that is out there with other agencies using different definitions, we have engaged the Qualities Challenge Unit to our respected organisation who do this thing across the UK to agree with stakeholders and other parties to investigate the whole issue of definition, and they are due to report later this year. The other thing that they will be doing, and this is what stakeholders tell us, is as important as the definition, which is to identify the strategies that help individuals freely disclose that they have a disability so that they get the support that they need. If I could tell you that studies show that even university students will disclose this freely at university but will not disclose it when they go into the labour market. I was going to ask a question about training providers, but I will come back to that in a minute. You just talked about ICT, the question that Mary asked. That does not sit easily with the submissions by the games industry, for example, in Scotland, when we brought them before the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee to talk about the creative work and the opportunities that we had. I hear what you say in terms of engagement, but there is evidence perhaps to the contrary. The other thing that I would like to ask is, and Damian will know about this, is that we have a crisis in the heavy goods vehicle industry, 11,000 drivers short. On the basis that you engage through third parties, how do you assimilate the need with the supply as you see it, not just on a national basis, but on a regional basis? The HGV thing, and I have been told that my request for members' debate is being approved to discuss this, because it is an absolute crisis. How does that fall through the net? Let me comment, first of all, on ICT and then let Damian talk about the transport industry. Although I think that there are parallels, I made the point earlier that what our thirst for knowledge on skills demand has demonstrated in our skills investment plans show is that very few industries, in fact very few employers, really have a long-term view of what their skills needs are. That is a really relevant point when it comes to acting, when you know and when you need skills in the lead time. There is absolutely no doubt in a number of industries, construction is one where construction industry lost a lot of people some years ago, and now we are back in the situation of having to try and catch up with what the skills need. In the ICT industry, the demand from particularly young people for courses, the interest in the industry itself waned, fell off. In fact, to one point in time just a few years ago, courses were being reduced. The point that I would make is that we are very much in catch-up mode. We are catching up, but we are still in the mode of responding and trying to provide more places. The skills academy that Damien mentioned, one opening in Edinburgh and another one to open soon in Glasgow. Those are interim measures, but, to some extent, they recognise the lead time involved in producing, for example, computing graduates or digital skills through the conventional further and higher education routes. It is very important that I also make just a few moments ago, and it is very important that pupils, in a schooling sense, receive as much support as possible in the context of an understanding of digital, and receive some sort of computing training or education as they move through their school years. We are much in catch-up mode and there will certainly be industries and there are some that we know of right now, and, certainly, ICT is one of them where the skills investment plan is in place, but it has not caught up yet with the demand. Before we move on to transport, I heard what you said about catch-up, but what does SDS do? Surely it is not good to be catching up. It is better to identify the problem as it approaches you rather than wait until it passes you and then try to catch it up. Effectively, what does SDS do to identify upcoming problems such as the one that we have been discussing? Deal with that problem before it becomes a situation where you have to catch up. The interesting thing about this is that, until we launched our skills investment plans, there was no formal mechanism for collecting or understanding the demand that industries had or would have in the future. As we embarked on the very first of those, it was energy. It was very clear that what we were looking for and what we were collecting was information that was very often not available. We are in catch-up, to some extent, because the industry is in catch-up, because the industry did not forecast that the industry had perhaps my argument mechanism to inject the demand into which we have now provided. It is an industry and there are others where there are peaks and troughs, and there was a trough for a while. It is taken off again quite significantly. We have done our very best to be as far ahead of it as we can do, but, undoubtedly, the industry, ourselves and the nation, I did not recognise that looking forward to the current years there would be such a high demand for ICT skills. I think that it is a point that is really worth making that workforce planning generally is not that good. Actually, if you were to look at manufacturing and the supply of a component, you would plan well ahead to make sure that you had that component, but, somehow or another, the UK in particular is alone amongst the OECD countries in the degree that it does not plan ahead. There was a great example of that in the early 1980s. The oil and gas sector switched off the majority of their graduate and training programmes. Huge disinvestment in the early 1980s. When we had the recent upturn about four or five years ago, we could not get a chartered engineer for love of money. It takes 14 years to get a chartered accountant or a chartered engineer, so you reap what you sow. If you do not invest today for the future of tomorrow, skills do not sit on the shelf. There are not people waiting for the market to upturn and jump out and be ready. Similarly, with the ICT sector, the downturn happened on the back of 2000, the dot-com crash. There was no big recovery. All of a sudden, there has been a recent recovery. Industry did not invest in looking ahead to see how they were going to invest upstream. That disconnected between industry and its investment in the future workforce should be a very specific subject of this committee. When we look at countries like Switzerland, they are remarkably different. Switzerland has 8 million people, probably one of the best quality of living in Europe. 90 per cent of their GVA is from export markets, high-value markets. 67 per cent of young people at the age of 15 start their senior phase in Switzerland as paid apprentices. The apprenticeships are designed, validated and delivered by industry, 130 industry boards. The young people have contracts of employment in senior phase. The colleges deliver that curriculum on their licence to industry, and the alignment between the future needs of industry and their investment in those needs is absolutely one. The opposite is the case in the UK, where industry sits back and waits for those skills to come. What we are trying to do is to plug a gap. There has been an absolute gap in that information. The idea that the Scottish Government would invest £1.7 billion in further and higher education, and we have no demand statement from industry begs a question. We have come in and filled that gap. One of the great advantages of a new skills agency being available is that we are calling that out. We are working intensively with industry to say, look, help us to understand what the demand is going to be. Evening and asking the question, we do not get great answers. It is quite a difficult thing. We now have 10 sector plans, we have 11 regional plans, and we will get better and better at that. Part of our role is to challenge industries to say, look, you need to look ahead and we need to co-invest to ensure that Scotland is producing the talent that is going to drive the economy forward for the future. The question on transport, Cady, might be? Yes. You know that the industry has a number of issues. There are legal issues around what you can drive by, what age, etc. There are also insurance issues as well. In terms of poaching in the industry as well, that has been part. The MEA programme can make a contribution to it certainly, and 15 per cent of all starts last year were in transport and logistics, and that has gone up from 9.10 per cent by about 22 per cent. We met the Rhotology Association in Transport Scotland and we pointed them in the direction to a range of things that they could do in terms of trying to assist the industry. There are things like good case studies in school now with the A&D logistics, working with one of the Lanarkshire, working with GTG in the schools around developing a national progression award at school levels. My question was, how did that fall through the net? As Damien said, it is not as if industries are particularly good at predicting what their needs will be in the future. That is why the SIP process comes into play. You may be aware that, for instance, we have been talking about having a skills investment plan for the transport sector. We have developed some work around that, which has been that the Rhotology industry is happy with that and is now sitting with Transport Scotland, and we will be moving on that quickly. There are a number of things that we can do, but we are relying on the industry itself to identify what their needs are going forward. We are encouraging them to do that. I wonder if I can come back to training provision. I do not know how many training providers there are. I have talked to some of the construction agency. What due diligence do you perform on training provision companies to ensure that they can do what they can and that they are financially robust to ensure that there is no hiatus in terms of the provision? We do a number of checks on the providers. We have, in terms of the invitation to tender, 11 mandatory questions on that. That will cover a variety of things, such as criminal convictions, have they ever had contracts terminated, etc. Health and safety conflict of interest. We also do financial checks on births to it as well. Once that is fine, if they get a pass or fail, if anybody fails any of those questions, they do not get a contract. During the contractual year, we have in place a range of measures. They have to complete a statement of quality assurance, a statement of assurance of controls that they sent to us. We go out and we visit the providers concerned and we use a risk rating for that to make sure that we focus on the ones that we think need a bit more work with them. We have a compliance team that checks and assures the payments that are made to providers. If you remember, our payment methodology is very much backended on achievement. It is not all up front. A very small percentage is up front, so it is only for 16 to 19-year-olds. We have a range of measures that include speaking to the customers, which are the apprentices themselves, and the employers as part of that, and the survey work that we do to. We also relate that back to what training provider is. We have a range of measures to ensure that our contracting and contract management and working with contractors is robust. There is no major gap where apprentices might find, because of the lack of diligence by a training provider, that their training is impacted. If a training provider decides that he no longer wishes to offer a service, we will put in place measures to scoop up those trainees, get other training providers involved and ourselves, in terms of continuing their training with other employers. We have a rather regrettable situation in the steel industry just now in terms of we all have different views on how that might be recovered, but you lead on the delivery of the PACE programme. Can you walk me through it quickly as to what role you play in the whole PACE project? I think that it is quite important. Some of us think that we understand it, but we are quite instructive as to how you marry up those who might be redundant with skills, particularly on a local basis. We co-ordinate the programme on behalf of the Scottish Government. Typically, we try to look ahead at situations in which companies may be at risk rather than actually going through the redundancy process. There is close engagement with the enterprise agencies in respect of co-vigilance and who might be at risk. If there is a certain situation where there is a closure, we get in as quickly as we can. We find that if we get in in advance of people leaving the workplace, on average, we get about 70 per cent back into positive transitions. What we find is that if the workplace shuts and people disappear and they pay off or whatever, then the ability to get to them and give them good advice is significantly diminished. A lot of effort is then spent on trying to track them down and offer that advice. The advice covers a number of different areas. There is clearly the technical advice in terms of what they need to face in respect of payments and all of that. Very quickly, we move into skills analysis around what are the core competencies that an individual might have and where might there be in the regional labour market the types of jobs that they could swap into. That could be various. I will give you an example in respect of the energy jobs task force, which is quite a good one. Over the past six months, we have organised three different events where we have invited those at risk of redundancy in the oil and gas sector to attend an event. However, what we have done is brought up to 40 or 50 employers to the events who are looking for skills in very similar sectors. The first event that we ran at Padawdry, we had over 850 people from the sector come to an event, which was an amazing turnout. A lot of those individuals immediately connected with the likes of Scottish Water, who were looking for process engineers, folk at Dune Ray, people in the pharmaceutical sector, people in the whisky industry, all of whom had lost process and fluid dynamic type engineers to the oil and gas sector as it grew. Typically, we will case manage thereafter, so when we meet with somebody, we will register them on our careers database and we will then try and follow up with further support, both in terms of either acquiring additional skills, so if there are what we call transition skills that are required that might take somebody from a particular sector to another sector, we did that in respect of code 6 welding for the niggyard previously, where we did rapid upskilling to new industry standards. We will do CV preparation, we will do job preparation and we will follow through as quickly as we can. Depending on the scale of that, we work very closely with our colleagues in DWP, Job Center Plus, with the local authorities and with anybody who can add value to supporting the process. The position with the steel industry now pretty much is around retain rather than retrain, and so at the minute we are on a watching brief in respect of the steel sector, so we are not mobilising at the minute in respect of retraining just now. I think all of the efforts are around trying to exhaust the possibilities of retaining that sector and retaining those jobs, but right across the piece there is a very strong engagement across all of the partners to ensure that all of us are as responsive as we possibly can be to the very personal and difficult situation that people find themselves in, and for some that can be the first time maybe in 30 years that they've been faced with that situation. Having direct contact with somebody from SDS or from one of the partner agencies to actually sit down and work through what are the next steps is really, really important. It's really critical, the early engagement we find, the earlier that we can get in and the more progressive that businesses have good industry relation policies where they actually believe that they want to look after their workforce and so are willing to allow us to get in and engage with their staff the better. Thank you. I've got two supplementaries, one from Liam McArthur and one from Mary Scanlon. Sorry, Liam first and then Mary. In fact, I was going to follow up a couple of points that both Mary and Chick had raised. I notice in the corporate strategy that there appears to be a diminution of the goal of working together and that there seems to be an absence of any mention of goals and operational objectives of schools and colleges. I was listening to the exchanges there in relation to ICT. College places were mentioned, training places, universities, job opportunities. In fact, what we've heard in other evidence is about the severe reduction in the numbers doing ICT in our schools, the problem in recruiting teachers and I think the concern I would have coming through from what appears to be a change in tone or emphasis within the goals and operational objectives is that SDS is focused on the demand and the pool from industry and is perhaps slightly less concerned about what is happening directly in schools, where the pipeline of pupils coming through is going to be clear. In terms of job opportunities, the risk is that the teachers that we currently have in schools are attracted away. There was a particular problem in relation to computer programming. It's not just broadly that ICT is understanding that computer programming is a particular problem in terms of bringing young people through. Without that emphasis on the provision in schools, the providing in colleges and through training providers and universities and even the job opportunities is going to meet with limited success, presumably. Just a couple of points and I may be asked to come in specifically on the schools, but just in terms of the partnership working and the supply side, I'd be absolutely assured that we are intensive in our engagement in terms of those partnerships. We have over 400 school partnership agreements with every secondary school in Scotland. Very little of what we do, we deliver independently ourselves. It's a necessity that we're heavily engaged with schools and in respect of schools it's not just directly in the schools, it's with both the parent teacher councils and with the parents themselves because when you look at the influence on the choices that young people make, parents are number one, teachers are number two, and peers are number three, and careers advisers are actually number four. More of our effort is increasingly spent on getting the messages across to parents and teachers about the information that we're providing in terms of future demand because stimulating and inspiring young people to aim for careers in growing sectors is absolutely what we need to do in respect of it. Does that include helping schools to address the recruitment—whether it's a crisis, it's certainly a significant problem—the recruitment problem that they have in terms of— I guess there's two parts to it. One would be the direct management of the school curriculum delivery would be a matter for the schools, it wouldn't be a matter for schools developed in Scotland but we can support through the industry engagement and so we have shown that through apps for good and a whole range of STEM based programmes that we're able to leverage industry into the schools to add to the direct teaching capability and to support the process of inspiring young people and we've done that with the school environment as well so we've got a strategy with the Glasgow Science Centre where my world of work and the relationship between having a science experience and what are the careers beyond that is connected so we're both in the schools, we're working with the parent teacher council, we're working with the national parent forum, we've currently got a massive campaign through the nutshell communications tool that the national parent forum has to highlight particularly the ICT and digital sector and the opportunities that are there and so then specifically when we look at college and HE all of the evidence that we produce informs the outcome statements for further and higher education college. A really good example in energy, we funded the establishment of the energy college partnership where at the time 43 colleges said we're all experts in renewable energy but we actually said no we want to work with a smaller network of those who actually have the distinct competence and so we had the example of Carnegie College and Dundee College transferring their capacity down to Dumfries and Galloway in respect of overhead linesman technician training and so we have a network of now 10 colleges who are very specifically capable in delivering the supply training for the renewal work around the beauty denny line so the supply side is absolutely critical and maybe ask Danny to touch just a bit on the school. Thanks just in addition to a couple points to mention we've referenced the skills the sector investment plans and the regional skills assessment plans got a few times the importance of them in terms of the intelligence that gives not only our own staff in terms of being aware of where are the jobs of the future the skill sets that are going to be required for that what we've been doing in Staming's mentioned we work we've been working extensively with the various parent teacher forums to get that information over to parents in terms of information out there that particular communication to parents is not something we're going to see happening from traditionally from s4 at that transition stage we're talking all the way through all back through early years and in primary schools to raise awareness a much earlier stage of opportunities what's there within the curriculum and the recent launch of the care education standards has been a significant development in terms of looking at what's actually taught within careers education called I can I can statements can do statements so those have actually been introduced as part of the three to 18 curriculum so you're trying to get that information much much earlier in terms of how we communicate that to to young people and to parents and equally at the same time we're working very closely with teachers and that's around looking at some of the capacities around what they are teaching in the curriculum if you look at building the curriculum for particular skills for learning life and work in particular the work dimension how do we see the the whole issue about labour market information in careers and the whole career education standards permeating subjects so it's not a bolt-on that in addition to a young person will experience in the curriculum is part of the curriculum it's integrated within there and a couple other points I think it's really worth mentioning about the key role for employers we're working very closely with schools with local authorities and with employers to make sure they're actually more built in in reference in the curriculum that's where career education standards come in but there's a number of initiatives going on through learning through work week for example is imminent and some members of this committee will probably be involved in hearing about learning through work being involved in visiting some of the schools where employers are getting in with their modern apprentices and talking about what opportunities that are available in the labour market with Scottish apprenticeship week coming up March and again raising awareness of all the opportunities that are there there's a big digital skills campaign that's actually on just now about raising awareness of opportunities in this particular case in terms of digital skills there's a lot of information a lot of intelligence there that we actually want to make sure as Damien said to get through to the key people who influence the young folks young young people whether it's parents whether it's teachers and it's their own staff as well. Can I just pick up very briefly with something Katie Hurden was saying in response to Mary's questions in relation to colleges and we've obviously been through a fairly radical process of reform within the college sector and now each of us taking various views on the way in which that happened but nevertheless one of the defining objectives in rationale for doing it was better aligning colleges to the needs of industry and of our economy. I think it is more than a little surprising that we're finding that there's a drop in terms of the provision of apprenticeships from 10 per cent to 8 per cent. I mean is this a reflection of the college sector's been through this process of reform and therefore the expectation would be going forward that this will get back to the 10 per cent and beyond or I'm struggling to understand why it is that we've gone through this process at some cost to the sector with the result that they seem to be less able to attract the the sorts of work for which they are wholly geared up I mean except they're not the only ones geared up to but they seem to be in a worse position competitive to this procurement process than they were before. There are obvious fluctuations in terms of relative share because it's a competitive market and it can change from year to year depending on employer demand. Remember that that 8 per cent also builds on the subcontracting that they do because they're much more involved in the ME programme than that direct contract. Some of them prefer to do the subcontracting role rather than a direct contract with ourselves but 24... He pointed to the 44 per cent that they're applying for. So I mean in the sense that there may be a lack of appetite among some but... Mr McAlibag, I could say to you every provider over inflates what they can actually do. We get biz and you know that when you look at the previous year they've said they've delivered eight engineering MEs and they're bidding for 100 and they delivered eight and they were given a contract with 20 so it usually we look at that in terms of what their previous allocation has been. I think you know every college is different you know some of them have really have increased some of them have gone down and we've got big college contracts out there some over a million pounds as well but that's for direct contracts there's also the indirect contracts and as I said with foundation apprenticeships and the pivotal role that colleges play in that I think you will see that but I could see the greater employer connections also come that way but I couldn't prejudge I mean this is a competitive process so it would be unfair of me to prejudge any competition next year too. I would say that I think your question is right in the sense that the direction of travel will be more alignment and I think in time more of what the very good colleges do will become the norm and the difficulty between the direct contracts and the subcontracts is that for the direct contracts you need to have very high quality employer engagement because you're responsible for delivering the jobs because remember every apprenticeship is a job it's not just the delivery of training and for some colleges that's a great thing because they've got really really good industry engagement for those who haven't had the history of that they find that challenging through the regional approach they all should have good strengths and employer engagement and I would I would predict in time we would see quite a growth in that we had a meeting recently with a number of chairs of the regional colleges and we had a good discussion around that alignment and around the investment in work-based pathways and very much the question that you've pointed which is the colleges are very well placed to be a key bulwark in the delivery of work-based pathways and certainly I think the foundation apprenticeships for which we hope to have 20% of senior phase pupils undertaking work-based pathways alongside core subjects by 2020 then I think the colleges will have a majority role to play in that delivery so I think the trajectory will be up. Thank you for letting me in again. It was the point you made to Chick Brody about now I'm in favour of private sector I'm in favour of colleges an ex lecturer but what I'm most in favour of is a high quality training for young people that can get jobs but in the audience Scotland report under quality assurance and I quote convener apart from colleges and I quote there are no equivalent independent reviews of the quality of training provided by other including private training providers now if you're not independently reviewing the quality of training providers and we all know the inspection regime around colleges our college is missing out on the basis of cost because I don't believe that it's on the basis of quality are you going for the cheaper option is that what it's about it's certainly not a cheaper option because it's the same contribution rate irrespective of which training provider is involved and I just say that since that report we've been working with Education Scotland about the application of their inspection regime to the whole of the ma programme and today is the first report is coming out today and it's on engineering that involves colleges but it also involved private providers and the scores were excellent and very good so that has actually the first time that you are independently reviewing so independent external inspection is regards what education Scotland does but remember the audit Scotland report also pointed out the quality assurance procedures that we have in place also the quality assurance procedures which the accrediting bodies have in place for for individual training providers to be awarded learning centres accredited learning centre status too. I think it's a point are the private training providers reviewed independently in terms of the quality of training in the same way as our colleges are that's the question I want to ask is it equal high quality training from both and is there a system that because it wasn't in place last year. Audit Scotland were I think specifically referring to the education Scotland regime what was then put in place was apply apply that to starting with the engineering sector and as I say that's happened and the engineering sector report is out today on the education Scotland website so it's just starting no but we've put well they had to develop an approach to if you also remember education Scotland's could I just finish your answer well the education Scotland also would point out in their college inspection regime they didn't specifically single out modern apprentices too so that was also a gap in the that inspection regime so this is the first one focused on modern apprentices in terms of education Scotland's work but as I say training providers were also held to account through other quality assurance measures just a very quick question on the back of what Mary Scanlon's been asking obviously this is about getting young people ready for the world of work and getting modern apprentices and upskilling the workforce is there any difference in outcomes of people who have went the college route for doing their ma or going through private training providers is the outcomes in terms of the percentage that successfully passes at the same levels or I think it's difficult I think it's really dangerous to generalise about different sectors within within the provider base so there'll be some colleges where the achievement rate is lower than relative to third sector providers councils companies themselves etc so you would have to look at it in terms of we tend to do it on a framework basis so you look at engineering across the board when you're allocating the engineering places etc so it's it's it's differences and you'll get some who are higher some who are lower before bringing in Colin can I just check something you raised it earlier Damian and you mentioned it again they are fleetingly in the response and it's about this idea of bringing in your modern apprenticeships to S5 and S6. Could you explain a little bit about that and when that's coming in or what I mean S5s have an extremely busy year for pupils in school I'm struggling to understand how you're in your modern apprenticeship and top of an S5 curriculum so there's something about broadening what we consider success to be so at the minute it feels like success is defined in terms of quite a narrow academic definition and so for many parents success is sadly getting our five a's and getting our place at university and I've done a great job and for many people that's not a clear pathway for a lot it is but for many it isn't and the discussion we had with the commission for developing young workforce was is the senior phase a very productive phase for young people and when we look at the subjects they take and the experiences that they have I think you're absolutely right convener that S5 is a very busy space is it busy doing the right things though and for most people whether they're going the academic route or the non-academic route they will have two or three core subjects that they want to pursue and it could be English maths physics or whatever and what we see is increasing number of students taking what we might call make weight subjects it's not subjects that they've got any great ambition in it's not subjects that are necessarily aligned to the career path that they're going to go but it's subjects that will give them an academic tariff an easier academic tariff than their core subjects and some of what we're trying to say is look if you run your core subjects alongside the work-based pathway and if in time because this is part of a development process if in time we can get the same academic tariff for the work-based learning and the work-based learning would be the on-the-job and the off-the-job training that's a core component of the framework training as part of the apprenticeship so that that equates to the equivalent of a hire then you get the return on that for the effort that you've put in but better than that you get direct experience of the sector that you're interested in you switch on either is this a sector I want to pursue or not pursue now what we've got a whole range of pathfinders we started with two last year we're going to have 19 this year with 19 different local authorities we're looking to offer them in five key sectors where there's sectors in high demand health and social care engineering construction ict and digital and so on we think the rump of the work will be done at different points depending on those pressures so some schools run an asymmetric week so fridays are available for some of that work some schools example in shetland are running the on-the-job training over summer holidays so that young people are incredibly motivated to do the on-the-job training so they're doing that at a time where those pressures aren't so significant so will it really depend on the volume of academic subjects they're taking over s5 and s6 and the degree to which the school manages that but it shouldn't put a huge burden on on the young people but better than that it should produce an outcome which has got very very advantageous benefits what we found is is that for those young people who've taken the first path finders in engineering that the motivation back into our core subjects has increased significantly because they have begun to see the relevance of why they're studying what they're studying for and what the pathway might look for them. Correctly, because I'm trying to understand it, is it envisaged that it would be a replacement for some hires that some pupils would currently study in s5 or is it an addition for those pupils who perhaps are not taking five hires they might be taking one or two? Testing both of those options so we're testing both of those so a high academic achiever might want to run the work-based option alongside their core subjects and be confident that they can do that and acquire that learning and have the benefit of that learning. Some young people might decide I'm going to swap out a higher and I'm going to take my core hires but I'm very clear that I want to actually undertake an apprenticeship when I leave school and I want to complete the first year so I get an accelerated entry into year 2 on the back of doing the foundation apprenticeship. So it will depend, it'll be student-centred and it'll also focus on the schools and their ability to deliver. We've really touched a bit on measurement, but I'd like to look at a couple of specific aspects of this. SDS submission to this committee reports on a wide range of activities, but it's difficult to make the direct links between what SDS has spent its money on and the outcomes that have been achieved. Much of what's included in the outcomes section of the submission actually refers to financial and other outputs, and the outputs from those are specific activities or the number of starts on specific programmes, rather than on the success of SDS in achieving positive change as a result of this activity. I hope that that wasn't too convoluted. We report on activity impact and outcome measures. If you take the apprenticeship programme a really good example, activity measure would be 26,000 starts. The final outcome would be sustained employment and completion rates. For the £75 million that we invest in apprenticeships, the Scottish Parliament can be assured that they've got a five-star programme because they've got completion rates in excess of 74 to 78 per cent, which are the highest and comparable to any programme. You've got sustained employment at 92 per cent, six months beyond completing. When we do surveys of employers and individuals around what has transpired as a result of completing the apprenticeship, we see an increase in earnings, we see an increase from the employers in the young person's productivity in the workplace, their contribution to the sector and so on. It may not be specifically in the submission just because of the nature of what we can put in there, but be assured that we've got very clear outcome measures, which are aligned back to the activities that are funded. Similarly, in schools, if you look at the work that we do in respect of careers advice and guidance, the positive transitions of young people from schools is really critical. If you look at the outcome measures in terms of the school leaver destination reports over the last six years, you've seen a significant increase in the positive progression to positive destinations. We would be a small part of the contribution to that in respect of good careers advice. Clearly, the schools have got a substantial role in all of that, but right across the board in terms of all of our substantive investments, we can track exactly where we deliver outcomes that align with the national performance indicators and where those outcomes are real intangible. Remember, every apprentice is an employed apprentice. It is a job, a real job. What you're saying sounds good, but, of course, as you say, the submission itself didn't really bring that out. I think that the submission seems to be more about inputs and outputs, which don't really give the result of the spend on activity and the positive that comes out of that. I guess in case of the comprehensive nature of what we can provide, but right across the board we can absolutely align what we do with the national performance indicators, as I say, in terms of positive transitions from school, the acquisition of qualifications in support of a more skilled workforce, sustained employment, responding to redundancies, as we've discussed before, and the numbers that we work with in terms of supporting back into positive destinations. The production of the intelligence that we talked about, that intelligence in terms of spend is very low, and you'll see from the submission that relatively speaking it's a small spend, but in terms of influencing how the supply side meets future demand, it's absolutely critical. So, you know, hopefully that answers your question. Perhaps a trickier one to assess is where there's partnership working. Measuring success, I think, can probably be quite challenging for the individual partners within any particular activity. I just wonder how you capture the impact of partnership working, you know, I suppose it might be a return on investment of time or whatever, and the influence that you've had, and how you influence sometimes quite a complex partnership arrangement. That's a really, really good question. I'll give you an example of it in practice. So, maybe about three years ago, we had discussions with colleagues in Highlands and Islands Enterprise, we attended the convention of the Highlands and Islands, and there was a concern at the time, there was a belief that the future economic growth of the Highlands and Islands region could be arrested by a lack of skills, that skills could be a key block in the future growth of the sector. And we said, right, we will do a comprehensive regional skills assessment and investment plan for the Highlands and Islands. We did that in partnership with all six local authorities, with UHI, with Highlands and Islands Enterprise, with NHS, with the Forestry Commission and so on. And what we discovered as a result of doing that work was that the number one issue in terms of the future growth of the Highlands and Islands wasn't skills, it was actually population. And that the Highlands and Islands has got the fastest growing population in the UK, but it's all at the 65 plus age mark. And that the outmigration of young people from the region is still running at between seven and eight thousand young people per year. And that critically what's required is an in-migration of working families. And then there's clearly a whole issue around transport, housing and the proposition of lifestyle that would attract people specifically into the sector. And then beyond that we looked at very granular information around each of the regions because the Murray Firth and Inverness is very different to the Western Isles, is very different to Shetland, is very different to Orkney. And we've now got separate regional skills plans for each of the island communities. And at the last convention of the Highlands and Islands, three years down the road, the view is universally around the table where the work was a seminal piece of work that influencing the future provision of UHI in respect of delivering more work-based pathways because if you deliver learning via the workplace then it anchors people in the region rather than having to leave the region and hope that they'll come back in. That the requirement for a major talent attraction strategy into the region was crucial. And I think Alex Patterson was quoted this week as saying actually you know where the Highlands and Islands is now compared to where it was when HIDB was set up is an area of opportunity and what we now need to do is really communicate strongly that the region has got a lot of opportunity and it should be a region where it's easier to attract families into the region. Describe the success but I'm not sure it really gives me an insight into how you value your input into partnership working and how you assess the impact. It's a difficult one because as I said before very little of what we do if you look at the size of our budget it's not insignificant but relative to others it's it's we're a junior partner and largely what we have to do is through our influence and our intelligence and our innovation is bring some of that to bear on influencing decisions and and we do that there's nothing we do on our own there's absolutely nothing we do on our own we've over 12 to 15 000 businesses who provide apprenticeship opportunities we don't provide the opportunities it's industries who step up and say I'm going to commit to a future job and offer that job so what do we do to convince industry to deliver that so I don't know if I'm missing the point but partnership working is absolutely central to what we do I mean we could not do our job without strong partnership engagement. I've no doubt that. Sorry Colin, I think that I didn't want to render it. Sorry just to add to that and a couple of points joining these introductory remarks referred to our membership of community planning partnerships and we are involved in all 32 of those community planning partnerships and we're involved in all the various subgroups around supporting the priorities that are there and a lot that's come from the recognition that the SDS is a key role to play within those community planning partnerships because before that we weren't involved in all of them so that's a major step for us to be involved in the contribution we can make and there's a couple of other partnerships that's really worth mentioning and it's very easy to say partnerships when really when the essence is about how we join the work together and the schools is a very it's a key one we've got nearly 400 school partnerships in place with secondary schools and that details out the services that we provide in conjunction with the schools and how we make sure we deal with those those particular priorities and another key partnership we have is with the job centre plus around integrated employment and skills and that was about how we work together mainly around how we did some data sharing and client and client referrals as well but the other big one we've talked about today was mentioning some of the questions earlier on was the PACE partnerships there are 18 in Scotland and we managed the 18 partnerships and that's about bringing all the organisations together to make sure we deal with some of the PACE situations that are there. Damien mentioned about positive destinations 92.3% was the positive destinations last year and that was very much about a partnership approach in terms of schools the committee will be aware of the the participation measure that's now been introduced this year so we're moving from 51,000 52,000 school leavers to over 225,000 individuals age 16 to 19 year olds we fall into that participation measure in terms of how we support those individuals secure positive destinations employment training work and that very much brings about the key work that we play within SDS in terms of our own the data hub that we manage and we support supported by other partners now we support individuals who are looking for in terms of supporting them into employment training and further learning. I'm certainly hearing lots of positive statistics and so on there but I still don't see how you're evaluating what you're doing in that partnership success or fail what could be done better whatever the investment that you're making in there in terms of time which is money how do you evaluate that? Can I give me an example Mr Beattie? A recently one in terms of evaluating it was Education Scotland's reviews the committee will be aware of Education Scotland undertaking a series of careers information advice and guidance service audits reviews throughout Scotland so far we've had seven this year five of which have been reported on and a common theme coming out from all of them has been a really in terms of good practice has been the school partnership agreement and they've been in the talk to headteachers senior members of the staff within within schools talk to pupils as well and their own staff in terms of how those particular partnerships have really engaged both SDS and with the school and what's also interesting coming out from that in terms of some of the recommendations and a key recommendation that's coming out from that partnership agreement for particular for schools as well as ourselves is how do we embed career management skills all of the developments and careers advice into the curriculum the point I made earlier on about the importance of earlier intervention and that's been a key point that's came out from a review of a partnership agreement okay I'll leave it at that and move on to a different facet which is quite simply how does the SDS assess its value to employers how do you assess that so it's a number of ways and our ambition working with employers as we state in our goal is that they can recruit the right people with the right skills at the right time and that sits at the heart of what we do so as we said before the first part of it is are we able to work with industry to articulate the demand and the future needs that they have can we then put in place short medium and long term measures to ensure that that supply meets that demand and then separately we have two other programmes where we work with companies who want to invest in and grow their workforce and we look to ensure that they get the right support to bring forward those investments lastly we've got a web environment called our schools force where we try to aggregate all the offers available to business in respect of schools in one location so we make it very very easy for industry but the ultimate test will be are those sectors in growth and are those businesses in growth and are their staff and their workforce contributing to the long-term competitiveness of those businesses in respect of of those challenges so we would see ourselves as helping those companies through providing the future skills and ensuring that that pipeline right across all the partners is meeting their needs that we're challenging them also to co-invest in that model and the challenge then beyond that is to understand is that delivering the competitive advantage for individual businesses for sectors and for the Scottish economy I guess I guess what I'm looking for is to see what your evaluation is in terms of how you determine what the investment is going to be into different aspects of support for employers and how you how you decide which is the most successful where you focus your resources I mean the early emphasis on responding to future needs has dominated the work that we're doing so in terms of future skills demands that has been the area that we focused most heavily on and in many respects it's not on either or we've got four areas that we continually look at in terms of the the long term we look at what do we need to do better and different in respect of informing young people who are eight nine ten today in respect of the future jobs that might be there helping their parents and helping the teachers understand those progressions so that inspiring the pathways around careers is a critical part of what we do making sure the system is responsive so that the outcome agreements are aligned with future demand then putting in place immediate measures through the academies so if there's a need right today there's no point in saying to a sector it's going to be four years before you get a graduate so the code plan example is an example of an initiative to respond today to how we deliver that and then lastly what we tried to do is to create better connections between industry and the supply side so that in the future we don't have the peaks and troughs that we're witnessing just now so that's still in its early phase in respect of what of those different elements are working better and so we will continue to evaluate that and determine is you know is it direct intervention like code plan working more significantly than actually an alternative Cary? There's also got some specific measures in terms of looking at the returns we get from the survey of over two and a half thousand employers involved in MEs so we asked them did it help improve productivity and 75% of them said yes that's up 7% from the last survey we did and it did it help product service quality improve and again all these results have increased and we measure it that way we also asked a question this year to look at the different frameworks and how productive people were at the start when they came in and how productive they became as part of that as well and there's been it's a pity at Miss Scanlan's not in the room at the moment but there's been quite a lot of excerpts from the Audit Scotland report here today selective excerpts from it but one of the main points arising from that was that we managed the ME programme well in Audit Scotland recognize that? John? Yes just very quickly chair in further two columns first question regards your outcomes and most of your submission was on your financial inputs or outputs and I think they mean you very quickly come back and says well one of our outcomes is you know the delivery of 25 modern apprenticeships and that can it take me back again about I think you also said that the relationship that you had with industry could be significantly improved and you were unable to sort of identify for the future where the voids were because of this lack of information or a relationship I mean Shaik did mention it and he mentioned it and let's bring me back how then who gives you the information then of the 25,000 modern apprentices that you need to deliver if there's a void here right which then begs the question are you meeting that outcome target of 25,000 pound by quantity rather in quality and we do know for it you know we do know for a fact I think identified in the year 2020 or 2022 that we're going to be 100,000 plus engineers short and so of that 25,000 mAs how many of those are actual engineers and saying how do you get to you know my concern is that you're you know you're just meeting the target by quantity rather in quality. Please understand the question maybe I asked Katie to speak in the daily but just be absolutely clear we start with a buying proposition in respect of what we want to buy for one of a better description which is a clear articulation of where we want to invest in in terms of future skills and that's driven by the key sectors in Scotland so in respect of the economic strategy for the Scottish government where do they see future growth coming for Scotland's economy and where would they like to see that investment skills go to drive the economic demand going forward so that's very explicit so we have got clear priorities around the key growth sectors we've got clear priorities around STEM which we understand will be in future demand we've got clear priorities around specific groups of young people and all of that is factored into an annual buying statement in respect of the procurement so it's actually a very very detailed process I may be asked Katie to come in so every year we use the skills investment plan information that's available we've been using the regional skills assessment plans and we ask every sector skills counsellor body in Scotland to predict the demand for MAs we overlay that with as as Damian has said the policy overlay in terms of the focus on young people a focus on STEM a focus on level 3 plus so in terms of the growth that's happened thus far 82% of all growth in the extra 5000 from 9 10 has been for young people it's 16 to 19 year olds we've had more 20 24 year olds with a decline in 25 year olds in line with government policy yes specifically about engineering in terms of that growth it's up 29% and what it was in terms of 9 10 and that's 7% of all share and I could say for the growth industries that are there in terms of financial services is up 1700% you know it's 9% of the growth that we've achieved so we could give you all the statistics in that in terms of what we've done also in Scotland if we're looking for comparators has been mentioned today you know 64% of our MAs in Scotland are level 3 plus 1314 it was 62% and we've been on a trajectory again upwards that's in contrast to in England where it's 41% of level 3 so we've got a much better programme in Scotland than we have in the rest and again as Damian says we what we try and do is match demand overly with policy and do the buying proposition there and we also have to respond to changes in demand in year 2. Would it be possible to have a breakdown of the 25 000 MAs? We've published that on a quarterly basis and on an annual basis too. The second thing was that you know the I think it was yourself Damian who said that the sustained employment rate was for six months because you might be adding a wee bit more to that in respect of you know just how long does people if it's six months is that the Remember they have a contract of employment as apprentices they are employed status some of the criticisms have been particularly down south where the history of employed status wasn't there and was introduced recently that some providers down in England offer a contract of employment and then as soon as the apprenticeship ends young people are tossed on to the on the heap so we've surveyed six months past the completion date and at that point 92% are still in sustained employment so they are still in a job. The Scottish Government trade unions and others have been pushing this year of fair work up the agenda recently you know just to ask how SDS have responded to the cabinet secretary for fair works letter of guidance around fair work what new priorities that focus brings for you as an organisation and whether you've been able to adapt to those new priorities within your your current budget. There's two aspects to it one is being a fair work employer ourselves and meeting the living wage getting accreditation and investing young people so we've achieved all of those in terms of our suppliers and their meeting the living wage we've progressed with that in terms of the policy around fair work that's an emerging policy and we're contributing to that debate as we speak I presented to the fair work convention about six weeks ago I think it was and what we were clear about was that the opportunity I think for Scotland is is around the productivity gains that can be achieved by having very progressive work practices in the workplace and that if you look at international comparators and I know some members don't like to do that but if you do look at international comparators then we typically lag other OECD comparators by 20% in the productivity stakes so there's a real potential for Scotland to achieve significant growth if it can make in gains in roads into that productivity conundrum and the productivity conundrum could be addressed by having much much more progressive working practices in the workplace and so when you look at the underlying performance of the labour market over the last 10 years you left with a lot of concerns and the concerns relate to the nature of work and the quality of work so what we've seen is employment rates have increased but part-time working and zero-working have increased also what we've seen is that the in-wage welfare bill so work tax credits and so on has doubled from 2 billion to 4 billion so there's a sense to some degree that a large tract of the UK economy may be driven by low wage low skilled business models that are propped up by an in-work welfare tax and that is certainly not sustainable now probably amongst the best models is the finished model so Finland have an agency called techis their strap line believe it or not is called joy at work and what Finland wants to do is to demonstrate that they have the most productive workforce amongst OECD countries and part of the reason for that is that in Finland low wage business models don't exist and so labour is expensive and so if you have labour in your workforce or in your workplace you need to put it to good work and you need to create a culture where people come to work every day of the week with a spring in their stab with a belief in the organisation and you get that contract which is something about and I'm bringing my skills to this organisation and I'm anticipating that I'm getting a decent wage and that wage is going to allow me to be able to look after my loved ones that the employer is going to be concerned about my welfare and my development but for that contract I'm going to work my socks off and every hour of every day I'm going to consider about the asset that I am and how do I put that to place a good use in the workplace now that requires a fundamental shift in the types of cultures that we see in organisations the best of organisations do that and the worst of organisations don't do that and I think the opportunity for Scotland is to be able to articulate what interventions can we put in place that stimulate highly productive workforces so that people bring their skills to the workplace and work incredibly hard but the deal is they get looked after they get a decent wage and they get progression and you get that reciprocal relationship which doesn't often exist That's particularly about the budget allocation you said that it was a new and emerging theme and work for yourselves. How have you been able to adapt within your current budget is your current budget allocation enough to see through the priorities of the Scottish Government on fair work? Much of what we do would be a horizontal contributor to the fair work agenda so in terms of new and additional work that's emerging and so one of the areas that I think will be very significant in contributing to this space will be the potential devolved powers in terms of welfare and particularly the work programme. We're heavily engaged with Scottish Government in understanding what that might look like and what the service might look like and specifically the interventions that are put in place during the two-year period of the work programme. How do they relate to a commitment to fair work and a new business model effectively for a future Scotland where productivity is significantly higher than where it's at now? The point that I would make is a lot of what we currently do contributes to the fair work agenda. The new and additional will be emerging and one of the spaces where I think the significant potential is around the devolved powers. You have said that SDSR contributing to the debate around fair work. Cabinet Secretary has asked you to lead and innovate. How are you able to demonstrate SDS really leading the debate around fair work and driving through that change? Much of what I've discussed over the past 10 minutes is the evidence around what works well elsewhere and what would it take in Scotland. We believe that there's probably three things that need to happen and we're in discussions about how that would come to fruition. I think that we need national conversations that last for some time, which are about industry, talking to industry about best practice in creating high-performing workplaces. Back in the mid-80s members might recall the DTI demonstrator programmes where very successful businesses shared with other industries and businesses their success and what were the factors that might help. I think that we need a national conversation that has industry talking to industry and public sector talking to public sector about how do you do this and what are the strategies that would drive it forward. I think that we need to build more capacity within our colleges, universities and graduates coming out with an understanding around high-performing workplaces and then we need direct positive action. You've spoken about the lag in productivity between our country and others. As an increase in productivity, is that the measure of success of a fair work agenda? What would you say out as the measure of success? The measure of success will be inclusive growth. I think that that is the holy grail and it's both the economic and social positive gains. With productivity comes improved competitiveness which should mean sustained employment and good wages. The individual benefits because they get a decent wage and they get a good working environment and they get progression. The company succeeds because they are more competitive and they can win more contracts and they can generate more wealth. The cabinet secretary has set out that the Scottish Government believes that fair workers, sustainable jobs, fair contracts, fair wages, particularly for those who face disadvantage or significant barriers to employment. Mary Scanlon has already picked up the issue of the amount of disabled modern apprentices. I would like to pick up a particular issue around young deaf people. There has been an issue around whether people with a disability feel confident to declare that. Many young people who are deaf do not define themselves as being disabled at all and do not see that as any disability. How do you cater to that? How my world of work caters for young deaf people and how do you make sure that they are included in the fair work agenda? We work directly with the appropriate agencies in this space and we are working very specifically on supporting those people with particular issues in that respect, Danny. There are a couple of points to mention. The National Deaf Children Society is working very closely with them and other organisations that support them with young people and adults in terms of any other additional support needs that they may have. For example, we have been creating a partnership framework with the Royal National Institute for the Blind a few years ago called template for success. That model has now been rolled out to include the National Deaf Children Society's organisation as well. We are working with the Scottish Consortium for Learning Disabilities and Values into Action Scotland to take that template for success. What that was about was to work with young people, parents and other organisations who support them, including ourselves. Now we can provide that additional support in terms of what they require, whether it is in a school or whether it is accessing employment or further education and training. Just now, we have a model that is a statement of intent, walking across to three earshers, particularly supporting young people who have an issue of disability around being deaf and how do we support them? Access, employment, learning and training, what kind of careers advice and support do we give their parents and young people at an earlier stage as well as later on in schools as well? In link to that, we have been working with, and you mentioned our own particular website, which is called My World of Work. We are working closely with the national organisations to make sure that the content and materials that are utilised and can be accessed in there are suitable for young people of all. Additional support needs to be made sure that they have that, whether it is accessing themselves or whether it is through an intermediary like their parents or teachers or careers advisors. You mentioned earlier on in your response to Mark Griffin's question about innovation and leading and delivery of fair work. Forgive me if I am wrong, but what you seem to be saying was that SDS's response to that challenge about you being the innovator and you being leading and delivery of fair work was that industry should talk to industry, public sector should talk to public sector. What specifically are SDSs doing to lead and to innovate in terms of the fair work agenda? So, particularly ourselves, one of the key developments in this is going to be around leadership practices. The three components, as I said, would be conversations, capacity and then direct support. We are in discussions with Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Scottish Enterprise about the nature of that direct support that would be offered to organisations who would want to create more high-performing workplaces. Directly today, we have a partnership with investors and people. I think that last year we supported over 250 companies to engage with a direct resource to help them to understand how they now start to put in place the culture that would give effect to a high-performing workplace. We ourselves are working around a proposition called everyday leadership, where literally everybody in the organisation understands the roles and responsibilities and contributes to where that needs to go to. In terms of direct support into companies, we have all of that. In terms of the living wage and the business pledge, we are actively promoting those both through our supply chain and directly into companies. There is a lot of very specific work that we are undertaking right now. I would be interested to hear that in more detail. I am sure that you could write to us afterwards with some of the detail of that, but I need to move on. I will check that you have a quick supplementary and then I will bring on Liam. When you were answering a remark about not so much leadership but management, isn't there a gap in training managers to, for example, look at workforce planning and things like that? Where is that done? Is it done? There is a gap. Part of the answer to the issue is to do more. I think that that is not only more in the context of the public sector contributing to more being done but also very clearly the private sector and the companies themselves doing more. The phrase has been used a few times today. Some do it very well and others do not do it at all. Scotland is a particular challenge. We are very much an economy where a huge proportion of the workforce is working in small and medium-sized enterprises and, in particular, in small businesses. Currently, I am involved in a couple of small businesses myself. Undoubtedly, it is a real challenge to find the time to invest in the development of management skills and capabilities that a larger organisation might see as being part of how it has operated for many years. I think that there is a gap. I do believe that, if I look at the education system, the curriculum for excellence, what is happening in developing people in further and higher education and, for example, the work experience and some of the attributes that are being developed through the education system, clearly over time—I can mention individual institutions—there is a significant effort in some of their programmes to equip people to be managers and leaders as they come through that system. I believe that, over time, we will upgrade the attributes of our management of our businesses—not only our large businesses but, hopefully, the small ones as well. However, I think that you are right. I think that, in terms of achieving the Holy Grail, the management education is an important aspect of that. Liam Kerr, I was going to ask about some of the targets under the national performance framework, but I think that quite a bit of the ground was covered in response to Colin Beattie's earlier questions. If I pick up one element of it in terms of narrowing the gap in terms of participation between the different regions, I think that, earlier on, you were talking about the work done with the convention on the islands and islands. That being a mapping exercise is clearly useful, but it is then what is done with the mapping exercise to respond to the issues that it throws up. It would be interesting to know that, assuming that somewhere like the Highlands and Islands is one of those areas where participation presents different challenges, what is being done to address that? If I look, for example, at the construction sector, although Orkney College will do an awful lot in terms of delivery, still some of the training provision that has been required to be carried out in Inverness or the likes. What kind of support can SDS, working with the Skills Council and what not, put in in order to try and ensure that that training is delivered closer to hand in order to reduce the cost to business, I suppose the disincentive for particularly a young person to go away and potentially then not then come back and address that issue of participation? It is a really, really good question and it is live today. As part of the action plan that supports the Highlands and Islands Skills investment plan, we have a whole set of things that we want to work together to change. It has been chaired by Norman MacDonald from the Western Isles and it has got all the relevant partners to attend that implementation board. We are specifically looking at the challenge of near-to-home delivery of training and so that is alive just now. I guess it is back to the scale and scope of it and also the degree to which we can leverage more of the industry investment into it. There is a three-way play at the minute. Can UHI do more to ensure that that delivery is more localised? Can we make better advantage of some of the distributed methods, whether it is video or web-based learning? Can employers do more? If they have some capacity for on-the-job training that can work as a hybrid model with the colleges, can that deliver more? We have seen really good examples of that in respect of the aquaculture around Western Isles and the growth around the salmon sector and so on, the hybrid models that can happen. The final bit is where we anticipate future investment going to come. Can we start to work with the schools, industry and UHI to make sure that that provision is delivered in whatever format that is required that minimises the leakage of young people from their close neighbourhoods, either to Inverness or beyond? In terms of that localised dimension to what you are doing, is that borne out in terms of both the unit cost of delivering anything in the islands and particularly in the islands is going to be more costly than it is in other parts of the country, certainly more urban parts? However, the age profile of those who are looking to train and reskill is almost certainly going to be higher in the islands than it is in other parts. Is the approach that the SDS is able to take geared to reflecting that rather than adhering to a national programme that needs to be delivered in a national way? In national priorities with local flexibilities and for the island communities in particular, we have to be flexible, both in terms of the cost models that we are constantly looking at and maybe Katie can comment on that in a minute. We are looking at shared apprenticeship models, is there a way? How do you protect the importance of the employed status, but how do you also allow smaller companies to come together to share that training? Our commitment to the Highlands and Islands and to COEI has been to demonstrate that flexibility. There is no point in us being around that table if we cannot respond to those flexibilities and we are working very hard to do that. We will be able to demonstrate that. Of the early pathfinders and the foundation apprenticeships, the majority were in the Highlands and Islands region because we know that if we can get an increase in the work-based pathways in the Highlands and Islands region, that is one way of anchoring young people. You will never stop young people wanting to go and explore and live their lives in that early part, but for the want of jobs and connecting people to a local economy, the recent survey that Highlands and Islands Enterprise undertook said that the majority of young people still want to stay in the region, but they migrate because of jobs or because of learning. If we can anchor those through more apprenticeships and work-based training, with the romp of the delivery being a hybrid model between industry and UHI, we have a great recipe for success, but it absolutely has to be flexible. Lest I be accused of solely focusing on the Highlands and Islands, are there other parts of the country where there is a specific gap in terms of the participation that is requiring a specific response from SDS? It is a really good example of borders in Dumfries and Galloway. Dumfries and Galloway is probably more particularly where you have very large tracks of rural population, not high densities of employers, not great provision or not a great wealth of provision. There is a big challenge about how you respond to all those agendas. There is a huge amount of work with North Ayrshire Council around specifically the measures that we need to put in place that respond to their local economy and the progressions and the pathways that they need. The national agenda is important, but that local flexibility is crucial, because people who live their lives locally do not live their lives nationally. To Liam, when you are asking the last set of questions, a lot of it has been touched on already, but what I wanted to ask was the commission for developing Scotland's young workforce identified that 27 per cent of employers offered work experience, 29 per cent of employers recruited direct from education and 13 per cent of employers have modern apprenticeships. What steps are being taken by SDS to try and encourage more employers to train young people? Yes, 13 per cent. Although that is a slightly false baseline, because you would not have one-man bands necessarily having the capacity to take individuals on as an apprentice and provide the necessary supervision and training that is required there. We have looked at the whole expansion issue and are developing further plans around that. There are a whole set of things out there. Scottish apprenticeship week is our big week for employers and it has been moved forward to March this year in tandem with EASY for the school system. That has been a big part of it. We do an awful lot of promotion. I do not know if you have seen the Sunday to the times this week and the sun around the modern apprenticeship awards to bring that out too. We have got the regional and the skills investment plans, for instance in the Highlands and Islands area. There is a goal in there to increase modern apprenticeships there by 7 per cent. That is about our engagement with employers locally on the ground, to go out there using the trade bodies, etc. There is just a whole lot of promotion and marketing activities that goes into employers. We have apprenticeships.scot as our new website for fulfilling that sort of traffic alert around apprenticeships, which pushes out messages and is linked to our skills force, the main employer website too. The other thing around that is one of the recommendations in that report. The strategy was around more employer engagement in MAs and the specifically setting up of a supervisory group, which was to gain more employer engagement. We certainly think that that would be helpful when we have already been to our board recently on plans for that too. We have got a whole plan around employer engagement. We have seen the increasing number of young people moving into positive destinations when they leave school, but I wanted to ask you about the proportion of young people who are not in employment, education or training. What are you doing to support them to find employment or to take up a modern apprenticeship? In terms of young people not in a positive destination, back in 2003-04, that represented 13.3 per cent of the school leavers that particular year. In 2013-14, it was 6.3, so a lot of work has been done obviously in those intervening years in making sure that young people have that positive transition. There are a couple of points happening specifically from an SDS perspective. All young people who are in a negative destination, who are not in a positive destination when they leave school, are all case managed. We have our work coach service, which provides that intensive one-to-one support with individuals who are in our SDS centres locally. They have distributed their 47 centres that we have throughout the country, so there is a very intensive case management service works there. The second point is worth mentioning. I refer the other on to the data hub. The data hub is really, and now the participation measure, really, that in essence. What we are trying to do there is to say that, yes, SDS is a key role through work coaches and through intensive case management support, but so do others. For some of those young people, many of them will have a number of barriers, and some of those barriers are not employment or learning related. It is really, really important to be working partnership with other organisations locally, and we do that through local employability partnerships. There is a subset of community planning partnerships. We work very closely with other partners and organisations within the localities. Another area where I think SDS plays a key role in is the employability fund, and that is how we make sure that we arrange within local areas the requirements in terms of having support measures to help young people to access the labour market. For some of them, it will be about further skills training. It will be very specific in terms of jobs where it could be generic employability skills that they need support and we have contracts across all the 32 local authority areas to deliver that employability fund. The final point to mention is to go back to the data hub that allows SDS and our partners to monitor and manage young people in that particular group of young people who have not entered into a positive destination. It applies to school leavers, the 51,000 of which there is 6.3 per cent of negative destination, but more importantly now with the participation measure, that number expands up to include 16 to 19-year-olds. I mentioned it before, but I am hoping that the foundation apprenticeship opportunity in senior phase will significantly increase the awareness amongst young people about the different pathways that they can choose. There is an academic pathway, but there is a work-based pathway. The work-based pathway does not need to be less academic in its rigor, but the degree to which you connect to the labour market is really important. What I am hoping to see is that that will impact on the represented groups in a way that we have not seen before. One area that the committee has not touched on, and I think that it is remarkable that we sit here in 2015 and that our relative gender uptake in STEM and science type careers, particularly in engineering, is significantly underperforming. We have looked really, really hard at what is stopping young girls in particular and young women from pursuing careers in engineering. When we looked upstream, we found out that of those young people who get a pass or a higher grade in physics in Scotland, 72 per cent are boys. If you are not studying physics, your chances are that you are not going to progress into an engineering-related career. There is something really important about switching on early towards the choices that young people make and particularly for young women, the choices that they make around science subjects, that they do not switch off physics as a subject in particular. We are doing a lot of work with the Institute of Physics to understand what is it about the unconscious bias that goes on or the way in which physics is presented and taught in the classroom. There are very few great examples of any country in Europe that outperforms the average—pretty much most of Europe—on the performance. The statistical outliers seem to be in single-sex schools, but clearly that is not a model that we are going to move back to. Just to say that upstream, we need to think hard about how do we ensure that young people make the right choices and keep their options open? In senior phase, they get a really good low-risk opportunity to test whether it is a pathway that they want to choose. It is really interesting that the young people that we took on in the pathfinder at Lockgelly High School in Fife for the engineering pathfinder last year—I think that it was a 15 or 10—were young women. The difference in their perception having undertaken the first year of the foundation apprenticeship before and after was absolutely phenomenal. There is nothing like experience to help young people to make more informed choices. I am really hoping that the foundation apprenticeship helps to address some of that on the representation, because it is not right in this day and age that in areas such as ICT and digital and in engineering, we literally have a one-to-ten ratio. It is just unbelievable that that exists in 2015. I think that there are more opportunities to gain those experiences earlier and to bust the myths around it. The national grid did a survey of 18,000 young people and asked them what was their perception of engineering, and that was done about two or three years ago. Largely, they said that their belief was that it was flat-capped, to Keynesian, dirty, male-dominated and poorly paid. That was the belief of young people about that. As the head of engineering in Scottish Power said, our engineers are the foot soldiers in the war against climate change. He said, compare that as a proposition to the Keynesian flat-cap, poorly paid and male-dominated. That foundation apprenticeship could have a fundamental effect in changing the perceptions about the work-paced pathway and the progression into apprenticeships. The foundation apprenticeships and how it might tackle certain groups. I was thinking about one of the recommendations from the developing Scotland's young workforce in relation to the underrepresentation of black and minority ethnic groups. That recommendation said that there should be a targeted campaign to promote the full range of modern apprenticeships. What are you doing to address that issue and how successful has it been? We already had a very extensive promotional campaign since the report was published. The issue—we have talked to all the stakeholders involved—we have a very active Equality Advisory Group with external groups on it—is that the vocational route in the active parity of esteem in some BME communities is very much less valued. The academic route is pushed with the result that 65 per cent of white school leavers go into further and higher education, but it is 80 per cent in BME, so that shows you the differential there. There are issues about what is a respectable job. I have been told by the likes of Beamus that there is a culture of sacrifice now and then you gain later. We have a range of actions. We have had a big campaign earlier in the summer around that. We are working with Beamus and we have got two people embedded within Beamus. That is about going out to various communities and targeting them and going to all the groups and associations locally and spreading the message about apprenticeships to try and increase the uptake there. We are also putting a specific focus on female BME as well, because that is underrepresented too. We have also had some projects looking at that. Rathbone, one of the training providers, undertook a project last year for us in Dundee. That was just basically foot soldier out knocking doors of local businesses. As a result of that very small project, we have got an additional 30 MAs from BME communities that they would not necessarily have done. We have got an equalities action plan across the four groups mentioned developing young workforce that will be coming out in the coming weeks. What that will do is establish what the issues are, because they are different from each of the four groups that have been mentioned. It has been developed on the basis of what our stakeholders have told us and the evidence that is available there. It will put forward the range of actions that we are involved in trying to increase in MAs, but a lot of it is based on cultural norms and societal values, which, if we take the gender issue, will take a long time to change. The Government has given you a target of increasing the number of MAs from 25,000 to 30,000 by 2020. Given that there is underrepresentation of disabled people, people who are not in employment education or training and people from black and minority ethnic groups, how do you balance, bearing in mind the budget situation, trying to achieve those numbers and providing additional support to those groups in order to help to fill that gap? One of the areas that we will look at in the plan is that we have put a bit into Government is about extra support for individuals, particularly care leavers and disabled groups. That is all part of the comprehensive spending review calculations that are going on at the moment. We do balance, and the plan will have key indicators towards the targets that have been set within the youth employment strategy 2 about increasing the percentage of participation. Obviously, that is the extra numbers as the increase goes up, so there will be indicators and milestones for us in our progress. We will have to do both, and that is our commitment. Check the geo-submitory, if you want to ask me. In terms of tracking Government's economic strategy, one of the things that we have been and I do not really, I mean I would like your input, I do not expect the SDS to do everything. In addition to the lack of good management, which is different from good leadership, we are very insolid. Damian, you have mentioned at OECD, who knows how many times today. What can be done in your opinion as a skills development? One of the big things, last week in the business and parliament, we talked about, one of the presenters talked about, lack of language training. How do we, through skills development, internationalise all of the apprentices and trainees that we have? What can we do to be a bit more outward looking at those that go through the skills development programmes? I know that a lot of it falls on companies. That is a really good question. It is one that I often reflect on because, originally, I was brought up in Dublin and Ireland, and I spent a long time in Scotland. There is a real sense of a difference in outlook, where a sense in Ireland is that you will not survive unless you have got an outward look and you are connected to international markets. That does not feel as pronounced. There is something about, right through all of our activities, that that core vein of internationalisation is non-negotiable. Within our school experiences, we switch on early language programmes. The whole digital side of things has got incredible scope, so the ability and the rate at which we internationalise is incredibly foreshortened through digital technologies. Folk might remember in the past, if you were looking at international markets, you wrote to the embassy and you looked for a country market report, and the embassy took three months to give you the country market report and you paid them £20,000. You paid them another £20,000 to find you agents. You then went out on a visit to those agents, and you took another year before you could get into the markets. Through the internet and digital technologies, you can literally land in a market and be trading today. For me, the twin track of how do we get an international mindset that is a core facet of a Scottishness? It is there, but maybe it is not as pronounced as it could be. How do we get into people's minds that the digital challenge has got great opportunity and threat in equal measure? If you look at all the recent research around the disruptive potential of digital technologies, it is going to be absolutely phenomenal, and it is the rate and pace of disruption that is going to be phenomenal. The challenge for Scotland is are we going to be a nation that responds to that by way of being a victim, or are we going to be on the curve and leading it? You just need to look at the Ubers, the Air Nibs, and so it goes back to that fluency of international mindset, but actually are we digitally aware? Are we connected to the digital economy? Do we have businesses who actually are engineered from a digital perspective and their markets are not near to markets? The vast majority of businesses in Scotland sell within a 44-mile square radius. Our mobility in our workforce is very limited. I met an adviser to the Treasury in the US, and we were talking about labour market interventions when you had major closures. I was asking him about what would you do if the steel mills closed in Cleveland, and he said they did. I said, what did you do about it? He said, we did nothing. I said, what happened? He said, people went to work in Florida, and that would be like people leaving Glasgow and going to work in Athens. We struggled between Glasgow and Edinburgh for people to migrate within the travel to work region, so the mindset and the digital bid would be two things that we could focus incredibly on and both have great potential. I am mulling on the linguistic challenge of moving from Glasgow to Athens. From the macro to the micro, one of the aspects that has been introduced to support in the development of young workforce is the employer recruitment incentive programme. It is more a plea than a question. I know that the start date for that was set in July this year. From a constituency example, I know of employers who were taking people on as they left school, which is a couple of months earlier in the year. STS has been reasonably pragmatic in responding to that, but the plea would be to look at the start dates and make sure that that is relevant to when it is that young people are likely to be taking up the sorts of opportunities that we are seeking to promote here. In terms of starting in July, the Government came to us. As you know, the local authorities are the ones who are actually out there on the ground delivering it. We are administering the programme, so there was some work to be done on eligibility, where the money was coming from etc. That is why there was a July start date as part of it. We can certainly ask the Government to consider eligibility, the issue that you have raised there. I certainly appreciate the time that it takes to get everything in line, but in this instance it would have been perhaps more sensible to backdate it because the risk was that you had people taking young apprentices on and being faced with the choice of either ditching them and taking on somebody else or just not benefiting from the programme at all, which is now a term. We can take that back to the Scottish Government and ask them to consider it. That is helpful. I have one final question. You mentioned in just a few moments ago that this model of MAs being in the senior phase in school was low risk for those individuals who took it on. It would surely only be low risk if the SQA and the universities have accepted that it is an equivalent tariff to hires and other qualifications that are already recognised. Have they done so or what work have we done on that? That work is on the way. It is a great question and it begs the question of how do we value work-based learning versus academic learning in its true sense. Right now and in the past the system has actually worked against it. So, if I am a head teacher in a secondary school and if the convener is taking higher maths and I am taking a work-based pathway, then the school gets four times the tariff for you than for me. You said that before and I understand that. We all understand that problem. We understand the history of it. You have said that it is low risk and that was your exact words. If you take the model that you have been describing of taking an in-year modern apprenticeship in S5 and S6, in the senior phase, my question is what work has been done by SDS in making sure that SQA and the universities provide an equivalent tariff score? If that does not happen, I cannot see how it would succeed and how it will be a low risk. Absolutely, I understand that. Specifically, there is very in-depth work on going right now with SQA in terms of modelling the certification that it will get through the work-based pathway with hires and, equally, there are very detailed discussions on the way with the likes of Harry Watt, Strachlyde and Robert Gordon on how they would manage that. It is a development programme, but those issues are absolutely being worked on. What is the main for the successful completion of that development? It is a five-year programme. We have received European co-finance. It would probably take the first three years to develop a number of pathways and to work out what are the elements of a defined framework that we would then set for the last two years where we see the programme scaling up. I would say that this is probably the first year of the programme, so in two years' time we should land on settled advice to the Scottish Government in terms of what a national entitlement should look like and what the framework for that national entitlement should be. When you say that you are working with the SQA and the universities for providing an equivalent tariff score for recognition of that work, are you saying that that will be in two years, three years or five years' time? No, that should be way sooner. That is a technical exercise. I do not have the specific on it, but I could write to you with the specific of when that will be available. Thank you very much. I thank you all for coming along this morning. That has been just slightly over two hours, but I think that it is a productive two hours, so thank you all for appearing here before the committee this morning. Now that we have agreed to hold the next item in private, therefore I close the meeting to the public.