 195dd Stygff ramp Thank you, people. Welcome everyone to the third meeting of the educations and skills committee. Can it please remind everyone present to turn off their mobile phones as he can interfere with the sound system The first item is to allow Richard Lochhead to declare any interests that are relevant to the work of the committee. Can I welcome Richard and invite this declaration Thank you, successor, pleasure to be here and no official declaration of interests. Unofficially, as a primary school teacher, a chynnalch chi'n gwin coinciduol, a chyfwc y ffordding wrth i ddim yn gweld drwy'r ddweud, gallu rwy'n defnyddio'r rhan o'r r photol dweud o'r aesfa oedd yn swydd. Yr mwyaf cysyllt y bydd ymlaen i'r llei'r llei'r llei'r llei'r llei i'r llei i'r llei i'r llei i'r llei i'r llei i'r lei i'r llei i'r llei i'r llei i'r llei a yna, Ideitem five would be a chance for us to discuss, reflect on what we're hearing today with the panel. It's also suggested that similar review items are taking it in private in subsequent meeting this month. Ie об family should we will take it in private? Ideitem three is the overview of further and higher education. We have in front of us the panel of witnesses. This is the first of a number of overview panels this month. These sessions will inform consideration of our future work programme and a session with the Cabinet Secretary in the 28th of February. So before welcoming the witnesses, can I begin by putting on record my thanks to all those who organised and took part in the fact-finding visits in relation to further and higher education at the University of Stirling last week and on skills at Stirling community enterprise. The practical experience that members have heard on those visits provide valuable insight into context for those overview sessions. I would now like to welcome Shona Struthers, chief executive from College Scotland, Professor Andrea Nolan, convener of University Scotland, Bonnie Sandlin, president of the National Union of Students Scotland and John Kemp, interim chief executive of the Scottish Funding Council. Good morning. I would like to go straight to questions. The first question I have is regarding a report in the Herald this morning about the new university scheme to lower students from working class. Could anybody give me some further information on this? I would be happy to update you. This is part of our response to the commissioner of widening access report that came out earlier in the year in March of blueprint for fairness. In University Scotland, all the principals have come together to say how we can deliver the step change. We have been working hard over the past four or five years and even beyond that to improve access to higher education as part of a holistic drive through schools and colleges, and I am sure that my colleagues will speak about that. We came up with a plan to deliver what are ambitious targets but targets that we are all committed to, which revolves around three areas. The first is about improving our admissions systems and reviewing them. Seventeen of our nineteen universities across Scotland use contextualised admissions, so there are flags that we can identify if people are coming from less advantaged backgrounds. We have been doing this on an individual basis and looking at what works and what does not work. We have some evidence now that students from deprived backgrounds in particular may have had more challenges in getting opportunities to develop their skills and expertise, that if we admit them in some areas with lower grades, they do really well. What is really important to us as university principals is that people succeed when they are admitted and they go on to have good outcomes in employment. We are looking at spreading our best practice, sharing that further, so that is one area. The second area that we are looking at is around our bridging programmes. Our evidence now indicates that delivering bridging programmes, so if people are coming from school or from colleges, to get our prospective students aware of what universities are like, not to be daunted by it, not to feel under confident and that there are other people like you, we have been doing that on an individual university basis largely. We feel that if we come together more and maybe offer things on a regional, potentially a national, who knows, we are going to develop our bridging programmes collaboratively. If we do that, we have the potential to offer more places to people on bridging programmes and summer schools activities that will help them to transition into university and to believe that university is for them. The third area that we plan to do more work on is streamlining, and that will be in collaboration with our colleagues in the college sector. Streamlining are articulation routes to ensure that people have a range of opportunities and pathways into university. When would you see this piece of work being done and being ready to put into action? A lot of the building blocks are there because we have done a lot of things individually, so we agreed to the plan last week at our University of Scotland that we spent at our away day and we will be putting together a board to deliver it. The actions that we will put in place during this year, the impact takes a while to see as you get more people through into the system, as more people attain the qualifications to come into university. The impact will take a while, but the actions were committed to moving on in this academic year. That builds on actions that universities have been taking for some years. These are tried and tested methods and contextualised admissions. There is now quite a lot of research behind that, showing that people with particular grades from that school might perform as well as somebody with far higher grades from a different school. There is a lot of strong research behind that. What Andrea has described as streamlining the articulation work is something that has grown quite a lot in recent years, but it still has the capacity to grow further and be quite an important way of widening access to quite a large number of students. It is something that we strongly support. The college sector is very much looking at the articulation route to develop the learner journey. Although we have some good examples of articulation, it is just not right across the board. We want to see that much more across the board with colleges and universities being much more of a standard route rather than just specific partnerships that have been created. Do you have any comment to make on that? Just to say really that NHS Scotland absolutely welcomes University Scotland being so bold and decisive before the commissioner for fair access has even been implemented. We are very excited about the opportunities that this sort of collaborative national approach and regional approach is going to have for students. We absolutely believe that articulation is a jewel in the crown of the Scottish education system. It is a wonderful opportunity for students for whom direct access into university isn't right for whatever reason. We have been very clear in NHS Scotland that where articulation works it is wonderful. In recent years across all institutions in Scotland, 51 per cent of students who are articulating from college to university are being forced to repeat years of study and only 49 per cent are entering university from college at the year and level that they should. This is not a good or reasonable use of the very limited resources that we have available for tertiary education in Scotland. It is genuinely exciting to hear colleges and universities working more collaboratively to try and make that a more smooth progression. Is that based on the universities or is it based on the courses that are 51 49? That is all students who are articulating from college into university. There can be a number of reasons for that. There are some institutions who do not have a very smooth alignment between the college course that students are articulating from into the university degree that they are articulating to. There are some courses. For example, law is one that I hear quite a lot that has to have specific subject matter covered in first and second year that perhaps a student who has done an HNC or an HND in college will not have covered. I believe that there are absolutely opportunities for that as Andrea and Shona are talking about that streamlining of curriculum content to make sure that that is still a smoother path. Where it works best, the college and the university have worked together to design the course so that there is seamless articulation and the student is well supported. Where people are repeating years, sometimes it is for good reasons that they are changing subject or need that additional support but sometimes it is because the college and the university have not designed a route that works. Thank you very much. Liz, do you want to come in on this subject? My questions are more about the role of the Scottish funding council when it comes to helping this process. If you look at what the Audit Scotland reports have said, both into higher education and further education, there has been some concern expressed about the clarity of what is that role. It would be helpful, John. I read the paper that you provided, but it did not respond to any of the concerns that Audit Scotland has raised. I am particularly interested in how you feel that the outcome agreements, which include widening access, measure the success of that? The outcome agreements are the means by which we take the Government's priorities and the funding for further and higher education and link those two things together. There are agreements between the funding council and the colleges and universities. They are based on negotiations between the colleges and universities about what is achievable and achieving the ends that we mutually share. We agree with universities a set of targets for widening access. Built within that are requirements that they have contextualised missions and so on. We use them as a method for encouraging and linking to funding progress with widening access, but I am stressed that they are an agreement. They are a collaborative agreement between us and the universities and the colleges about making progress on those things. They are not a simplistic method where we can co-opt a set of targets in our office and tell the universities what those are. We have a set of targets in our office that we can discuss with the universities on widening access, but it is a process of negotiation and agreement about how the funding is used for Government priorities. Is that the point? Yes, it is, but why do you think that Audit Scotland is not very comfortable about the clarity of that? I would not say that they were uncomfortable. The Audit Scotland report on higher education suggests that we need to update the outcome agreement guidance to reflect our new strategic plan, which we are doing at the moment. The strategic plan is fairly recent and the next set of outcome agreement guidance has not come out. I think that there is sometimes an expectation that outcome agreements are more directive than they actually are. Those are about collaborative working between the university and college sector and the funding council to reflect priorities. Professor Nolan, on that theme, the indication is that a great deal more work is being done than will be required to be done, given that the Scottish Government's policy intentions are changing. When it comes to the setting of outcome agreements within the different institutions of the Scottish funding council, do you feel that that process is well researched and resourced in terms of the numbers of people who are able to help individual institutions to work that up? There are very positive things about the outcome agreement process in that one has a discussion about your institution and how your institution's missions, given that we are all autonomous institutions, how your mission and your strategy, how we can marry the two and deliver to the Government's agenda. It is positive to be able to discuss that. With all processes, they can always be improved. They are bilateral discussions and I think maybe in the future it might be helpful to consider how we could at the beginning of a session actually say, well, these are the things that we want to achieve sectorally for the whole year and we will now go on and discuss those individually. I think that it is very challenging for the funding council, particularly in the last year and possibly this year, when our outcome agreements are on a three-year basis, but our funding settlement this year has been a one-year and it is likely that it will be an X one-year for 17-18. That is where it becomes quite difficult because of course our planning cycles in universities we take a student in by the time, from the moment we look to recruit the student to when they graduate is four plus one, five years. That makes it challenging for everybody. I am interested in the initiatives around widening access. I wonder if we can maybe look at the context of that both for the college and the university sector. I have been advised and I have been told that it is harder now for a young person in Scotland against university than it was five years ago and as a consequence places anecdotally I would say from one family are being rationed by qualification. Does that not therefore mean that it makes it more difficult to address the attainment gap when in fact young people who in the past would have access to university courses are now not being because of government policy of funding, gap and capping? The number of Scots-domiciled students at universities in Scotland has increased by about 10 per cent in the last 10 years or so. There is an increase in the number of Scots-domiciled students accessing university. It is fair to say that demand has probably grown above that and that is perhaps the success of some of the widening access initiatives. In the long run it is something that is going to have to be considered by the Parliament, the Government and the funding council how we make the best use of the capacity in colleges and universities to meet the widening access targets. In the last few years the number of students from Scotland going to Scottish universities has been increasing. The indication from this year's UCAS statistics is that it has increased again by about 4 per cent year on year. The issue is perhaps that demand is increasing at greater rate than supply. Some of the consequential changes of the introduction of fees in England and therefore the charging of our UK students has enabled the expansion of the number of places for Scots-domiciled students in Scotland. There has been an expansion but it is perhaps not enough to satisfy demand. Increasing demand is an increased number of people who would, in the past, have accessed a course. It is not that there are lots of people who want to go who are not able to go. Those are people who, five years ago, would have accessed a place who can no longer access a place. Therefore, the way in which we are managing that demand is by increasing the level of qualification that they require. I would have thought that that would have made it even more difficult to address the question of the gap in attainment by the time that you get to college university level. I think that we are accepting that your demand has grown more than supply. The cap on places means that there is nowhere else for the universities to go but to ration by qualification, logically. We are expecting young people to achieve higher qualifications to access a place at university than they would say five, ten years ago. You could argue that it has been in a position where there are young, talented people who could contribute to the Scottish economy who are not able to access a place and would allow them to do that. In the long run, that is an issue that we need to consider collectively, not just the funding council, in how we use the supply of places that we have in both colleges and universities. Some of what we have referred to as streamlining or articulation here is a way of using the same number of places but getting more people through. We also need to consider the total supply of places. I think that the other context is around colleges, where we talk about bridging the opportunity to get from college to university. We also know that the budgets are down by 18 per cent in the last, let me say, since 2014-15. The audit report tells us that disproportionately part-time places have gone, disproportionately women have gone, disproportionately people over 25 have gone. How do you think that perhaps NUS can reflect that? How does that address the question of equality of access and education? NUS has been absolutely clear. The protection of FTE places was very much welcomed by us and the opportunity to have more students able to access a place at college on a full time basis, but that has come at the expense of part-time places, which disproportionately affect women, disabled learners and mature adult returners. We would like to see some kind of investment to rebalance that. On your previous point, when you were talking about the opportunity for access, it is worth mentioning that the application to acceptance ratio for 2015 for people from SIND 20 backgrounds was 63 per cent. That is in contrast to people from SIND 80 per cent to 100 per cent, which was 75 per cent. That is a percentage gap of 12 points for people from the least deprived communities to people from the most deprived communities in having their application to university accepted. Conversely, 29 per cent of college students have come from SIND 20. Colleges are absolutely seeing an overrepresentation of people from the most deprived backgrounds, and I think that there is something there about opportunity and equality of opportunity. We have had an equality assessment on the budget, which leads to the consequence that poorer students' disproportionate end-up in the college sector, which is cut, and better off students are more likely to access a place at university. Do you agree that you would feel any equality impact assessment on that basis? I would not like to speculate on what the outcome would be, but I think that colleges do excellent work in an atmosphere of ever-declining resources. The chance to go to college to do a higher education study is as valid for some students as what university is, but I think that it is making sure that its students are restricted to one path or another on the basis of where they are from. I wonder if the colleague from Colleges Scotland would like to reflect on what you would see as what should the direction of Government policy be in order to address the question of equality. Obviously, the cuts to budgets have had an impact on students and the target of the full-time equivalent to be maintained. It is welcome. However, the consequence of having a negative impact on part-time learners and, therefore, on women returners is something that we would like to see the imbalance redressed, absolutely. There are many colleges that, while focusing on the young learner who tends to study full-time, have looked at admissions on a first-come, first-served basis. In that way, you get the older learners to get the opportunity to come to college, but it should not be one or the other. My question is round about the admissions aspect of what you were talking about, Professor Nolan. Initially, one of the things that has been brought to my attention is that I am from a rural constituency. Some of the strategies and, as I suppose, the recording of the people coming into universities in the widening access agenda from the private background tends to be postcode-based. That does not work in identifying students of that kind from rural areas where, of course, the postcode might be a small village and poor families living next to it. What would your advice be to us in collecting that data? We could be looking at missing some targets because we are not identifying that type of student in rural areas. That is a very good point. It is one that we have puzzled with and considered over time. The measures and the targets have been set against the SIMD way of assessing deprivation, which is a composite measure with many things in it. At a very high level system national, it identifies areas of people who live areas of deprivation. However, our evidence or data suggests that 50 per cent of the time is right if you measure it against other indicators of deprivation, for example, free school meals. We find about 46 per cent overlap that both of those measures identify. It is not granular, it is not perfect, it does not give you a full picture of how to address the full range of deprivation. Certainly in University Scotland, we have been looking at other measures such as free school dinners or if your carer experience or your carer status. You might look at schools with low progression to higher education. We feel that some universities use, in their contextualised admissions, to pick up those people who are disadvantaged but who are not or living in disadvantaged areas but are not being picked up by the SIMD-20 measure. That is a good point. It is worth saying that we agree with University Scotland that the SIMD is not perfect for every purpose. However, at a high level, particularly at the national level, of measuring progress and widening access, it is an extremely useful tool. The latest iteration of the SIMD came out, I think that it was just last week. You can go on that, put in your postcode, find out how wealthy or deprived you are. If you look at the maps on that, particularly in urban areas, it is a clear indication of the background of the student. In rural areas, you are quite correct, it is less good because the data zones are more mixed. We very much recognise that, somewhere like Robert Gordon's at Aberdeen University, where they are in a more rural area and in an area of quite low deprivation in the urban part of Aberdeen, the targets that we would expect in those institutions have to be very different. If you are in Glasgow, the percentage of the population that is from SIMD 20 or 40 is far higher. It is a very good overall measure. It is less good at saying that you should admit that student as opposed to that student, and it is less good when you get granular in particular institutions, but it is still a very good overall measure. Do you see a role for any kind of almost self-declaration in admission forms, or maybe even a checklist? You mentioned being through the care system or other criteria. We do, as part of our outcome agreement process, allow institutions to use other measures as well as widening access. We are working with University of Scotland on a wider basket of measures, including parental income and so on, which will give a better match between what is and is not a widening access student. It is important that we do that in a consistent way across the country so that we can measure the progress of one institution against another, because institutions use their own measures. If you add them up, it is sometimes difficult to say that University X, with those five measures, has brought x per cent of its students a widening access. In this university, with a different set of measures, we will have a different set. Which one is making the best use of our funding to widen access? It is quite difficult to do that if the measures are not consistent. We do need consistent measures, but there is no reason that that should not be quite a wide basket. It is worth mentioning that the application form for SAS, the Student Rewards Agency for Scotland, is the form that you fill in in order to get your student loan in your bursary. Do you ask questions like, are you a care leaver? I know that you cast, which is the generic application system for most people going to university. It is also working really productively with NUS at a national level to look at what other questions should be asked. I think that the commission for widening access was very clear that the data that is available to institutions could definitely be improved. As John said, although SIMD is not perfect, it is the best that we have right now. I think that there is scope for better data production and better data use. I know anecdotally, for example, that the changes to SAS and to UCAS cannot always be picked up by institutions and their computer systems. It is systemic issues around data collection, but it is not just from the applicant. I suspect that there are probably ways that it could be streamlined from schools. It is a point about SIMD. John Kemp is absolutely right. It certainly works for urban areas, but it is a blunt instrument when it comes to rural Scotland. It has not worked for 17 years, so we all need to come up with a better way of doing that. I want to just ask two questions. The first was about Audit Scotland's report into colleges. I just wanted to clarify if I could, Mr Kemp, the point that they made in relation to understanding the merger costs of colleges in which the funding council published a report last month. What Audit Scotland specifically said is that this will not include costs of harmonising staff terms and conditions, which could be significant. Is that a fair comment and is there a plan to publish those details? Our report does not cover the harmonisation cost. The reason it does not is that there are a number of changes happening in the college sector over the period of the merger, some of which were related to merger, some were not. It is very difficult to reach an entirely precise answer of what savings are related to merger and what are not. Part of the change that was happening in the college sector over that time was the move towards national bargaining. Some of the colleges that were harmonising pay were doing it with an eye to that. Some were not. Some colleges' harmonisation did not cost much and some cost quite a bit more, but sometimes that was related to looking forward to national bargaining rather than the costs of the merger. For that reason, we did not include it. We are in agreement with Audit Scotland that it is very difficult to be absolutely precise about which changes in costs in colleges are related to merger. We have gone for a fairly robust and conservative way of looking at changes in staffing. Was there a ball part? I take your point that it is not being possible to come up with a precise number, but has it been possible to come up with a broad number? Is that a number that Audit Scotland considered to be auditable? Part of the complications that we did not include every merger in the savings figure and some of the bigger costs were at one of the colleges that we did not include. We have figures on it that they are not ones that I would like to give here, because we are still working on it. The other question that I wanted to ask was a more generic question, and it relates to Johann Lamont's line of questioning. Is the winding access agenda that you have all spoken about very logically this morning consistent with developing Scotland's young workforce, which I still think is one of the most seminal pieces of work that has been done in Scotland all the time of this Parliament? Are the two, because of the concentration that Ian Wood had, or Sir Ian Wood had on vocational education, trying to blur the lines of that and take out so many barriers to understanding why vocational education is so important? Are those two consistent? What are you doing to make sure that they are, as a worse, seamless? They are consistent, and it is very important that we keep on working to make sure that they do not diverge. The work that has been done on developing the young workforce, particularly the parts in schools about vocational pathways, needs to be things that are linked into a number of possible outcomes when people leave school. If it becomes something where their vocational pathway is seen as not university, then I think that the whole thing will have failed. I do not believe that there is a divide that says that vocational is not university and academic is university. We, in our work with colleges on developing the young workforce, very much want to encourage flexible vocational pathways that allow people to perhaps, at an early age in school, think about particular areas that they might want to work in, but do not limit them to particular outcomes, but take them on to vocational courses that might lead to an HN in school and then on to college and then on to university, or it might lead them into work from any of those outcomes. It is very important that we see that as one education system, not a separate education system, but vocational in a different place from the academic or widening access education system. If we are to introduce the kinds of routes that are going to properly implement developing the young workforce, I think that they are ones that help with the aspirations on the commission for widening access as well, because that can be done by improving the learner journey, improving articulation and creating routes that are not trying to get everyone to the same state or six-year and then do a four-year degree. There will be other routes, which I think are a way of both widening access and giving us a first-class vocational education system. I would like to just reinforce John's points there. We are quite clear that university is not for everybody. It is not for everybody at 18. It might be for people later on in their 20s and their 30s. We might want to do a masters at some point, but what we are about in terms of the developing young workforce totally aligned with our access agenda is about the equality of opportunity. People have the opportunities and they are not, in some way, negated by where you have come from, your race, your gender or whatever. A lot of what has been said is that colleges are great places for many people to learn. The system that we have at the moment is a bit institutional. It is looking at schools, colleges and universities, and what we really need to be doing is looking at the individual and seeing for some people at school in the senior phase. It is much, much better for that individual perhaps to be in college. It is better for the individual and it is better for society. If you look at the other end, the vocational training or the technical training in college can lead on to university for some people, but it does not need to. It is not about seeing them as separate silos. It is very much seeing them as a flow for an individual and it is also not linear. You might start at school and you might go on to university and you might go back to college or vice versa. You might go to college on to university. I think that it is about making sure that we make things simpler for the individual. That is all part of our spending review submission around the learner journey. Can I ask one question about one of Swedenwood's recommendations, which was that employers and national industry sector groups should form partnerships with regional colleges to ensure that course content is industry relevant? We said that two years ago. Has that happened? It happened daily. That is exactly how college courses are developed. I could go to any college and they could show me all of that. The college outcome agreement is based on a regional skills assessment, which you can ask Gordon McGinnis from the SDS about in your next session. They are very much informed by the regional skills assessment and skills investment plans. We expect to see that reflected in the outcome agreement. The employers groups that are referred to there are being established at the moment, but there is a lot of workforce evidence that goes into the college outcome agreements to make them reflect local need. I think that it is really important that we are talking about widening access and about apprenticeships to be absolutely explicit. The widening access agenda is not just about getting more young people from deprived backgrounds into university. It is also about getting more young people from not deprived backgrounds at all to think about apprenticeships as a valid method of moving on after school. That has to be taken in context. Any of Scotland's research indicates that almost half of apprentices are making choices about what apprenticeships do based on what they can afford and not on the basis of the information, advice or guidance that they might have received or, indeed, on their own career aspirations. Apprentices, for example, are in a very bizarre situation where they are workers but they are also learners but they are not treated as workers and paid significantly less, but they are not treated as learners and they do not have the opportunity to co-create their own curriculum. They are also unable to access benefits that their counterparts in full-time education can access, for example, the council tax exemption. If I can lay that out absolutely bluntly, on the basis of the current apprentice national minimum wage for apprentices between the ages of 16 to 19, their annual salary would be £5,544. That is £2,000 below the national poverty line, assuming a standard working week. It is also £2,500 below the maximum amount of student support that is available. Apprentices are treated very differently and it is a very gendered difference as well. For example, in Scotland childcare apprentices, where women make up the vast majority, receive a mean hourly pay of £4.23 an hour, which is significantly below mean pay. It is actually the lowest of any apprentice. Conversely, electrical technical apprentices, which is massively men-dominated, receive the highest mean pay in Scotland, which is £10 per hour. Women make up just 5 per cent of those starts. Brief supplementary. Following on Tavish's point about engagement with employers, the Audit Scotland report mentioned that, following its engagement with industry bodies, it said that that maybe had not been as fulsome, as it might have been expected. There is some way to go on that. I was just wondering how you would explain Audit Scotland's finding on that point. The point of the Audit Scotland report was about the mergers and whether the mergers had created a different dynamic for employers. The point that I was making was about the outcome agreement process and how those relate to regional skills assessments. From memory, I think that they spoke to the FSB as part of their look at mergers. Is that correct? Exactly. I would like to explore a little bit college governance. As you are aware, there has been a fair bit of controversy over college governance failures in recent times. I wonder whether the measures that have been taken so far are sufficient to address that and are sufficiently robust to future proof against this happening again. College governance landscape has been massively reformed. We have had a good governance steering group in place for about two years now, and that is populated by all parties in terms of colleges, national union of students, Government funding council, trade union members. Together, collectively, we have looked at developing our code of good governance. That is now in place. The Government had its task group, which came up with many recommendations. I think that what we have now is a different landscape and a different set of rules and regulations that make it much more robust and that the situations that we have seen in the past belong to legacy colleges. I think that we have a much better position now with board members who receive more robust training and we have chairs that are publicly appointed. I mean, that sounds excellent, but Oric Scotland's report on Scotland's colleges says that the activities of college boards are not sufficiently transparent, only one college complying with the code of good governance. That specifically makes reference to putting on websites, agendas, minutes and board papers. That is something that we have addressed with the sector recently. That has improved as we go on. That is a point that has been addressed. One of the key measures was external assurance to mitigate the risk of future issues arising and that we would principally SFC. Are the measures in place to reassure us on that point? The Public Audit Committee will be considering quite soon some of the reports on the college sector this year. Last year, we had quite a lot of discussion about North Glasgow College and Coatbridge College. There was quite a lot of discussion about whether the SFC had been robust enough and how it dealt with the issues that will be in front of the Public Audit Committee this year relating to Clyde College and GCRB. We have taken a fairly robust line with those issues, which came up last year. I think that there are a set of procedures in place, partly to do with the reclassification of colleges as public bodies, partly to do with the code of good governance and partly lessons learned from instances like Coatbridge, I think, put us in a different place from where we were a couple of years ago. So that you can give us that reassurance. I can give you reassurance that we are in a position to act robustly where there are problems. I can't give you a reassurance that there will never ever be any problems. We are working with the college sector to do code of governance and I am fairly sure that the incidence of problems will be less than it might have been in the past. I can't give you a reassurance that there will never be any. I was kind of hoping for a yes or no thereabouts to… Well, it's a yes. Sounds like a qualified yes. Do you think that the inequalities that were highlighted in the Greig's report in January 2012 have been addressed through the recent college reforms, notably through regionalisation and the activity to improve the governance of colleges? You mean inequalities in gender on boards? Yes. Perhaps you and I could answer that. There has been progress. In Professor Greig's report, there was a whole list of different inequalities. What we've seen since then to now is the reform of the college sector on many different fronts. I'm sure that this committee is well versed on it, but we've seen the mergers, which is structural changes. We've seen regionalisation, which is where the colleges and the employers looked to make sure that there's opportunities in the region that are addressed. We've seen the colleges brought into the public sector and have to adhere to O&S reclassification, and we've seen the reintroduction of national bargaining. What Professor Greig's listed was a lot of different inequalities, and all those different reforms have addressed quite a lot of them in different ways, but it's been a very complex landscape with lots of different change simultaneously. I think that what we've got now are colleges—some of them are significantly larger, so they have much more clout in their region, and they're working better with employers. I think that the college sector is set up better to work with schools and universities and employers. I think that a lot of the inequalities that Professor Greig highlighted in his report have been addressed. I agree that there's a large number of inequalities. I suppose that I was really thinking, maybe simplistically, at the gender balances on boards and so on, which obviously are very important. Sorry. I don't have the latest figure, perhaps. The gender balance of college boards, and the reason I don't have a precise answer is that the college boards reformed themselves over the last year or so, so it might have changed, but it wasn't far off 50-50 even before it was reformed, so I would imagine that it's gotten better. I recently did a survey of each of the college boards and looked at gender. I'd be very happy to submit that to the committee. From memory, I think that it's sat around the 35-40 per cent for females on boards. That sounds a lot better than it was a few years ago, that's for sure. Can I ask whether the original intention of college governance changes has delivered on the aim of putting learners at the heart of colleges? That was in the report of the review of further education governance in Scotland in January 2012. I would say just two points. I think that you've now got students on boards, and I'm sure that Bonnie will pick that point up. I think that we've now got a student association framework, which is a big improvement on where things have been in the past. In terms of putting learners at the centre, I think that the student voice is absolutely there. Yeah, I think that just to pick up on that, that's absolutely right, and certainly I was a college student president in 2012 when the murder processes were just beginning, and my own experience is a volunteer student president sitting on the board of my college and the board of the regional murder group and also studying full-time and also on placement two days a week. I also have kids, but there's no student that's ever going to be in that situation again as long as the status quo continues. Every college now has a student association that has at least one sabbatical full-time officer, and their job is to represent the interests of students to the college and nationally, too. Of course, there's work to be done in terms of developing students associations in US Scotland, and the Scottish Funding Council will have a partnership project that develops and supports students associations to constantly get better. I think that when you compare university students associations who have existed for a significant amount of time, who usually have far higher block grant support in order to be able to fund their activities and compare that to college students associations, they are very, very different bodies, but the nature of college is very different to university as well with a far more transient student body who may only stay at college for one year before moving on. Certainly, before Professor Griggs's report, there's a significant difference in the way that learners are treated within colleges. Is it perfect? No. Nothing ever is really, I suppose, a status quo is never good enough, but I certainly think that the intention and the partnership approach is there. As Shona has said, the framework for colleges is used by students associations and their colleges to build a partnership approach to make sure that the learner is at the centre. You were wanting to come in briefly on the point that was raised. I'm giving that Coatbridge College was specifically mentioned by herself, John. I'm just looking at the constituency MSP if that situation has been fully addressed, and assurances can be given that it's unlikely to happen again. Yes. The new college Lanarkshire was the final post-merger evaluation of new college Lanarkshire. That college is operating well. On the specific instance of what happened at Coatbridge, I think that there's no risk of that happening again in that college. Fairly significantly beating me to the punch on what I was going to ask about, which was the relative weakness of student representation in colleges. Compared to not just universities but schools, when we look at the education journey, when you take parents and guardians into account, the relative political lobbying power of those at school or who represents them in universities is much larger than a college. I'd suggest that that's why the college sector has perhaps seen cuts to its budget, disproportionate to its other sectors. I was just going to ask, but Bonnie covered it quite significantly. How do we continue to improve the voice of college students not just in their own institutions but in the national conversation about that sector? I think that it's really interesting if you can reflect back on pre-2012 to now. I've been very lucky to be involved with NUS Scotland as a volunteer and now as a full-time officer since the regionalisation process was in track. NUS Scotland is absolutely hyper-aware that the vast majority of our membership is college students, but we're talking about issues that affect college students in a way that I don't think NUS ever has before because the voice of college students has been strengthened through the student association development. That was first of all funded through transformation funding while the regionalisation process was happening. Now colleges are funding that themselves. There are some colleges or some college students associations that are doing very, very well. There are others who are perhaps a little bit smaller or who for whatever reason aren't quite at the same level of progression development, but we're working with them to develop their structures as a student association to ensure that they have that institutional memory year on the year because I think that for college students associations that's really the biggest weakness that they've had is that universities have got abundances of staff members within their students associations who know year on year what's been worked on, what hasn't, what has been lobbied on, what hasn't, what successes has the student association had in pursuing their own agenda. Whereas with college students associations that hasn't always been the case because there hasn't been that institutional memory and so when you get a new student officer team in every year historically before there was spatical officers a lot of them may have dropped out of their role during the year as soon as NABs or graded units came up because it's a lot of work taking on that kind of level of responsibility and sometimes that has to give when you've got to focus on your academic progression. I think things are significantly different to where they were four years ago, but we are absolutely committed to working with students associations to help them get better and improve their voice. Certainly seeing the improvement over the last couple of years, is that reflected in an improvement in representation for the part-time students, mature learners etc that John had been referring to before, whose courses have been affected disproportionately in recent years? It can be really difficult to reach some demographics of students and that's not just a college representation issue, that's for universities as well. For example, a lot of college courses part-time students might come in at night and perhaps there aren't a student association representatives around them or perhaps there are distance learning students and so they are not around the campus as well. I think that it's significantly better than again the more it was when there wasn't spatical officers. I probably couldn't put a figure on what the direct sort of intervention and interaction is with those hate the phrase hard to reach students. I don't think that anyone is hard to reach, I think that there's just different methods in different ways, but those are students who we would say we don't normally have as much contact with as what perhaps we have with full-time day-time students. That's very much. I think that anybody would welcome the increased ability of students to engage and that element of the reform programme has been really important. Do you think that there should be targets established at college level or through government policy to address the fact that actually over this period when you've had increased representation there has been a reducing reduction in student numbers in college by 41 per cent and a reduction in women in part-time places of 48 per cent. The irony to me is that you get increased representation but you're representing a smaller number of students. What do you think should be the next stage in addressing that? That's a very big question. I think that any Scotland has been absolutely clear that there needs to be some kind of rebalancing. There has been a focus on full-time places, and that's right. It's right that there are opportunities for any student who wants to take them up. That has unfortunately come at the expense of part-time places, which does disproportionately affect women, mature learners and disabled people. We would just like to see more opportunities, more part-time places and maybe a sort of rebalancing in that focus. What do you think can be done to address the rather dismissive approach that explains the disappearance of part-time courses as being, well, those were only hobby courses anyway? Can I just say that one person's comment and it's not anybody's official line? In terms of re-establishing the benefits of part-time courses, courses for people perhaps with learned disabilities who are able to be sustained in the community because of those courses, has there been any work done to try and analyse which of those courses have actually gone? It's really difficult to... It's a narrative, I suppose, where the purpose of education is in order to get a qualification to go out to the world of work and sometimes emits the fact that education serves a whole realm of other purposes, whether that's confidence-building, getting people back into just a social context of being able to interact with other people, and that's hugely valid too. I don't want to be a tall dismissive and suggest that all of these courses were hobby courses, but some of them were very short courses. At the time of the economic downturn, there was a decision, which was partly by the funding council, partly by the Government, to prioritise full-time courses for young people at a time when that was needed. Like Vaughney, I agree that we need to constantly keep under review the balance of courses. There are still part-time courses existing in the college sector. There has been a rebalancing away from some very short ones. I'm not being dismissive of these courses, but it was about prioritisation. In the decisions that we take in the funding council about prioritisation, students are part of that. If Vaughney and I hadn't been here today, we would have been at our access and inclusion committee, where Vaughney is a member of the committee, our skills committee, has a student member, and Vaughney is at our board meetings as an observer as well. We involve students in those decisions, but the changes to college provision to increase the number of full-time students and reduce the number of part-time students without being dismissive of these courses was about prioritising something that was needed at that time. Would it be reasonable to say that I get prioritisation, I get that you address the challenges of particular times? If you simply do it by the length of the course, then you may be losing very important courses for people to enhance their ability to access work, while at the same time sustaining other courses. I wonder whether you have applied a set of criteria to, which is more subtle than simply saying, if you are under 18 or if you are full time. I don't know whether the college sector has looked at this, but anecdotally I am advised that the kinds of courses that would support people to sustain people with learning disabilities in the community that don't come to a qualification with action are critical in terms of people being able to achieve their full potential. Those courses are disproportionately disappearing. If you don't know, could you give me an assurance at least that you would look at this question so that you are not crudely getting rid of courses on the basis that they don't have a qualification, when in fact for some particular groups they are not just nice things to have, but they are very significant in terms of people being able to be supported. I can undertake it. We will meet and give you more detail on that, but the only courses that this was covered in the Audit Scotland report going back to 2009, the only ones where we applied a criteria of the length of the course for not funding them in the future were ones of less than 10 hours. They were very, very short courses, not the kind of course that you were talking about. Even if it was within 10 hours, I am asking is it reasonable to say what was that course doing and how was that enhancing somebody's skills, rather than a blanket, by definition, because it's under 10 hours? It is worthless. I don't think that that's particularly rigorous way of looking at what those courses are offering. I'm very happy to give you more information on the courses that we need to present the information to the committee around. I hope that that would be helpful. Thank you very much. Colin, then, Ross. I think that it's probably worthwhile, while we're looking at the doom and gloom in Audit Scotland's report, and I'm very conscious that we shouldn't be drifting into the Public Audit Committee's area. The report clearly says that the college sector has continued to exceed activity targets. There's also been a comment made about women being disproportionately impacted by the termination of the short-term courses, but the report here says that gender balance is now broadly equal overall, which seems laudable. The number of students going to a positive destination is at a record 82 per cent. That's got to be good. And also the overall percentage of full-time further education students completing their courses from 2009-10 has increased from 59 per cent to 2014-15 when it's 64 per cent. These are all very positive things that we need to look at as well. I would recognise that some students that are on very short-term courses, which have been described for 10 hours and so on, have probably lost out on that. We need to look at the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is whether the Government is actually successfully delivering the outcomes that its policy is intended to do, which it clearly appears to do. I think that we should be absolutely clear that Scotland has got a world-class education system that we should rightly be proud of, but I really wanted to come back to that 64 per cent successful completion figure, because that means that 36 per cent of students aren't completing their course. That's a third of students who are going to college. That's a third of our arguably most vulnerable learners coming from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. That's a huge number of students that aren't completing their course. I recognise that there are significant successes that we should rightly celebrate in Scotland's education system, but that figure—that 36 per cent of students not completing their course—isn't one of them. I agree with you. It would be wonderful if 100 per cent of the students completed their course. I think that the point that I was making is that there is improvement. You can argue that it's not enough improvement and that it should be going further, but there is improvement, so we should be noting that. I haven't seen an analysis of 36 per cent of whether that's students from disadvantaged backgrounds or whether it's a mix right across the community. I don't know that. It would be interesting to have that figure, actually. Our destination survey information will find out what's happened to those 36 per cent, because often it can just be that they've gone and got a job, which is not a negative outcome. Sorry. Colin has beaten me too many ways. I was wanting to look at the drop-out rate and what the rationale behind that would be. I suppose that tying a few things together has made quite a broad question in looking at the impact of college mergers and regionalisation, to find out more particularly from the college sector. We've found reports from the funding council, we've found reports from Audit Scotland, but what criteria do you think should be in place to firmly and robustly judge the success or not of the merger programme? Of just the merger programme. I'm at risk of repeating myself. I think that it's really difficult just to look at the merger programme. It took place at a time of massive change. I don't think that it would be easy to disentangle just the benefits of the merger programme, but if I was to focus on just the merger programme, I think that what we now have is a smaller number of colleges, some of them are off scale. I think that what that's enabled us to do is to act more cohesively as a sector and to also work more cohesively with employers. There are definitely benefits there. We are bigger players and we are more influential in community planning partnerships, for example, of which colleges don't neatly fit into the regional structures of community planning partnerships, but still they are big players. There have been benefits of the structural changes, and I suppose that what it has done is well. The mergers have brought together colleges to avoid duplication of some of the courses where colleges side by side and competing for the same students. There are definitely benefits there. As the merger evaluation reports that John John has already alluded to have shown savings on the pay bill of more than £50 million per annum. Ross, you were right to come in. I am going back to the drop-out figure and the third of students who don't complete taking on board John John's point that many of those students have found themselves in a positive destination. There is a significant number of course who are not. Summer months are really an acute problem for that. What is the next stage, in your view, in supporting students in that gap over summer? That is where the funding issue becomes most severe. I just wanted to clarify that, because I knew you had it written down somewhere. The 64 per cent of students who are passing their course is FE-level students. The retention and the successful completion for HE-level students in colleges is 71.3 per cent, so that is quite significantly higher. I think that there is probably something in that. In the US Scotland, it is very clear that the FE student support system, as it stands just now, is unfit for purpose. We have information that we have accrued through doing surveys to students about how students feel about applying to courses when they do not know what their income is likely to be. As an example, if you are a mature adult returner with children, you have to make the decision as to whether you are going to apply for a bursary or whether you are going to apply or whether you are going to remain on benefits if you are going to do an FE-level course, which can be really challenging to navigate if you do not know what your options are. Also, the current system for FE student support currently discriminates by age, rather than by level of study. As an example, if you are doing an FE-level course and you are aged up to 19, it is likely that you will be paid the EMA, the education maintenance allowance, of £30 a week, rather than the maintenance bursary, which is between £74 to £94 a week. That is not called just doing anything wrong. That is a limited cash sum of money that they have to allocate between all the FE-level students and using the EMA, rather than the bursary, as a way to make sure that that pot is stretched further and can support more students. Certainly, as far as the US Scotland is concerned, we have welcomed the Government's commitment to student support review. It is fair to say that if we were starting right now with student support system and we were designing a student support system, what we would design would look not very much like what we have just now. I think that we will be hopefully really involved in that and look forward to some really strong recommendations in the long term coming out, but certainly in interim as well to make sure that that funding gap for college funding for FE-level students is plugged. I took Professor Nolan's earlier point that it is difficult to plan when you are getting one-year funding and you have three-year or more extended lengths of financial planning within university. However, there is a budget about to come up. What pitch are you making when you share with the committee—not necessarily today but at some point in the autumn—what pitch are you making for funding? I presume that you are going to make it on a three-year basis and the justification behind that. In other words, why should we give universities more money given the financial constraints that the country faces? We appreciate the financial constraints and that we have had over a long period of time. What we believe about universities is that they hugely add to the prosperity of a country, to Scotland being fairer, wealthier and greener. All sectors argue that. Absolutely. In terms of the growth of the economy, we believe that that is fuelled by our graduates, by graduate-level skills and, in actual fact, investing in those and beyond. In master's level skills, that is really important. If you look around the world, that is what many developing economies are doing. Universities are playing in an international stage whether we have five universities in the world's top 200. It is not just those universities—we have a world-class system. My university is not in the world top 200, but I teach 6,000 students in Hong Kong, Singapore and India. We play on an international field and many countries envy the higher education system of Scotland. What we are pitching for is that we are sustainably funded. We have talked a lot about the Audit Scotland Colleges Report, which indicated clearly that the sustainability of the sector is not being addressed. Funding is a sustainable sector that will recover the cost of our teaching and research, while recognising that we are on difficult times. I want to ask two specific questions about funding. I start with research and innovation, notwithstanding Brexit and what I believe is a very difficult and worrying situation for university research. Can I ask you about the problems with the research excellence grant, which is causing some concern in that, as I understand it, that is being cut? That is something that, in terms of the balance of the indication that you obviously have to raise as much in research funding as you possibly can for exactly the reasons that you have just set out. Can you say a little bit more about the problem with the research excellence grant? The research excellence grant is part of our core funding that comes from the Scottish Funding Council, and John will probably say something in a minute. We use that to fund our facilities and various other generic research costs within our universities. It is there because the funding that we get from research councils, charities and European sources, they do not cover the full cost of research, and they are absolutely clear about that. That is the dual support system, which we live and breathe every day. It is a hugely important part of us being able to attract in. Scotland spent probably around £280 million invested through the reg in university research. Through that, we leveraged in up to three to four times that amount. We leveraged it in on the back of that money, so it is a very well-used investment. What has happened with the cuts that were sustained this year was that our teaching grant took more of a cut in 1617, and our research grant was flat cash, which was better than having a cut. In terms of competing internationally, research is not local any more. Whatever you are doing, research is international. The connectivity of scientists of problems and the societal challenges that we face here are the same as many communities around the world. It is pivotal that we invest in our research infrastructure and maintain that balance. To re-emphasise that point, there was no cut in research grant this year. The core research grant was kept at flat cash, except that, in the area of inflation, that is a real terms cut, but in cash terms it was preserved. Where there have been changes is that the distribution between institutions has changed as a result of their last research assessment exercise, which had a differential outcome. Some institutions did better. Quite a lot of institutions in Scotland did very well, and that meant that they took a bigger share of what was a same-sized pot, and that made some institutions didn't get as much money, but there's been no cut in the overall pot. Can I just put everything together this morning in terms of the funding aspect? Obviously, we're looking at a situation where the Scottish Government has decreed that 20 per cent of the intake of every Scottish university will come from disadvantaged backgrounds by 2030. On top of that, we have issues about research funding. Professor Nolan and Mr Kent this morning have flagged up the issue about the supply of places, and we have issues on top of that to do with Brexit settlement. Can I ask you a very important question? If we are to widen access successfully and not cause the difficulties that Johann Lamont spoke about earlier in squeezing out some other students because of the CAP system that you mentioned, we have to have a debate about finding more money for the sector. As I understand it, to do all that we want to do to deliver everything that the Scottish Government has set out, we have to have more places and we have to have more money. Can I ask you whether you think that that's a correct direction of travel, and to come back on Tavish Scott's question, to what extent will we have to increase the funding to have that sustainable future for what is a world-class university sector? Do you want me to go first? The targets for widening access are not for this year, in the future. The First Minister talked about a child born in 2014, so it's 2030 before we're done. There is time for us to, over time, make adjustments to funding levels in order to achieve that. There are a number of ways in which those targets can be met. Some of the ones that we've talked about this morning, about articulation and so on, mean that there isn't a linear expanding everything to exactly the same size. There are a number of ways of doing it. While I would agree that, in the long run, I'm the interim chief executive of a funding council for both colleges and universities, and in the spendering review, I want both colleges and universities to do well on that. I think that the big benefit that you get from an educated population at colleges and universities is what drives the economy. It's about the people and the innovation, but largely the people that come out of universities makes a difference. I'm not going to sit here and say exactly what the number is that we would want in the spendering review and what that should be over the next 15 or 20 years, but there are a number of ways of doing it that can equalise participation without necessarily expanding the system to the highest level that we have at the moment. Can you just expand on that, Mr Kemp? If we are to ensure that 20 per cent come from disadvantaged backgrounds and not have a disproportionate effect on existing students, surely by definition that means that there has to be more places? I don't think that I've denied that, but I'm saying that it's not a linear and that you need to expand it up to exactly the same kind with everyone doing six years at school and then getting five hours and going in to do a full four-year course. If we get the developing the young workforce work operating properly in different learner journeys, not everyone will take that route and, arguably, that we don't want 60 per cent of the population taking that route. The economy needs a variety of different people with higher education experience, and that's the importance of linking the developing the young workforce agenda with the whining access agenda. We need to produce an output from our universities and colleges, which is what the economy needs. Forgive me, but Johann Lamont made the point very eloquently earlier that we know of students who are extremely well qualified, who are finding it increasingly difficult to get into university, which is a good thing in terms of the competitive edge that universities have, but that is surely not a good thing for the Scottish economy's future. From our perspective, it is a conversation that it is a political choice about how you fund a higher education system. If we are to increase places around to hit the 20 per cent target without there being a change in demand and in a fixed cap system, there is only one obvious conclusion, which is that some people will be displaced. There may be other choices that are developed for those people. They may wish them, so demand may change, but that is the reality of where I see we are now. A key question for me is that we need to make sure that the teaching that we are doing and providing in that rich research environment in universities is properly funded. What I would be very sad to see is any erosion of the unit of resource for teaching. Our tuition fee has been static for six or seven years now, so there is a whole conversation that we have there across the education system about how we prioritise and what is right for Scotland. George, do you want to come in briefly? Thank you. I will indeed ask a question about funding, after all, just in terms of Brexit and all the debate taking place in the media and think pieces, et cetera, and evidence to various committees. What monitoring is taking place over the impact of Brexit on further and higher education at the moment in terms of your own responsibilities? Secondly, I have been hearing, but I do not have any evidence for this, that consortiums for research are being put together in Europe that are now missing out at UK institutions because of Brexit. Is that the case? Do you have any examples? Is that something that you are monitoring very closely? Yes, and we have heard those examples as well. The challenge at the moment is that we have heard anecdotally those examples of people putting together research proposals and people from British universities being less likely to be involved, but that is in advance of anyone knowing what the arrangements will be in the future. Some of that is in the realm of, quite difficult to guess, the full impact. There are a whole range of unanswered questions on Brexit, which nobody knows the answer to at the moment. We have been working to look at the potential impacts on Scottish universities and on Scotland colleges, because there are some courses and colleges that are funding through European money. There are implications for students from the rest of Europe who study in Scotland and what will the impact of that be, and what will the numbers be in the long run. There are impacts on potential research funding. In many of those, we do not know the answer yet. We know the potential impacts. We have looked at the amounts of money involved, and they are substantial, but we do not yet know when it will happen. We do not know what the rules will be on some of those European research funds, and we do not know the outcome for European students studying in Scotland. There are a number of unknowns. We are working closely with the Government and the sectors to try to reduce those unknowns, but they are still unknowns at the moment. Is it therefore your understanding that, at the moment, there are research proposals in BISB that have been put in place in Europe where European universities and institutions are excluding British institutions? I have heard anecdotally that from universities, yes. I have heard anecdotally that I do not have the evidence base of perhaps not quite as much as that, but where a UK or Scottish person was a lead now being put into being a co-applicant, because, well, just in case, we do not know what is going to happen. I think that I would agree with John the impact. I mean, who knows, and it is going to be some time, but a really important thing for us is where we can to give certainty to people. We really welcomed in our sector the speed at which the Scottish Government came out and said to clarify the situation on EU students, their fee status for 1617, and also the very reassuring messages that came out about how much we value EU staff marshals. I mean, I had many, many of my staff come and say to me, it was really good to hear that. I know we do not know the outcome, but at least we are appreciated and valued. But there is an area that we are trying to seek clarity on, which is around the EU students' fee status for 1718. My point about the long timescale is that our admissions opened yesterday for UCAS. In my prospectus, I have, as do all the universities, in their prospectuses that students are applying against, there will be the same fee status as for Scotland, i.e. EU students do not pay fees in Scotland. That is there now, and we in the universities are having real concern. Is that some kind of pre-contractual arrangement? Do we admit them? On what basis do we admit them? We are seeking an early resolution or an early statement about the status, not the long term, because clearly at some point we will be moving out. To help us plan and continue to attract students and to help us plan for the future, an early statement on the fee status of 1718 students. Our conservatory shuts most of its admissions off to be in early October and admissions from dentistry and veterinary medicine. That reassurance, where it is possible, not for a long term, to help us to transition, would be most welcome. If I can just pick up on that as well. It is similar to Professor Nolan in Yes Scotland. I am absolutely welcome to speed at which the Scottish Government came out with that assurance. One thing that we are not entirely clear on is what the assurance will be for students who do not perhaps follow the linear route of starting university in first year and doing a four-year degree. There may well be students from a new year background who are starting their educational journey in college, perhaps at an NC level, perhaps even below that, and whose journey through education, if they want to progress through to get to attain a degree, may actually be six or seven years, or perhaps longer. There is some clarity on what that guarantee will mean for students who are perhaps not taking that traditional route through education. We would be very much welcomed. The points that have been raised about impacting on the university sector apply equally to the college sector. It impacts on our funding, European funding, on our staff and on our students. Of the back of that question that Richard has just asked, we have talked about internationalisation, we have talked about attracting international students. We will all be aware that there is a post-study visa pilot happening at the moment and that Scottish universities were excluded from that pilot, as were Welsh universities and Northern Ireland's universities. I want to ask what effect that potentially has on disadvantaged, potentially Scottish universities on attracting international students. I also want to ask whether Scottish universities were asked to be consulted on that pilot, were they asked to put applications in to be part of that pilot, or was there any kind of consultation period at all in that decision by the UK Government? I was not aware of it. I heard it from a colleague when it was announced, I saw it in our press. I was not aware about it. I believe that universities were chosen on the basis of visa refusal, right? I am not quite sure, because I am not quite sure. I believe that it was on that basis, but it came as a shock to us. What impact do you think that that is going to have on you attracting international students? Given that it is only four universities, it is not clear to me what kind of impact it will have, and it is a quite limited trial. However, the broader issue of students and immigration policy is the one that is impacting on our ability to recruit and impacting hard. Over the past 10 years, the number of international students in Scottish universities has risen by about 50 per cent, but it has plateaued in the past four or five years, and that would be because of the tightening up of the visas. The numbers have absolutely plummeted on international fronts. It is down about 75 per cent, so although the numbers are relatively small, the proportional impact is massive. What impact does that have on your funding? Obviously, those are fee-paying students as well. The college sector is that we get our funding. We need to bring in other sources of funding, so anything that impacts on funding streams has a negative impact, so it is not good. As John said, we have been growing, but we have plateaued. We have seen some countries plummet. Students from India have dropped by more than half in the past three or four years because of changes. I would like to make it clear that we want good students to come. We really appreciated the post-study work and the fresh talent initiative that was here in Scotland. We believed that it benefits Scottish businesses, so we want students who are here by right. However, the future is going to be very challenging. The Audit Scotland report said, well, diversify your income streams. We are trying hard, and it is becoming increasingly difficult with the myriad of changes that occur to immigration policy on almost a monthly basis. I was partly covered off by the line of questioning regarding EU funding. Given that, just under 10 per cent of students in Scottish universities are known UK EU students, has there been any communication from the Scottish Government about the status of 17 or 18 applications? Am I right in my understanding that some universities are having to underwrite the funding for those themselves? What will be the potential impact of that? We have had discussion highlighting that we would like an early statement on the status so that we can plan, but we have not had an idea. What might be the consequences to Scottish universities if they are left covering those costs themselves? Obviously significant. We have our prospectus as approved now for the next round of recruiting, so that ability to plan is really challenging on this basis. It would be fair to say that universities are being left in limbo. We need a decision one way or another. Can I quickly ask you to round on some of the points about sustainability that you raised? Again, the Audit Scotland report highlighted very clearly that there has been an 8 per cent decline in real terms of the tuition fee paid to Scottish universities. Again, by 2016-17, there has been an 8 per cent cut in the teaching grant. Would you classify that as a sustainable level of funding? Obviously, it depends what happens in our discussions that are going on now about the year ahead. We appreciate the financially difficult environment, but for us it is about long-term sustainability. We are working with the Government to be a part of a short term fix, but we cannot go on with underfunding of the sector as it is. I have just got one final question for the panel. It is on the higher education and research bill. Could you tell us what you think the impact of the legislation will be for Scotland, including any risks for teaching or research? I think that there are two main areas of impact. One is on teaching quality and how that is measured. There is a proposal in the bill to set up a teaching excellence framework in England. A substantial number of students from the rest of the UK come to Scottish universities. Scottish universities will want comparability with the teaching excellence framework at some point. We have a separate quality system in Scotland that we intend to continue to have a separate quality system in Scotland, so the issue will be how you marry those two things together. Comparability with the teaching excellence framework in England with our quality enhancement framework in Scotland. There is work on going to do that. I was down in London yesterday giving evidence at the committee stage of the bill. There is work going on on that aspect of it, but we are quite clear that Scotland will continue to have a distinctive quality system. There are also implications on research funding for the creation of UKRI, which will merge some of Hefke's equivalent body in England's research funding with the research councils and create a body that has an England-specific role in the form of Hefke's funding. A UK-wide role in the research council funding is something that we want to make sure that Scottish universities are not disadvantaged in any way that that body operates properly as a UK body and that Scottish universities continue to receive what is fairly substantial amounts around £250 million a year from the research councils as part of a UK-wide body. I think that it is fair to say that NUS has got significant concerns, and I would be happy to submit the documentation that NUS has prepared and sent to Westminster for consideration if that would be useful to you. In regard to the teaching excellence framework, we have quite grave concerns that the metrics that are proposed do not align very well with the Scottish system and the students' partners approach that Scottish institutions have taken and developed very well. We have concerns about the office for students, which, as it stands just now, has no guaranteed student representation on its board, which to me means that the office for students is an oxymoron. There have been a number of amendments tabled to the bill, which seeks to address some of the major concerns that NUS has, but, as it stands right now, I think that gravely concerned is probably the position that I would say NUS, and that is not just NUS Scotland, but that is what NUS as an entirety has with regard to its proposals. I absolutely agree with John's points about the areas that will give us rise to concern and that we are working on around the TEF and also around the UKRI, the reconfiguration of the research landscape, to make sure that Scotland has a voice in that, a clear voice. How do we get the Scottish Government to be able to oversee this as well, because it is rather the Scottish Parliament, because at this stage it is only accountable to UKRIs and we are accountable to Westminster ministers? We have put in quite strongly that we would have representation on the board, and where we can, we have flagged this the whole time. It is not just Scotland, it is Wales and Northern Ireland. We are pushing hard our concern that, having research England in the middle of this, there needs to be a financial firewall between that and the research councils that fund a lot of our research. Scotland is hugely successful in accessing research council funding, far more than our share of population would determine. We have lobbied hard on that and we are trying to get the UKRI board to have our representation from Scotland. I do not have anything to contribute for that. Okay, thank you very much. In that case, can I just thank you all for your time and your very useful evidence. Thank you again. End of the first session, we will have a short break and then we will come back to the next session of witnesses. I think we will just start with the witnesses for panel 2. Thank you very much for your attendance. In front of us we have Mark Smith, the head of early career strategy standard life. Gareth Williams, head of policy, Scottish council for development and industry. Helen Martin, assistant secretary of the Scottish trade union congress and Gordon McGinnis, director of industry and enterprise networks, skilled development Scotland. I thank you for your attendance this morning. I kick off by asking a question about modern apprenticeships. If you do not mind, Mr Smith, I would like to ask you about some of the work that standard life are doing around the challenges and potential benefits of extending the number of apprenticeships and others can come in after. Okay, thank you. I mean, we've done a lot, I guess, in the early career space over the last three or four years. Apprenticeships, formal apprenticeships in the modern apprenticeship framework is probably the least volume aspect that we've done and most of our focus has been still on graduate but sort of early careers entry levels from school leavers as opposed to formal apprenticeships. We still do over 300 in the last five or six years. However, it's been quite an interesting shift in the last three years. The vast majority, almost 90 per cent of the actual modern apprenticeships that we've done have been done by those aged under 25. For a long time, the apprenticeship route was something that was available to existing staff members to further their career and their development as opposed to targeted specifically at entry level roles. We've done a lot. For us, the apprenticeship route has to be aligned to the skills we need as a business. If there is an apprenticeship available, which will enhance what we do, we will offer it. It's quite straightforward as that. We've been very pleased to work on the foundation level apprenticeship, speaking to Skills Development Scotland about graduate level apprenticeships. For us, if we can focus on those areas that are really of interest to us, we will be supportive. If that means taking more on, I'm delighted to do it. If that means that we reduce the number of graduates that we take to take more apprenticeships, that's something that we will look at, because it's about getting the right skills blend that we need to move forward. I'm very happy to look at any solution that takes our skillset forward. Why did you have the large increase in the type of apprentices you'll take? If we go back six years, we didn't employ anybody aged under 21 in the business. We're not going to be a sustainable business for another 200 years if we don't reach out to our communities and give young people first career opportunities. We started a school leaver programme. That was not tied to any skills training or any formal accreditation. It was just an opportunity to give a formal, structured work experience to young people who deserved it. He was more than talented, irrespective of background qualifications or anything else. It was driven by two things. One, the realisation that we didn't have these numbers and that was failure on many levels and a determination to do the right thing but also to build a skills base which would take us forward. That was the start point for us, literally less than half of 1 per cent aged under 25 going back to 2010. That was the driver, one school leaver programme and since then a refocus on trainee ships. Investment 2020 now comes into our investment operation. Apprenticeships, foundation and graduates. The suite of early careers programme has started from what we call, I would ever guarantee scheme, six months paid internship and now cuts right across the business. For us it's really important that we've got the skills to move the business forward. We've done the right thing. We've tried to connect with communities and try and be as diverse as we can in our employment practices from lots of different groups, various school leavers, ethnicity, whatever. We try and target groups wherever we can. It's exciting to see what we've done and I'm delighted to take the role now that looks to how we can join up our internal programmes from school leaver right the way through to postgraduate and how we internationalise the frameworks that we've established here, which is to be open and diverse. For us the prospects of having a business which is just ageing and not having the right requisite skills, that's just not building a sustainable business. Just one final question. What's the sustainability in terms of how many continue right through the programme or how many drop off? It depends on the programme. If I think about our school leaver, our guarantee scheme, 70 per cent stay employed with us at the end of their paid six months. We bring them in, given the living wage development programme. Just under 70 per cent stay with us and 28 per cent go on to other employment or higher education, so we only have two per cent who don't go into a positive destination. Our graduates, we've got over a 90 per cent retention rate, our apprentices, again it's at 90 per cent and we've got lots of anecdotes of people who've progressed from an apprenticeship or a trainee scheme and are still with us, so really high retention rates. A lot of the programmes are still quite young, so we've still got some time to see a lot of the benefits flying through the business, but it feels maybe real pride when you see someone who's been with us on a programme like career ready, for example, where they work with us, they're mentored by one of our staff for two years, they come and they get a paid internship in the summer, when they leave education they apply to our school leaver programme, then in that six months they then become a modern apprentice and now they're working towards professional qualifications and that's over the last five years and that to us has been the power of unlocking a latent talent stream which we just weren't tapping into 10 years ago, five years ago, we were just starting. The transformation of our age profile is extraordinary, to come back to that point earlier, half of 1 per cent aged under 25 at the start of last week that number was now at 7.3 per cent, so we've worked hard and we're pleased with what we've done but we also acknowledge that actually the potential internally now is massive that how we make sure that talent that we've recruited progresses and takes our business forward. I'd just like to go on to the other members of the panel and ask them again about the challenges and potential benefits and also the role of employers' third sector educational establishments in delivering apprenticeships, SDS, et cetera, as well. Mr McInneson, you go. Thanks very much and thanks for the invitation to come along this morning. What Mark outlines is really a model of what we've been encouraging many businesses to do to many companies to get out of the way of just recruiting and inducting young people into the business, private and public sector, so the promotion and development of the modern apprenticeship in whose Mark referenced the wider apprenticeship family, foundation and graduate apprenticeships is something that I'm very keen to promote further to businesses. Scotland has had a strong apprenticeship model, a stable policy environment for apprenticeships and I think that has been welcomed by employers. A commitment that all apprentices were employed and Volney quoted some statistics earlier on. Those are minimum level statistics so the apprenticeship rates are set as part of the national minimum wage at a UK level. Many employers in Scotland will pay significantly above that, particularly into the private sector and most private public sector employers will pay in the living wage in terms of their apprenticeships. Not all, but many are. Employers in the private sector recognise the need to compete for young people, so that influences their wage rates in some of the Scottish water. When you take into account the investment in training, it will cost them around £120,000 combining wages in their top-up training over and above what SDS gives them as a contribution to take a young person through their apprenticeship, so it's not an insignificant investment that they are making and the young person, but as Mark says, they are getting the right skills and the right fit for their business. We see the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, which was introduced and the Government officials will say that it has been imposed in Scotland and there are devolved nations by the UK Government as an opportunity to take that apprenticeship investment further. Skills Development Scotland has formed the Scottish Apprendiceship Advisory Board, chaired by our chairman, but has a large representation of senior business people, good gender balance, as well as I may add. From across the business community, it met for the second time yesterday in Glasgow, it got input around the quality and standards that we plan to undertake. It had engagement with further senior officials from the Scottish Government. Minister Jamie Hepburn met her employer engagement group two weeks ago and had a presentation from Foundation Apprenticeship Participants in Engineering. The discussion earlier on about vocational or academic routes had two young people there. From their experience through the Foundation Apprenticeship, one was targeting a university programme, another one was looking for the vocational route back into the workplace. It's an exciting time for us, a lot of work. We've got an extensive programme of engagement with many of the levy paying companies that will be in Scotland, trying to get them in the worst terms levy ready, making sure that they've got a good awareness of vocational routes. They can tap into the latent skills programme or skills talents that Mark referred to. It's an important time for us, but we've got good engagement both with the provider networks in the third sector, good engagement there, strong. There will be a Scottish Apprenticeship advisory board that will be supported by an employer engagement group, a standards and quality group, and a group that's going to specifically look at the quality-based issues. That's backed up by our current MA equality action plan as well. The modern apprenticeship programme is one of the skills programmes that our members report most positively on. We welcome the plans to increase the number of starts in this Parliament. That's based on their own experience but also on the evidence that there is internationally linking apprenticeships with higher productivity. We think that the Scottish model that emphasises quality is one that we need to protect and sustain rather than moving towards more of a volume approach. We welcome the comments that have been made by witnesses so far around diversity and looking at gender stereotyping in particular areas. That's one that we would endorse. We welcome the introduction of graduate-level apprenticeships and many of our employer members want to make that link between work and learning at those higher-level skills. We also welcome the introduction of foundation apprenticeships and we hope that, over time, those can be made available to children in every school, young people in every school. At the same time, we recognise that there are challenges, for example, within rural areas. The apprenticeship programme is not going to be suitable for all. It's going to be industry-led and we need to look for particular solutions in some areas, including rural areas. I echo a lot of what has been said by the other panel members. We are very supportive of the apprenticeship scheme in Scotland. As other people have said, it is very good quality and that is one of the key strengths about it. The fact that we have defended the status of apprenticeships as employed by employers and paid at a decent rate and unions argue for the living wage for apprenticeships and we achieve that in many instances. We have some concerns around some of the equality aspects of the apprenticeship system. There is still clear gender segregation between the frameworks, which SDS is doing a huge amount of work on. We are continuing to prioritise changing that profile and making sure that people get the right opportunity to work and that gender segregation is not maintained in our economy through the apprenticeship system. We are also concerned about the numbers of disabled workers who get access to apprentices. There are some quite simple things that we can do around supporting the trainers who deliver the frameworks and understanding how they make reasonable adjustments and how they would support a disabled student who could potentially help that in going forward. We are equally concerned about the numbers of BMA people taking up apprenticeships and we think that that is a game. More work could be focused on that. We are very supportive of graduate level apprenticeships. We think that that is a move in the right direction and we want to see those being used to bring people into high-level, sustainable careers and really good quality opportunities for workers. In terms of foundation apprenticeships, we are supportive of the concept of bringing people from schools into workplaces and we think that it was a good innovation in that respect. We have some concerns about the fact that a foundation apprenticeship is not employed and not paid, so it is a departure from the employed and paid status from the apprenticeship scheme. We can see some of the arguments that people are using for why that is the case, but we think that it is very important that it does not start to erode the employed and paid status in the wider apprenticeship scheme and that the young people who are in foundation apprenticeships are not being exploited within the workplace and that there has been a proper consideration of high foundation apprenticeships, link with apprenticeships and link with minimum wage requirements that come around the apprentice. As Gordon said earlier, that is employment law from Westminster that has a minimum wage rate for apprenticeships. Simply calling something on a foundation apprenticeship does not take away that need to pay the minimum wage. There are some practical issues there and it is very important that we design a skill system that supports young people into work and gives them access to really good quality opportunities and also just makes sense within the wider employment context. Liz, you have a couple of questions about the parents. Do you want to come in here? Right. Okay. Sorry. Joanne, would you like to come in and then go? It was specifically on this issue of equality of access. I know that disability organisations put a number on the level of involvement of people with disabilities in apprenticeships. I wonder if you can give us figures on that. Secondly, if I could ask SDS to what extent you are working with NUS on those issues and perhaps you could indicate what specifically you are doing around addressing the question of segregation, because I think that Helen Martin is absolutely right. The apprenticeships are in the danger of reinforcing on any quality that is already there, but what specifically have you done to respond to those disability groups who really highlighted the very, very low numbers of people with disabilities accessing apprenticeships? I will come back just so that I am rock solid in some of the statistics in terms of participation levels. What we have done in terms of our action plan, and we have done a lot of work over the last two years and I think that has been reflected, Helen, sits in our group, has worked with a number of representative groups, so BEMIS closed the gap in gender capability Scotland, Glasgow Disability Alliance and Glasgow Centre for Inclusive Learning are just some of them groups that I have worked with. We have targeted issues around disabled young people, gender balance related activity, the numbers of black and ethnic minorities that are within it, but also care leavers are an important group in terms of their equality of access to labour market. We have developed an action plan in conjunction with our partners, a five-year plan measurable with the smart targets attached to that. That is where we have received half a million pounds from government in terms of the investment programme to initiate those issues. There has been a lot of development projects with the specialist groups that have delivered it so that we can get learning, and it is Helen said to share that learning and understanding with and build capacity within our network of providers. A big focus on employers as well and trying to communicate more to them about the positive aspects and the abilities that disabled people have, rather than potentially the jaundice views about what they cannot do as opposed to what they can do. So I said a five-year programme that has touched on issues around areas like STEM related activity, big projects with an institute of physics and gender and others to drive that activity forward. One of the things that we have found around disabilities is about the disparity in terms of self declaration of when somebody is disabled and whether or not. There has been a tendency for individuals to withhold that information and perhaps not show that to employers or training providers when they are making applications. It is an important one because we have got resources that we can then deliver where we are having awareness that the young people are disabled to support them in the workplace. It is a key aspect for us, but it is working across partners to look at the definitions of disability as well and coming up with some agreed ones across the sector. Are you got the figures currently for the non-poval disabilities of access to apprentices? I will get them for you. I will have them back here. I am not creating a hierarchy of discrimination here. I recognise that there are particular issues around job segregation in terms of women and work, but are there specific things that disability organisations have highlighted to you around the very low figures? To what extent are you able to take that as a separate stream of work from a general issue around attitudes and equalities in terms of, you know, it cannot simply be the attitude of a young person or maybe not declaring, there must be fundamental things that are barriers. If the numbers, in my understanding, are very small. The numbers statistically are, and if somebody wants to pick up or come back with the detail of that for you. On the specific point about this, disabled people getting access to apprenticeships are disabled workers committee. I raised some issues around this very point in that they were hearing reports that one of the big barriers for disabled workers was that the tree and provider themselves did not have enough understanding of disability equality and how to make reasonable adjustments to support the young person through the entire scheme. It was not so much the employer that was the problem. It was the tree and provider's understanding of how you would make a reasonable adjustment that was caused by a barrier that, in some ways, is extremely worrying, because that should not be happening within the system. However, the other element of that is that, because those tree and providers are commissioned by SDS, in some ways, there is quite a simple institutional fix in that you can insist on better understanding and outcomes for disabled workers within the contract, whereas the impact that you can have an employer sometimes is more challenging. In some ways, if that is what is happening within the system, there should be things that we should be able to do this year and next year that correct that issue. In terms of its significance, we already know, for example, people with visual impairments, phenomenal numbers of people who are unable to access work, and then we have a debate about the extent to which support people with disabilities in terms of the benefit system, which is really, really important. However, the other bit of it is that there are things that are happening in the system that are actively stopping people working. In terms of it being a priority for the work of SDS, it is to really understand that we ought not to be having trainers who do not get this, but the broader significance of it in terms of the potential of people with disabilities to work is not just about fairness within apprenticeships, it is a broader fairness about the world of work itself. I do not disagree. The work that we had undertaken in around the 14-15 starts for modern apprenticeships, only 0.41 per cent had actually self-declared in terms of having a disability within the programme. We undertook an exercise with our training providers and those numbers increased to 3 per cent in terms of understanding that negotiation with the young people in the programme. When we went back and analysed their school records, then if you look at equal cohorts, then something in the region of 12.5 per cent had been accorded as having disabilities. We do have a range of measures that target the young people, employers and those within the education system, particularly at that transition period. We have a data hub structure, which is a shared record system, with all the education institutions in terms of schools, colleges and DWP, ourselves and SAS. It is using that type of big data in terms of analysing and understanding who the young people are in the system and then getting career coaches and careers advisers working with them and then linking them into training organisations to try and pull more young people with disabilities through into the training system. We have targets and I will send you a copy of a five-year action plan. We are more than happy to come back with some of the specialist people in our team and sit down and have a more detailed session. We have a published five-year action plan and it is a real focus for our work and with our training organisations as well and the targets within that. With respect, those targets are not working. Would you look at the consideration of quotas? That is that we are going to identify a certain amount of money that you have got funded to deal with apprenticeship, which will only go to people with disabilities. We have a number of incentives already, which are target-driven in terms of wage incentives and incentives to help young people into the workplace, so those targets exist and will be measured against those. Is ring fence part of your budget today? Yes, that is already there. May I ask about the apprenticeship levy? My feedback from businesses is that I very much hope that this is an additional source of income and secondly that it correctly dovetails with lots of the other programmes that are already happening. Can I ask you what your feeling is? I think that the Scottish Government, UK Government, are consulting about how that money should be allocated just now. Could you give us your views on what you think a good allocation would be, not in terms of the amount but in terms of how it should be done? Secondly, I notice that the Scottish Government has made the comment that it is possible that this undermines the Scottish aspect, the discrete Scottish aspect of apprenticeships. Can you comment on that? There are two questions there. I will pick up. From our perspective, I have met Mr Hepburn a few times, Jamie Hepburn Minister, in relation to business consultation. There has been a significant consultation at the Scottish Government level, and I think that that has been appreciated by individual organisations and by the business representation organisations like CBI. There is a frustration at the Government level about the lack of detail about how funds will come to Scotland. There is a ring fence to the part of Barnett formula. The Scottish Government has consulted the consultation exercise closed last week. It prompted six questions, and those were around a broad layer as the Government's ambition of 30,000 mAs by 2020 around the right level. There should be more, there should be less. Should foundation and apprenticeships potentially be part of the levy system? A question there around more flexible use of the levy in terms of workplace training and support outwith the apprenticeship programme, and a question around should some of the funds be used to support young people into work around employability programmes. I have not had the outputs from that exercise. Some of the concerns that we have had from employers who have a cross-border operation north and south are concerned, and they want a programme of activity that is not too dissimilar north and south to the border. You asked about the English system, so England has set a target of 3 million apprentices over the course of the UK Parliament. If Scotland were to follow that, percentage would be something like 60,000 mAs, and I think I got a feel from that. Is that simply to many? It's going to chase in numbers. We have an expansion plan to take it to 30,000 mAs by 2020, and that's undertaking a fair amount of work with industry bodies, looking at sectors within a regional basis. Engineering, for example, where we can identify clusters of engineering companies, but the percentage of apprentices in that area are lower than we would anticipate, so very much a targeted marketing campaign. I then know of the back of things such as foundation apprenticeships. Would you have a growth programme as well that would complement that? I don't know if I'm fully answering your question, but there's a lack of detail at present. I think that the UK Government had said that a pound in meant a pound out in terms of an employer. Some fairly complex structures are peering in terms of if a live repair was going to use that within a supply chain. I think that it comes across potentially as fairly bureaucratic. What's your understanding about the timescale for a decision being made about the allocation? You'd be best, I would imagine, to ask a Government official in terms of timescales. The consultation exercise has been concluded. I understand that the announcements will be made around November time, but that will be for the minister to decide. First and foremost, it's good to hear the widespread recognition and the importance of apprenticeships. Certainly, last week, the committee visited Stirling community enterprise, which I think has demonstrated for Fulton and myself that the power that apprenticeships can do in terms of delivering opportunities. Despite all the good work that's gone on in Scotland, I think that there were only eight months away from the apprenticeship levy coming in. Could I maybe suggest that Mr McInnes should be slightly diplomatic in your language about the reaction from employers? I think that, certainly over the summer, I've heard things such as saying that there needs to be clarity and that there's serious risks. Those are some of the things that employers are saying to me. Are we ready for the apprenticeship levy? If not, what has to happen to make sure that we are ready? I think that the Government ministers themselves would express a degree of frustration about the amount of detail that is available from a UK level. On top of that, I think that there's been a number of changes made to the UK commission for employment and skills, which undermines actual support structures around things like national occupational standards, for example, which have greater importance in Scotland because much of the SQA's portfolio, for example, is built on national occupational standards and these were structures that were designed at UK level. Colleagues have been taking some actions to address this. For businesses, if you're an engineering company and you're going to make a commitment, then that's a four-year commitment that you're making to a young person to take them through their apprenticeship. There are issues there in terms of what that future financial landscape will look like. It's not within our control at this stage. It would not appear to be in the control of the Scottish ministers in terms of waiting for information from the UK. Can I maybe put the same point to Mr Smith, Mr Williams and Mr Martin, just in the sense that Mr Williams is sitting in the middle and waiting for things to happen? What's your feeling about the risks and opportunities from the apprenticeship level and what needs to happen between now and April? The majority of our members would be not opposed to the principle of an apprenticeship level and the biggest concern has been around the lack of clarity. That's principally been at a UK level and I think there's a degree of sympathy with the Scottish Government's position. That said, the Scottish Government did earlier this year go round and speak to a couple of hundred businesses and the output of that certainly wasn't clear within the consultation that was then issued over the summer, with a very short time for businesses to respond. That obviously is another concern. Gordon has already highlighted some of the issues, the concern about the Scottish model, how the funding will come back to Scotland and back to businesses, the cross-border issues for businesses, the impact on existing levees such as the CITB levee and the future of industry support for those to continue, concerns around the thresholds and whether those will be linked to inflation or changed if there is continuing pressures on public sector budgets, bringing a lot more businesses into the system. Obviously, we've been picking up issues in specific sectors such as the public sector and sectors of the economy that have different models of training such as the legal sector. Those businesses that perhaps place a lot of temporary workers in other businesses and therefore wouldn't necessarily offer their own training schemes. Those businesses that perhaps have fluctuations in their work, fluctuations in their workforce as well, and the point of the year that those calculations would be made and might draw some of those businesses into the system and there would have to be ways of addressing that. I go back to the lack of clarity as the overriding concern. There is going to be significant money. We understand coming to Scotland and as has been said already, businesses want to be able to have a strong voice in how that is spent and they want to see strong evidence of additionality in relation to the plans that were already in place. From our point of view, we see the levy as a tremendous opportunity. We are very supportive of the introduction of the levy because it is important that employers take a strong role in providing skills within their own workplaces. We think that that is something that has maybe been lacking to a certain extent in the past. What the levy is doing already is increasing the interest of employers in getting involved in training and skills policy and having a strong voice in how that money might be spent. We think that it is a really good opportunity to put in some proper infrastructure around the training and skills environment, as envisaged by the wood review. The SAB, the Scottish Advisory for Apprenticeship Board, will be absolutely crucial going forward and it will be an opportunity for employers and unions to sit together and to talk about what apprenticeships should look like and what the numbers should be in different sectors and how that should work. Previously, there was not really an opportunity to do that because it just was not getting the same level of buy-in from individual employers, whereas now there is a high level of interest. There is potentially some dangers within the system about whether that will just suck up the training budget of employers and just means that suddenly apprenticeships become the only thing for training and lifelong learning available to employees. We think that we really have to guard against that within the system because it can't be the only thing that we do to train people. There has to be a good range of options for a range of workers in a range of circumstances. Whether you fund that all from the levy or whether you fund the levy does a distinct thing and then there is other money drawn down for lifelong learning or for other training or employers are expected to do that in addition. That is all up for discussion. A lot of where you would draw the lines is about what is the level of funding that we receive from Westminster. Until that question is answered in terms of the level of funding, it is very difficult to understand how much the levy is going to provide in your education and training system as a whole, whether it is going to stretch to foundation apprenticeships, whether it is going to stretch out for unemployed workers, whether it is going to stretch to the workplace as a whole. All of that is dependent on how much money is actually within the system, but we do know when we are clear that we need a training and skills system that can do all of those things and fits together nicely and the levy has to play a role in that. In an ideal world, we will be able to meet that challenge and we will be able to maintain the best aspects of the Scottish system, which is the quality of the apprenticeships, the employed and paid status, the employer and union involvement and the industry standards that underpin all the training. However, there are quite serious technical issues that need to be resolved within this, going forward as well. Clarity would be nice because the sooner that we know, the sooner we can make some plans and some provision. We know how much it is going to cost us, so we know that there is a cash amount that will go out. We also know that we are not going to be able to reclaim a great deal of that. It is going to go and hopefully it will go and it will feed necessary skills, development and evolution. That is okay. We are comfortable with that. In principle, it is a very, very good thing. We are cautious of chasing volume. Let us go for a target and let us have X number of tens or hundreds of thousands of apprenticeships. If they are into spaces that are not needed and they are not making the demands of business and employers, what are we actually training and preparing our young people for if they are not for real jobs with decent wages at the end of it? For us, nobody wants to pay the same money twice. We are already investing a lot of stuff in pre-employment. We are investing in our own trainees and graduates. That is because we need those skills as a business and we get that. My fear is that another part of the fiscal process says that we are paying this money every year while we are paying for these trainees and interns because the money is going out in this levy, so we need to justify why we spend it. Currently, we have very strong business cases to why we spend the money on what we do and bringing our young people in. Long may that continue. There is a lot of detail. We would like some clarity. I am looking at how we can align our internal programmes to an apprenticeship framework that is here in Scotland and also in England. The majority of our training and development and recruitment is still here. That is going to continue, so we need to align it to what is available in Scotland. For us, the greatest flexibility that we can get through these levy funds would be ideal. We would love to get back in. Every pound that goes in, we would like to get out. I do not think that we are going to see that, but the maximum flexibility as to how we can claim those funds would be great. I will ask finally a very specific question. I think that there are a lot of different aspects that need to be clarified and looked at, but I think that one of them is age. For me, the skills system is absolutely right that we make sure that our young people have the right skills for the world of work. However, as we are seeing in the north-east, big economic changes can happen, and I come from the retail industry, which has seen huge technological change. Is there an issue here that if we over-focus the levy but also the wider skills system on younger people, that we fail to build a system that can cope with those economic changes and the reskilling that we need to do in the future? I think that that is absolutely right. We have done a lot of work supporting veterans into the workplace. The focus on early careers is not necessarily a young early career, but it could be somebody returning to the workplace, for example, a parent, a carer. That, to us, is about tapping into the necessary skills. We do not want to put a cap on who we work with and where we draw our talent from. We have seen people coming out of the forces with amazing technical capabilities that we need. Our investment 2020 programme has taken in people who have spent 12 years raising children and rejoined the workforce. Having the right skills and the training capability to maximise those people's potential is important. The age thing for us, the focus has been on youth, but it is by no means the only focus. Thank you, convener. A few questions, but maybe I could just follow on on this one. Are you saying, Mark Smith, that when it is announced as to how this is going to happen, you are going to lose X amount of money into this system and it comes back to Scotland. You want the Scottish Government to put all of that into training and skills, but in a way not just into the narrow measure of modern apprenticeships. Is that taking you right? That would be our preferred outcome. My understanding of the English system is that it is a digital voucher, whereas it is run through PAYE, so you see how much is going out every month and you can claim, I think, on a monthly basis. I might not be technically correct. Something that allows us the maximum flexibility to claim for the training of our people would be a good thing. Gareth Williams, as an industry representative, has had a fair perspective of Scottish business in terms of how they would like to maximise what goes in and what they get out of it? I think that that is fair. There is a recognition that not all businesses are going to be able to get everything out, but they still want to be able to have an influence on how that money is spent to maximum benefit. I thought that you made some interesting points last about the potential conflict if the policy is very narrowly faced as it currently is south of the border, or could be south of the border, so again, the clarity is not there yet. I was asking earlier on about developing certainty on workforce. Does there seem to me that just straight up a clash between having a very narrow focus, which, as Mark Smith just reflected, takes a lot of money out of his business if it is just on one and would not allow us to continue to develop, for example, developing certainty on workforce? Is that fair observation? Yes, I think that it depends on how you design the system. I think that that is one of the challenges that we have here, is how we make this a line with the other skills policy requirements that we have within Scotland. On the other hand, there is also the opposite challenge, as well, about if we design the scheme too broadly and you are allowed to do pretty much anything with the money, then does that undermine the entire concept of an apprenticeship? We have been very tight in Scotland about what we consider an apprenticeship and it has been based on industry standards and it has been very tightly designed, whereas in England that concept is already much much looser. It is not beyond our ability, I think, to marry all of these things together, but I do think that we have to recognise the fact that there are going to be tensions within the system and there are principles that we are trying to defend, as well as trying to design a system that actually does work for the Scottish economy. I think that it is also an opportunity to really get into this idea of creating an infrastructure that allows us to think about what we need for the Scottish economy as well and to get away from an arbitrary target-driven process that is about a sort of top-down policy lever, because we will finally have employers and unions around a table together who can sit and talk about skills needs and skills development and design solutions and pipelines that work with sector by sector, rather than necessarily always having them to be driven from that kind of outside government. None of you are arguing that we need to reinvent the whole wheel again, are we? The last thing I think we need to do is rip the whole loss up and start again, just because there is a new thing called the apprentice lever. I think that still think that developing Scotland's young workforce is a great programme, we should be doing an awful lot more of it, but is your collective view, I'm sure SDS takes this view as well, that we don't reinvent it all, but if we're going to have some new monies by all means concentrate those on the programmes that are working effectively? Yeah, yeah, fine. Okay, I wanted to ask about the skills review. There's an STDI submission that we've seen sight of, Gareth, and it says in it that there is some duplication and confusion among others and some interventions lack scale. There's a line in your submission about the skills review that you've kindly provided to the committee. Can you just talk to that line? I mean, what is the duplication and confusion among users that your members are concerned about? Yeah, I think it's widely recognised that the skills landscape is cluttered as you'll seen in our submission to the committee. We're most directly involved in the STEM area, and when you start to map out all the interventions in that particular area, you can't fit them on a side of A4, nowhere near that. I think that's replicated in other areas as well. A lot of the work that's going on is very good, and we wouldn't want to denigrate that in any way, but it does become more of a challenge for employers to navigate their way in and for those initiatives to achieve a scale and a national reach, and an input from employers that we all know from the work that the Weed Commission has done is essential. Another example would be in the digital area, which is obviously a very high priority, but there are a number of initiatives in that area that are specifically aimed at tourism businesses, for example, or on which tourism businesses can draw, and they all would appear to be struggling to achieve their aims because of that confusion. We think that there are a lot of positive things in the system. I mentioned apprenticeships, the work that SDS does on digital, and my work, for example, are all widely appreciated. Why is there confusion there? Those bodies that the schools of you are looking at are all Government bodies. Presum that the minister or all the civil servants who are sponsoring those bodies are responsible for making sure that there isn't confusion and there is clarity? It is important to note that our comments on our submission are not just reflecting the number of Government bodies, not just those four agencies that are specifically referenced within the review, albeit that there are issues between those bodies. We would always want to see a no-wrong-door approach applied across all those bodies. The reference that I was making was more to the wider interventions that take place from public, private sectors and so on, and the need for greater clarity across those bodies, not necessarily reducing them all to one, but at least making it easier for employers. As an employer, Mark Smith, do you have a view on this? The landscape is very cluttered. I sit on the board for the developing young workforce for Edinburgh, Midlothian and Eastlothian. One of the ambitions is that you take a strategic view of that landscape and you say, how do you cut through some of the noise to connect employers who want to do something with schools and colleges that want you to do something with them? In essence, that is a very simple, very noble ambition, but in practice it is that there is a law for a lot of noise. I maintain from colleagues that I am involved in that most employers are doing something, but we do not have a strategic view on whether they are doing the right things. Are they connecting the right skills gaps? Are they playing the right interventions with schools and colleges that are needed? Do schools know what provision is out there? Do we have a sense of what the gold standard interventions are that are available to all the skill sets and age groups? We should do, but we do not. Absolutely, it is crowded, it is cluttered, there is a lot of good intention, but I guess the fear with DYW and city deals and are we just adding more and more complexity and more and more layers that make it harder for employers and schools and young people to connect? We do a number of things under our own steam, because that is something that we feel passionately about. We would always try and offer the provision that we make available to all schools. We do not want to have one relationship with one school, for example, because we want everyone to have that opportunity. It is not easy. How would you simplify it? What would be your point about Edinburgh, because that is where you are a major employer? I am not expecting you to solve Scotland's problems, but in Edinburgh, what would you do? What has just launched recently is a tool called Marketplace. This is an invitation for every employer to list their offer, their proposition, if you like. That is a space that joins educational employers, so schools and colleges can access that and see what is available and draw it down and make the connection. The nice thing—I am pleased that we try and work in partnership—we took the bid from SDS to work with them to build a platform so that we do not end up building a platform that is only good for one part of the country. It can be replicated across the whole of Scotland because it is a good piece of software. That is just one aspect. I think that there is a danger that you make it too complicated. You want a forum where young people and employers can connect. That might be digital and it might be real. We have worked with the Prince's Trust on a concept called Get Hired, which our charitable trust has funded. It is very straightforward. The Prince's Trust finds disengaged young people. They work with them and they help them to get job ready. In the morning of each Get Hired day, they do skill sessions with volunteers on CVs and interviews. In the afternoon, real employers come into that environment and interview them for a real job there and then. They have broken an introduction between talented young people who maybe have not been formally recognised as having that talent and employers. A physical environment where young people and employers can come together on neutral ground cannot be hard to engineer. Can I ask Gordon McGinnis? Presumably, you would accept that there are different ways to do this in different parts of the country because Edinburgh's circumstances with major employers like Standard Life would be very different from some of the rural areas that some of the rest of us represent, with a combination of both bigger oil companies and very small engineering companies. Is SDS's approach to reflect that? I think that developing software and young workforce is a good example of where I know your different partnership balls in different parts of the country are doing different things because that has to reflect the circumstances at the same time as trying to declap or get rid of the noise, I think, as Mark Smith elegantly puts it. Yes, I think, and I was going to reference the development of marketplace because it's a danger that we're going to end up with multiple employer-facing websites. So we've done good work with Mark and the team at the Edinburgh DYW group, and we're working hard across the National DYW group with Royal Bedwards and others to adopt the marketplace system as the kind of national model which can be adapted to a local level. So we've got a larger employer like Arnold Clark with multiple locations, for example a Scottish Water, to identify the areas and geographical locations that they can play into. The wider cluttered landscape is a mix of charities, initiatives, local activities, probably most congested in the STEM area, and we've started a piece of work with Scottish Government to produce a co-ordinated STEM strategy across the education system. We're finding that colleges were rightly having a focus in STEM but coming up with a strategy which potentially didn't sit comfortably with, say, a local education authority. So the more cohesion you can bring into systems at a strategic level and importantly get a strong link into the curriculum, into the learning outcomes that are designed, so design initiatives that fit and work with lesson plans as opposed to a new initiative which sits out with the curriculum is key. Locality is important and I sit on the UHI FE regional board so I'm familiar with many of the challenges that the Highlands and Islands place, particularly on the larger employers in their area because they're seen as the go-to businesses and I think we need to be creative in terms of using some digital content which would do some of the basic stuff in terms of things like interview skills and that type of activity and just be UHI I think, use technology far more effectively than many of the other regional colleges through necessity. So I think it's one to work at the regions in terms of the Highlands and Islands are probably a bit more work to be done at a national level in terms of the DIY group but we're working working with them on that. Final question, if I may convene, when Ian Wood published his report in June of 2014, his challenge was that less than 30% of Scottish businesses have any contact of any kind with education and only 27% of employers offer work experience opportunities, so have those numbers got better in the last couple of years? They are, I think they are getting better in DIY groups, I'm thinking of Ayrshire in particular, a very aggressive campaign with local employers that have had a history there of co-ordinated work experience at a school level but I think it's one that more employers have become aware of, we have tried to co-ordinate activities through some of our sectoral work, through the industry leadership groups with groups that Scotland Food and Drink and others and provide a co-ordinated so you're getting a better quality of engagement and a more consistent approach at a national level but that can be applied at a local level as well. Thank you, convener. Very much following on from Tavish's theme of questioning, in the previous session we're looking at further in our education. I asked Shona Struthers round about the regionalisation and the merger of colleges and what she would place down as a criteria for judgment success. She'd said that she's seen greater co-operation between businesses, employers and colleges. Since the merger programme, has that been your experience and have you found that greater co-operation compared to before? I just want to get a sense of how the changes impacted the relationship and the co-operation that you have with colleges across the country. To be honest, my insight into that is limited. We've had good relationship with Edinburgh College, especially around the formation of a foundation apprenticeship and their role in shaping developing the young workforce. There's a key partner in that regionally here. My experience and my interaction so far has been a positive one. That's really all I can say about it. We've engaged and it's worked well. I don't really have anything to benchmark it against as to what went before, to be perfectly honest. It's important to recognise that some of the colleges had very strong links with employers prior to the changes. Some of those were set up on more of a regional basis. We think that progress has been variable. Some of the college regions, for example Ayrshire, certainly have stepped up and are forging closer links. Some of that is related to the development of city-region partnerships or regional partnerships as well. There have been other areas where progress has been a bit slower and, hopefully, that will become more evident soon. I think that, in principle, it's a good move. It should offer greater clarity for relationships between schools, colleges and employers. Potentially, we would like to see universities plugged more into that as well so that, while relationships might be diverse, at least every school would know their college that they would draw on for mutual support and endeavour, similar with universities, and that employers would be clear as well on those relationships on a regional basis. I think that we might have a slightly different perspective on that. I don't think that it's fair to say that things are improving in terms of relationships with colleges from a kind of workplace level, not so much an employer level. For workers who are trying to undertake learning, the opportunities to do so at colleges are much reduced in terms of there's much less part-time provision, there's much less night courses, there's much less community learning, even our own learning project, which commission work. We commission different learning courses that are designed by the needs of workers. We'll decide whether we want to do a sign language course or whether we want to do a specific workplace-y kind of skills course and we'll design what the course looks like and then we'll tender it out. The number of colleges in a position to respond to those tenders even has gone down, so that's like commercial work really. It's because there is much more of a focus on full-time learning for 18 to 24-year-olds than there is on sort of lifelong learning and flexible learning for workers within the workplace. In terms of links with employers, I know that we have had very good links in the past and through Scottish Union learning again we've done quite a lot of skills pipeline development in specific areas, I'm thinking for example of the bread industry. There was a number of bakers in one area of Scotland and we designed a sort of skills pathway for a particular level of baker who was in very short supply at that point and we did that in partnership with the college. The role of the college in the skills pipeline is absolutely essential. We have the impression that the merger process was very disruptive to that role and it's now about trying to really build back up those kind of relationships but I think there are some issues still about how the mergers are bent in and how staff time can be used at the minute. I think that there are potentially still quite a few issues in Scotland in the college sector. Thanks. I think that as Gareth said, some colleges had a strong relationship with local employers. I'm on the board of Clyde College now, one of its initial colleges was Cardonaud and a long history of industrial partnership, particularly into gas, water projects, that type of thing, so there was a legacy there. It's early I think in terms of regionalisation, everybody just thinks that it happens and everything's fixed. There's a process of bedding in. You've touched on, colleagues touched on Ayrshire College and bringing two and a half colleges together on a strong relationship across that Ayrshire region with much more engagement with industry to help shape provisioning curriculum. SDS and John Kemp mentioned earlier that we produce evidence bases that are around regional skill assessments and that's a detailed analysis of the demographic profile of the region economic conditions within it that's informed through Scottish Enterprise. That's from the funding council that's supplemented by the what we'll do around sectoral development plans of which we'll get 10. Those will be cornerstones for the regional colleges to plan their regional outcome agreements on. I think through that planning process, if I look at Dumfries and Galloway, they used the early outputs from that to just adjust the provision, their engineering provision, they grew, but they also grew the technicality of that to a higher level which was what local businesses were needing. They didn't abandon hairdressing and beauty altogether, but there are just numbers a little so they get a better spread of their activities and they deepened their engagement around vocational experience and modern apprenticeships within the region. That was done through conversations from the senior management team, Carol Turnbull, through their board. That's what we're looking for, is to use that evidence base to get a better picture of what your curriculum plan would be like for the area. If I look at Glasgow, we've been doing work with local authorities within the city deal region and also the Glasgow regional board, the three large colleges within that. There was nine colleges in Glasgow before, so they never actually planned a curriculum across the city centre in the way that they now can, and they're making good use of the evidence base that we've done. The positive developments in terms of planning, what Helen describes, I suppose, is pressure on the system in terms of the fluidity of their budgets. Joanne made the point earlier on around women returners programmes, that type of thing. It's getting the evidence base from that type of thing and proving that it's worth, that that's something that's worth investing in. Too often, the colleges didn't capture what the outputs and outcomes from that type of activity was. It's slightly tangentially to Ross's point. The workers who often don't have access to further educational opportunities or are passed over for skills training and development tend to be those in the most precarious forms of employment, zero-hours contracts, temporary work etc. How do we ensure that we're not creating a vicious circle for these people where other workers are passing them by because these opportunities simply aren't available to them? Would they pick up? That's a good question. There's issues around digital exclusion there, literacy and numeracy. It's still a big issue for us, and I think impacts in terms of local authority budgets, in terms of what happens through community education, which would have been the traditional portal for people to enter the system. Your visit to Stirling would have been that into that type of venue. That's the areas where provision has actually fallen back, I believe, fairly significantly. We've been doing some work around literacy and numeracy levels, so the issues and priority being placed around closing the attainment gap is fine to put a strong focus on the schools. If kids go home in the evening and their parents can't either help them with their homework to a sufficient standard or they struggle themselves with literacy and numeracy, I think there needs to be a broader recognition of those basic skills for employment. Some days, 25 in the workplace and struggles with literacy and numeracy, they could potentially be there for another 40 years. So I think whether we can use digital technology more effectively to support that, but I think that would be an area where we should look and apply some scrutiny. I was going to say that we feel extremely strongly about the STC, as you might imagine. The prevalence of precarious work is increasing within our economy, and it is a real problem that we are creating a two-tier workforce. We have groups of workers who are in precarious contracts, be they agency workers, euro or contracts, umbrella contracts, a whole range of things that are designed to keep you by design in a precarious situation, to mean that the employer can use your labour at their will and that they don't have to worry about paying your sick pay, they don't have to train you, they don't have to bring you through into the workplace proper in a way that you would really want to see. We just think that this is, frankly, unacceptable, and we think that there has to be a policy focus on precarious work, and there has to be an expectation that employers do not keep people in precarious work for years and years and years, and they just are excluded from training opportunities, they are excluded from apprenticeships offered under the apprenticeship levy, for example. We have to ensure that workers in those contracts are either being, we seek to move them off those contracts or we are giving people proper skills pathways into other forms of work. Employers will often say that those are good contracts that they provide flexibility, but I actually think that there are better ways to provide flexibility within our labour market than to keep people in a position where they don't know if they're going to be able to pay their mortgage from one end of the month to the next. We also find that there are big equality dimensions to that as well. BMA workers are clustered in precarious grades, female workers are clustered in precarious grades, young workers are clustered in precarious grades, and it isn't actually the case that these workers necessarily have skills shortages. They can be graduates, they can be very highly skilled people who just, this is the work that they've got into and it is extremely difficult to get back out again, and I think that that is a structural problem in our labour market that we have to focus on. Is there a significant difference in how easy employers make it to organise and unionise these workers compared to other workers in more secure kinds of employment? It is much more challenging to organise a precarious workforce, but it is something that we have a big focus on at the minute. I don't know if you've seen our better-than-zero campaign. The difficulty really is that, if you try to advocate in the usual way for these workers, they are so precarious that they simply don't get taken back. There is no dismissal as such, they no longer receive hours because they are unionised and they are causing problems in the workplace. You can stop receiving hours because you take your child to the doctor one day, so becoming a union rep is not really an option. Therefore, it is very difficult for the union to organise in a traditional way, which is why we are using leveraged campaigns to organise for vulnerable workers, which is essentially about direct action rather than traditional forms of organisation. As we have seen with sports direct this week, which started as a leveraged campaign from Unite, that can have quite dramatic impacts on how workers are treated in the workplace. However, I think that it is important that we start to see precariousness at work for what it is, which is a form of exploitation, and that we start to ensure that people who are in these grades get opportunities to improve their skills and get opportunities to move through into the workplace. Those are contracts that are increasingly being used in the public sector. They are being used in the NHS, they are being used in universities. That is becoming more and more legitimate as a form of work. It is important that those workers are not being carved out of our skills agenda and that we are seeing ways of bringing people into a better situation. From our point of view, we do not have zero-hours contracts, we are a living wage employer, we are a living wage friendly funder from our charitable staff. To us, we believe passionately in real jobs, real wages, and we do that, but we do it through our supply chain. Obviously, there is a problem. When we started getting involved in this work five or six years ago, it was easy carving opportunities for school leavers. I will share this anecdote. When I was asked to take it over, I went up to our seventh floor and there were rows and rows of desks in these 16, 17-year-olds in exam conditions. I turned to the woman who was running the programme and I said, what are we doing? They are doing their aptitude test and whatever. I said, we know they are no good at maths. We have already seen what we are learning that is new, so we stopped that. I am not an HR professional, but I instinctively knew that that was putting additional barriers in the way of people accessing genuine opportunities with us. Then we turned off minimum qualification attainment for school leavers. If someone has got the ability and they want to work with us, do I care if they have one hire? If they are the right person, they are the right person and they deserve the chance. It is easy for us to take a principal position, because obviously financially we have resources and we can do that, but we do try to influence and help others where we can. When we have our own house in order, that is when we start to talk more publicly about living wage and skills. I remember using a phrase that got me into a wee bit of trouble and a treble corporate phrase about moving further upstream. If we were helping people post-education to find jobs and access and paying living wage and stuff, that was fine, but how do we make sure that we turn off the tap? How do we start influencing further upstream so that people are coming through education and as they transition from primary to secondary education, how do we make sure that people who are vulnerable and who come from chaotic—how do they get the support that they need? As an employer, there is not much that we can do in that space, but as a funder, there is. Therefore, we start partnering with a charity called Skillforce, with an award to help people to transition from junior to secondary education, partner with Career Ready so that people from disadvantaged backgrounds get access to employers and jobs like ours and mentoring from staff that we have, so that they are not excluded. There are things that employers can do, but it comes back to the question of, do the employers who want to get involved know what is available? Do they know what the best interventions are to get behind and to support? To the question earlier on, what would I like to say? I would love us as a country to strip back and make some brave decisions about some of the things that we do fund and that we do support and really focus on the things that do make a difference. What they are, I will leave up to far more qualified people to identify them. I think that the Fair Work Convention and the Labour market strategy offer an opportunity to start addressing those issues. I think that we do need to generally raise our sights on workplaces and have more of a focus on that, including the quality of leadership management and how people are treated. Helen made reference to a number of very disappointing cases that tell a larger story. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the world of work is changing and people will work more on a project basis when they come together for a particular task. There are higher aspirations around working flexibly and probably changing the expectations of careers and the number of different roles that those will involve. Balancing is the wrong word, but in addressing those fundamental issues, we are not trying to push people into choices that they themselves would not necessarily want to make. Gillian, you have got some questions that I would like to ask. We are just going to draw it to a close now. We have got Gillian and then Felton and that will be the last two. Short question. I have come back to something that you said a long time ago, which was about the challenges for rural areas. I am representing a rural area, so it is very interesting to me what you see those challenges as being and how they could be addressed around getting apprenticeships for people in those more remote areas. There is a public misconception that the vast majority of apprentices will be with small to medium-sized companies. Employers will tend to be in areas, and part of what we are doing around the expansion plan is looking at and reporting on a fairly detailed geographical basis in terms of apprenticeship uptake across the apprenticeship groups and occupational areas. We would not say how with probably the island communities where there are challenges and that is where we see the foundation apprenticeship model. It has been a better model to connect young people to local employers and actually create a relationship, rather than young people thinking they need to move away to get a job. There are opportunities there. I touched on it earlier, the number of employers in a local area and the opportunities to deliver consistently around the foundation apprenticeships will be challenging and that is something that we are working with. Stronger partnerships between the colleges for supporting apprenticeships in the local schools. I think that we will need to think creatively around how we use things like digital technologies and others to give people a start into a career. I suppose that there are issues around—you are talking about smaller businesses and obviously Mark's remit is dealing with this whole thing to your very large company, but for a very small employer, you are taking on this additional responsibility that someone needs to work for. That is a challenge. That has been identified. The FSB undertook a foundation of small businesses and undertook a study two years ago now through rocket science, which identified the challenges for small businesses that are making that commitment. They do not have an HR team. There has been a number of models undertaken in terms of pilot work around shared apprenticeships within geographical regions. There is one in Dundee and Angus just now, and there is one related to construction in the Highlands. Again, coming back to the apprenticeship levy and potentially some additional inflexible resources in the areas of models that you could create. It comes back to the structure of the apprenticeship model. We want employers to make a commitment in terms of employment to young people, and that is a stumbling block. It is a good principle to have, but no one probably needs to be done in terms of information and support, in terms of supporting small and micro businesses to recruit young people. My question is on skills for the future. I wonder what role you have in identifying what the future skills are rather than living in the here and now. The papers that I have in front of me are saying a statistic that I was not aware of. 65 per cent children are going to primary school just now. 65 per cent of them will end up in jobs that do not currently exist. I found that an amazing start. What are you guys doing in your various roles and functions to look at what the future skills might be? I will pick up. Thanks, Fulton. A lot of the work that we undertake with the sectors—industrial leadership groups—exist for Scotland's key and growth sectors, supported by Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Government. They help to set an industrial strategy for sectors, so we work alongside those groups to look at growth ambitions for the companies and what the future skills might be as they understand them. We produce skill investment plans, which are an articulation of future skill needs, both in terms of the types of skills but also the volumes as well. There are some emerging stuff that will take place. There has been dialogue yesterday around the FinTech, which is a merger of financial and technical skills, which say that it could transform the financial services industry. We are doing some work with Scottish Enterprise and Deloitte just now to look at what the opportunities and threats are there. Some potential threats around the digitalisation of employment could take swathes of employment out of things like call centre operations and that type of thing. We are looking at those future skill needs as well. We are looking at international research, we are just concluding a study just now or a report just now looking at jobs to 2022 and forward projections, understanding where the growth areas are, both understanding where the replacement demand for skills are and what they touched on earlier around, things like the health services and others. There is jobs growth in Scotland, but the largest number of jobs that are required in the labour market will come through replacement demand addressing the needs of those who are coming up to retire age. Things like the health boards, for example, will be quite heavily hit by the levy. They are not going to be able to put in a few percentage points on to the bills to their customers. The Government and ourselves need to think creatively how to support that, so something like Glasgow and Clyde, for example, could be paying £6 million into levy fund. They have significant skill challenges moving ahead in terms of the age profile of the workforce, but you could apply that to engineering companies or any other organisation. It is understanding that balance of what the skills system needs to produce to replace that to future replacement demand, as well as responding to the new stuff. I suppose that it is well that, if there is any way we can link that into another discussion point that is coming up across all the panel today and that is in terms of to use the phrase getting to the hardest to reach people. The initiative in Stirling that Daniel talked about in the meeting that he went to last week, and I visited a routes to work programme in Moline constituency in Coatbridge. It seems to me that they are doing a lot of work, picking up a lot of stuff, and they are doing a lot of work to get to people who are finding it difficult to get into employment. In terms of the skills that you are identifying, I wonder if there are also some thoughts about that being done in conjunction with looking at the people that are most hard to employ. The Scottish Government, in terms of policy structure, has a skills pipeline, which is segmented into four stands. It is activity, and this is how public sector organisations are self and local authorities in the college's view of provision. The first line of pipeline is really around engagement with those who are hard disengaged and then helping young people to move through that skill pipeline. There are just young people, but there are adults as well, and it is something that we can go back with a bit more detail on for yourself. It is a Scottish Government framework, and it has worked well. It has helped local employability partnerships to say how much provision do we have for each part of the pipeline, and do we have stepping points, transition points for young people to move through the system towards more sustainable jobs. Just to ask about Brexit and looking ahead to the challenges of skills gaps and needing people to be taxpayers in the future and all the debates that have taken place over the past few years about that, and that leads us into people from overseas coming to work in Scotland. How are you feeling about the potential impact of Brexit on meeting those challenges, and what steps do you feel you can take to try to prepare Scotland for those potential challenges in the future? The Scottish Government has established a cross-agency group that has been pretty well publicised, and we have skills development Scotland has been working with the Government, Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise to look at evidence base and reform that. I am trying to remember the name of the specific report, but a UK-level report gives us a breakdown, and the Scottish sample size is looking at industrial sectors and the makeup of both foreign nationals and UK migrants as part of the workforce. We have done an initial analysis of that, so areas obviously will not come as a surprise, but tourism and food and drink heavily, and it can be in some of the sub-sectors. Up to 35 per cent of the workforce can be made up with the EU nationals. The decisions about what will happen to individuals in that category, whether they will be able to stay or whether they will have to return to their home country. We also need to think, even if they do stay, what will the future flow be like, because some of our sectors have been heavily dependent on it. There are some sectors in terms of life sciences that again have been dependent on international recruitment as well, and we know from the states. Any immigration system where it is point-based or whatever else needs to have a strong influence, because it needs to support the Scottish Government and the current migration policy, is quite challenging. We have introduced a new levy system into that as well and also with conditions that, if employment categories are identified as suitable for recruitment, the home nation then needs to demonstrate that there is a skills plan in place to meet those needs. In areas like digital coding, for example, we have responded partly to industry and with industry and around things like code clan, because that is currently on the list in terms of recruitment. We can demonstrate that we are taking actions to do that, but longer term, I think that it will depend on decisions that are taken at a UK level for some sectors and for some seasonal sectors such as soft fruit and others. It is going to be a pretty challenging if that potential flow of labour is turned off. There is a short-term pre-Brexit issue as well, the uncertainty of people who are here already, and the impact that that might have on their ability to get a mortgage, for example, and whether they would just choose at some point, given all that uncertainty, to return home. Helin and I are both involved in the poster day work visa working group, which is a cross-party group that involves Liz and others. I think that we have presented a strong case to the UK Government on why there is an economic need to reintroduce that flexible route. We have not had much of a positive response so far, despite what was said in the Smith commission and the cross-party support and broad business and education support that exists in trade union. However, we keep trying to make that case and the new ministers in post a new context. Hopefully, we will at least be able to get a foot in the door at some point and develop a scheme. The other aspect that I want to mention was about our own young people and whether our international priorities change. We need to export more to non-European parts of the world, whether those require different language and cultural skills. We need to think about that and prioritise that, particularly as we all know that we need to improve the know-how within our businesses and on exporting. I am tempted to say that, as way above my pay grade, our strategic approach to Brexit, so I will keep it in terms of skills. We recruit locally, nationally and internationally, that is not going to change. The key thing is that we have the right candidates and we will work on investing in skills and the pipeline to make sure that we have a broad, rich, deep talent stream to fishing. We believe in that, and we will continue to work and invest in that, and we will continue to recruit internationally, nationally and locally. One thing that I would like to focus on is the sense of developing people's core skills. We touched briefly earlier on the question of the future world of work and what skills are going to be needed. Obviously, we do not know what is going to be in another 20 years. We can make wild sci-fi led guesses, but the ability for people to build strong career foundations on core skills, teamwork, confidence and communication is not going to change. The earlier we can make good interventions in education and early years, that has got to be a good thing for society as a whole and for us as an employer because we all reap the benefits. From our point of view, we have some concerns about the effect of Brexit just on certain sectors of the economy. It is very much dependent on what deal is struck with the European Union and what access we have to the common market and what deals we do with other parts of the world in trade agreements and what the conditionality comes with that. There are certainly sectors that we can identify as more vulnerable than others to some of those challenges—manufacturing sectors in particular—and we would be looking to the Government to put support in place for sectors that are facing particular vulnerabilities at this time and in this transition. We are concerned about the status of European nationals, as many people on the panel have suggested. There are certain workplaces that, without the European nationals, they simply would not function, such as the NHS, for example. Our universities are very particular within that as well. We are not confident that good outcomes can be achieved for European workers who are currently in post, but the question then comes, as Gordon rightly said, about what happens with the flow of labour, what happens for seasonal workplaces and for people who are dependent on a low-skill labour from the European Union. To date, we have an immigration system that has no low-skill labour element in it, because it has all come from the European Union. We now have a question about how we design an immigration system that includes a component of low-skill labour. I do not think that we have had any discussion about that as a country about the sorts of principles that we would like to see behind a system of that nature. It is a serious question for a higher workplace to survive, but also about what is acceptable to the wider community and what people want to see in the sorts of systems that are going forward. We are also a little bit concerned—I would not want to overstate it, but we have an eye on the issue of tensions in workplaces. That has not just about tensions between European and non-European workers, but that stretches out into tensions between different ethnicities of workers more generally. It is important that we make sure that, within all the process that we are not allowing a racist discourse to creep into our policies and we are not allowing that to play out at a workplace level or a community level. That is something that Trudunians are very concerned about and that we will certainly have a focus on in the next period. I thank the panel for its very brief look, please. Very briefly, just to come back on the target that we have set around disability, our target is to increase employment rate for young disabled people to the population average by 2021 and to have a correlation in the way that the M.A. starts to match that. It is 12.5 per cent presently of a mid-point target in 2017-18 of 6 per cent of all the M.A. starts, and that will be reviewed on anial basis thereafter. Once again, thank you very much for the panel for attending today. That brings us to the conclusion of the public part of the meeting today, so if nine panel members could be in the room, thank you.