Good morning and welcome to the 11th meeting of the Economy and Fair Work Committee in 2021. Our first item of business is a decision to take items 4 and 5, which is a discussion of evidence that we hear this morning in private, as everybody can tell. Our main item of business this morning is a second evidence session on our inquiry into Scotland's supply chain. This is the committee's first inquiry. We are looking at the short and medium-term structural challenges facing Scotland's supply chain and how the challenges and shifts in supply chains are impacting Scotland's economy. We want to consider how to build future resilience and whether there are opportunities to develop domestic supply chains. Our inquiry is structured around three themes of people, places and product. Today's session is the second of our people's session, looking at skills provision in Scotland. I thank the panel for joining us this morning. Welcome to Chris Brodie, who is director of regional skills planning and sector development at Skills Development Scotland. Mary Henry, who is deputy director of external engagements and partnerships at Open University. Paul Little, vice-chair of the college principals group Colleges Scotland, and Richard McClellan, director of qualifications for industry. I would like to ask an introductory question, which all panel members will get an opportunity to answer. The inquiry has been prompted by committee concerns about supply chains. We are seeing blockages and difficulties within supply chains that are impacting on consumers and on the economy and businesses, as they struggle to get people and get the components that are needed within existing supply chains. I am interested in how your organisations are able to be responsive and fast-moving to the pressures that we are seeing. The submissions that we have received have been very welcome. A lot of times, they focus on the longer-term challenges that Scotland faces, and there is a broader debate to be had about that. However, as with the committee, we are interested in how we address some of the real shortages and pressures and delays that the current supply chain issues are putting on to our economy. I will first come to Chris Brody from Skills Development Scotland, and we have previously heard from Skills Development Scotland. You have a focus on medium and long-term challenges in Scotland's economy, but what are you able to do that is more responsive and can respond to immediate challenges that we are facing? I am going to say as an opening statement that the challenges that we are facing in the labour market at the moment, particularly in terms of people's supply, have long-term routes and long-term solutions, so that focus on the root causes of the problem and addressing those challenges in the long-term is really important. I hope that we have an opportunity to talk about that today. Notwithstanding that, it is clear that the challenges that we are facing in the labour market at the moment are pretty strong. They are, as a result of a number of things. We have record levels of recruitment activity going on in the Scottish labour market at the moment and across the UK, so job vacancies are higher now than they were, or rather job postings are higher now than they were pre-the pandemic. That, in a sense, is a good thing given the challenge of 18 months that we have been through. What we have also seen as a major contributing factor is a choke on labour supply. That choke on labour supply has a set of reasons behind it. Some of it is related to challenges around Brexit, some of it is related to the choices that people have made in respect of being engaged in the labour market. A large part of it is down to economic activity. The challenge that we are seeing at the moment in terms of people supply is down to both an excess of demand, which is a good thing, and a deficit in terms of people. To come to the question about what we are doing to be agile around that, I think that partly the answer I have given explains some of it. We are working very hard to understand the reality of the labour market at the moment and where pressure points are. I have a team of sector leaders who are engaged with industry leadership groups and industry trade bodies. We are collating and feeding that information into Government, into colleges, into training providers to ensure that the system is positioned to respond. Specifically at the moment, we are working on the deployment of the national transition training fund. That seeing is deploying that the overall value of the fund is close to £20 million. That money is not just controlled by SDS. Some of that money is dispersed through colleges and other agencies. However, we have been working very hard to get about £4.5 million worth of activity deployed across about 20 projects ranging from childcare, seafood, creative industries, digital skills and others. That is a really important part of ensuring that people who are an employer or looking to recruit have the ability to reskill or upskill people who are looking for jobs. We have also just recently established a green jobs workforce academy looking to provide support and access to training, access to support and information on jobs to people who are looking to move into emerging green skills. I will stop there and allow others to come in, but no doubt you will come back to me through this morning. Good morning, everyone. The Open University is the largest provider of part-time education in Scotland. We have about 55 per cent of all part-time learners in over 22,000 at the moment. We very much believe that to be able to recover from the kind of economic issues that we have, we need to enable access to education for all. What we have been doing recently is looking at our curriculum and ensuring that the products that we have in the services out are fit for that purpose. We will be able to respond quickly to the issues and to be able to retrain people. We are already providers of modular education. We have part-time learners right across the whole of Scotland. 75 per cent of them are in work and learning at the same time. We know that 75 per cent of them are under £25,000 because they access the part-time fee grant. What we have been doing over the course of Covid and the response to Brexit, as well as working with individuals and businesses to offer out those modules, utilising the part-time fee grant and the Scottish Government and SFC-funded programmes such as the upskilling fund and the national transition training fund. We are also the only university that has access to the flexible workforce development fund to work with SMEs and offer them up to £5,000 of training. We are often in our modular curriculum. We have also developed a large suite of micro-predentials, which are 10 and 15 credit upskilling courses in those areas where we know that there are skills gaps, where industry has told us that there are gaps in IT, in areas of sustainability, health and social care and such areas. We are able to offer quite a few of those out free because we have access to the funding pots. In terms of response to supply chain, what we have done during Covid is that we have worked with organisations such as Skills Development Scotland, PACE and industry bodies such as the FSB to look at the sectors and see where the skills are needed and focus in campaigns to get to the people who were furlods or might have been facing redundancy or looking to upskill. We have worked with organisations such as Michelin who were going through a redundancy to get their staff upskilled and reskilled, particularly in areas of green technology and technical skills. The benefit of part-time education is that you can study it while you are still working and reskill and upskill. The focus that we have been looking at is that sector. Looking at young people, yes, there has been a big focus on that, but it is about upskilling and reskilling the population and being able to do it in a quick and modular fashion. That means that people can get qualifications or skills very quickly to look at that. We have also been working on our open-learn content, so the Open University's mission is very much about a social mission. We offer at least 10 per cent of our courses free and online in our open-learn course. During the pandemic, we accessed 7 million people to access that free learning. We worked again with SDS to get our open-learn content put on to my world of work on the first day of launch. There were 24,000 people to access that. We have been working with sectors such as the ecology sector, working with teachers, working with the unions and union learning to get people online. We have used the pedagogy that we have offered out free courses and funded microcredentials to enable people who are educators to be able to take their content online so that industry bodies and other educators are able to take courses that people had to come in and sit in a classroom and be able to take that online. We have offered that out as well. That is a snapshot of some of the stuff that we have done over the last 18 months to look at that supply and try to get people skilled up in that area quickly. That is great. Thank you, Paul Little. Good morning. Many of you will know that the college sector is during the crown of tertiary education, so I am not going to rehearse the breadth of the college education. Although for some of you, you may be surprised to learn that there are 23,000 courses and we serve about a quarter of a million learners in Scotland. Of course, when times are plenty or indeed when times are difficult as they are now, the college sector is there right across 13 regions as civic anchor institutions and as economic anchor institutions. I think that the challenge that you face here is your three central themes of people, place and product. I would commend to you the cover for Little report that was commissioned by the ministers last year, which was published just in February before the pandemic, so somehow it has got over eclipsed by a health crisis. In essence, it is a blueprint for what you are seeking to achieve here. We say from the very front cover that it is about taking an agile and inclusive and collaborative approach to both economic development, business support and indeed lifetime learning. The institutions that go right across Scotland geographically well spread, but they have expertise that date back many years. For example, my own is a centre of excellence in procurement and supply chain by the industry lead body. We are responsible for upskilling and re-skilling the supply chains of many economic sectors and the sector itself in supply chain. We have been doing that for 17 years. We have also engaged in people of procurement for tomorrow and we have been helping a number of companies to provide the skills and workforce, for example, to inward investment such as Barclays in a fast track programme for either 13 weeks or six weeks. That is phenomenal when you consider that we normally talk about four years or three years to be able to upskill in that sense. Micro-credentials were mentioned, and we are proposing in that report that micro-credentials should be 20 hours of learning. If you consider that we are talking of the lower skills or the practical skills of HGV or fruit pickers, quite honestly the media has not quite got the attention of the medium skills and the higher level skills that are also needed for our competitive economy. We would be urging in that report in the colleges to deliver that as symbionic partnership with business and industry. If you consider that the college sector right across Scotland is hardwired into the SME network, small and medium enterprise network, the reality is that colleges are very close to supporting those in need, those in future need and trying to work with the skills agencies to anticipate future demands. We have here in Scotland as a very cohesive nation an opportunity to do that. We have got a blueprint to do that. I want to commend that blueprint to you. I want to say more than that, we have also got a competitive edge here in Scotland. We have been arguing in that report, which was a distillation, if you will, of about one year of reference right across the sector and intra of the sectors to look at our competitive edge. We are proposing the concept of world skills. If you consider that we just had COP and everyone in the world came to Glasgow and to Scotland to find out what we are doing about climate mitigation and climate adaption, we are also very good at our world skills. If you consider that China, France, all the competitors in Brazil and India are all engaging in world skills as a movement over 70 years, Scotland punches way above its weight. It leads the UK in its response to that. We send students across the world to showcase the practical skills, the technological skills that are needed. We are very much in front of that. What we really need is our skills agencies, particularly our funding council, to pick up the pace to their credit. They have adopted that from the COMPF report. However, we just need them to pick up the pace because, quite honestly, that will help us to remain competitive as we respond to the urgent and present challenges. In essence, the college sector as anchor institutions is your national asset for upskilling and reskilling for technology education and for the rapid response, the agile response that you need for your three central schemes. Obviously, in that, there are some initiatives that we are happy to discuss further that can really help, particularly supply chain and procurement, and all those areas that are in urgent need of upskilling and reskilling. Richard McLean, can you respond to the question about supply chain pressures and how responsive the sector is? I suppose, as an employer, the greatest challenge that I have and we have is getting people just now to be able to expand our business. Within that, we are finding that one of the major obstacles is encouraging people to consider career changes. They come out of university and there seems to be tunnel vision towards whatever the title of their qualification is, and then you are trying to get them to consider, say, a career in education that has a focus on, say, construction or civil engineering. It is quite difficult to get them to think of something different that they feel they might not be ideally qualified to follow as a career. I see it important to encourage people to be multi-disciplined and have those world skills and be able to move from career to career at all different stages of their career development at whatever age they are. I will now move on to questions from members. If I could ask members to maybe direct the question to individuals on the panel, we do have quite a large panel this morning and I would like all members to get a chance to ask questions, so I will pass over to Michelle Thomson first. Thank you, convener. Good morning, everybody. Chris, if I could direct my opening question to you, I was heartened to read the submission from Skills Development Scotland in that you make it very clear the difference between skills gaps, skills shortages and labour shortage, and this distinction, in my opinion, is vital if we are to understand the people element of supply chains. I am sure that gaps and shortages, it is already, we have started to explore that, and I think that other members will want to come in on that, so I want to talk about labour shortages initially. In your submission you note that labour shortages occur to too few bodies and could be an issue of demographics, economic activity or reduced inward migration, so I want to understand from an evidential basis what specific impact a lack of inward migration and demographics is having right now and that can be perceived as structural issues that we need to address. I am coming to this from where are we now as well as I have got another question going on about where we are in the future, so if you could give me your opinion where we are and why that is, and the last wee point is, I am sure that the B word, Brexit, may come in, but what I want to understand is without inward migration can we have enough bodies in Scotland, so Chris, thank you. I am going to preface this by saying I am going to do the best I can to provide some numbers and some evidence, but we will almost certainly just make sure that I have those numbers right around what I am talking to with the written submission afterwards. In terms of where we are just now and what is contributing to the challenges, I think that there are three challenges and I hope that I remember the third one. The first is around Scotland's kind of challenge of demographics, so we have got a relatively low birth rate and as a result of that Scotland's workforce demographics, if we do nothing, we will have fewer working-age people in 25 years than we have now, something to the tune of around 130, 140,000. In the 10 years prior to 2018, Scotland's population grew by around about 280, 290,000. 90 per cent of that population growth was down to in migration from the rest of the UK and from the EU and overseas. In terms of the migration picture at the moment, the evidence that is emerging is suggesting two things that there are significant numbers of EU nationals who have left Scotland during the pandemic and may not have come back. This is part of global phenomenon and the patterns of inward migration across the world have slowed down, but the consequence of Scotland is that we expect that migration has fallen quite significantly. That has a detrimental impact on the Scottish population and has a detrimental impact on the availability of working-age populations. That is not the full story in terms of the challenge and there is a lot of evidence emerging on the implications of the pandemic, but what that is leading to is a rise in economic connectivity. I quoted a number around 280,000 Scots coming into Scotland over a 10-year period through in migration. The reality is that we have 823,000 economically inactive people in Scotland at the moment. Only about 20 per cent of them are looking for a job, so we have about 157,000. I hope that my arithmetic is holding up well here this morning. We have about 157,000 people who are looking for a job but who at the moment cannot find one. The focus on increasing labour supply is going to be really important to address those issues. Back to the opening question, some of the solutions to that are not short-term. It is not easy to get someone who has been out of work economically inactive for a period of up to two years back into work in six weeks' time. However, we need a strong focus on inward migration, talent attraction, economic connectivity and making it easier for people to upscale and reskill in the way that Paul and Marie have described. Thank you very much for that very comprehensive answer. Richard, I wanted to bring you in here as well from the point of view of an industry perspective, particularly around demographics and labour shortages. Have you got something to add to what Chris has said? Are you talking to me from a civil engineering construction? Yes. I am trying to get to the point where we are very specific about the difference between skills gaps, skills shortages and labour shortages and understand where we are now with the structural issues with labour shortages. What you are seeing in your area would be very helpful for the record and for evidence. What I am saying from a positive point of view is that there is a lot of potential work, there is a lot of work out there and what is choking the whole situation is getting the people to do the work. It is across lots of different sectors, in particular civil engineering. I feel that in relation to civil engineering it is about attracting people into courses that they want to do and see courses that will allow them to develop their careers. That is really all that I can say on that point. I will move on to my other area that I mentioned. Paul, I have read your excellent report with Audrey Cumberford. I have a couple of questions around that. It strikes me that you make a clear case for focusing on excellence rather than just competence. The point of view of mentioning world skills is my understanding that not only is it just a competition, it also develops international standards and therefore enables international benchmarking and increases competitiveness of the contributing countries. Can you confirm if my understanding is correct and give a little more thinking about the move towards excellence from competence that you outline in your report with Audrey Cumberford? In a sense, what we are arguing for in that report is that if you teach merely to competence, then the reality is that you do not have a competitive edge. If you teach to excellence or what we describe as proficiency, then the reality is that you are giving the inherent transferable skills that that individual will need, that technology will need to work in a competitive world. Increasingly, regardless of whether it is globalisation or deglobalisation, you are increasingly seeing a movement of human capital. We would want our young people to stay here in Scotland but we would want those young people to be able to compete with markets that are beyond Scotland. You cannot do that if you are teaching to merely competence. If you are merely following a syllabus and you are merely acquiring a standard, because that standard will be superseded by those nations that are engaged in upskilling, reskilling at world-class levels. There are some 80 countries engaged in world skills. Scotland is coming slow to that despite the fact that we exceed the UK and top the league and we have students who come forth in the world in certain skills. We are demonstrating in those skill areas that Scotland can teach in its college sector to the very, very highest levels and that those highest levels can continue to compete and that those individuals can continue to develop as, if you will, master technologists or master craftsmen and women as they progress in their careers either setting up their own businesses or indeed becoming the future lecturers that we need in our colleges and universities. However, that standard is a world-class standard and you are right. If we are able to benchmark and that standard will change, if we are able to benchmark annually or every two years as the competitions engage, for example, next year the competitions are going to be held in China, we will know whether the UK and in particular Scotland is going to be competitive in a changing world if our students are successful in that, but that skills infrastructure needs to support it. Across the UK we have hollowed out our skills infrastructure with dismantled our polytechnics, dismantled our craft skills and the reality of the situation is that this is one of the few things that we have got left to be proud of here in Scotland and in particular to give our future workers a competitive edge. I will now take Maggie Chapman and be followed by Fiona Heslop. Good morning to the panel and thank you for being here. I want to speak a little bit about, and Marie, maybe this is for you initially. You talked about some of the work that you have done about focusing and targeting skills training, some of the micro-credentials in areas. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? We have heard from evidence previously that there are barriers in some disadvantaged groups of the training and the opportunities for upskilling and reskilling. How can we focus by geography, by demographics and by sector in specific ways? What is it that you are able to do now and what are the kinds of things that we need to change to make sure that we can improve that? It is a very good question and one that we all tackle on a daily basis when we get up in the morning. One of the key things from an open university perspective is that we offer open access to all of our qualifications for the vast majority of them. I think that nursing there are NMC entry requirements, but for the vast, vast majority of our undergraduates we offer open access so that you do not need any qualifications to study with us, and 19 per cent of our students have no formal qualifications at all. The ability to be able to open up access to education for everyone is key to it, being able to get to the demographics. We have got 25 per cent of our students who declare a disability and 9 per cent of them mental health issues. That is more than a lot of universities have in total, and it is something that we take very seriously in terms of support that we give to people. What we have found is that the online supported education can offer that anywhere. What we have found is that a lot of people find that easier. We have found a lot of people who have went to brick-based universities who have struggled with anxiety and who find the online environment easier. The support that we put in there enables us to be able to do that. The flexibility that it offers in terms of a part-time education that can be studied at any time means that people who have got care and responsibilities, people who need to work part-time, it enables them to be able to work. As I was saying at the start, 75 per cent of our students are in work and 75 per cent of them are earning under 25,000. We know that there will be people within that that are in work poverty and struggling. We work a lot with care experience and with carers. We reach into demographics there in terms of the populations and the offering that we have generally enables people to do that. The modular basis of the OU means that people can study for the outcome that they need, so it is not about having to study for a full four-year qualification. Sometimes a 30 credit module or a 10 credit module is enough for people. It might give them the qualification that enables them to get into Paul's College. It might enable them to put a skill on their CV. They have coding skills that they have been able to develop in a 10-week programme that we can run that shows and demonstrates. We have done that with retail workers whose job basically went online. We have been able to retrain them in 10 to 12 weeks to be able to show their employers that they have got those skills. In terms of sectors, we work with SMEs, large businesses and industry bodies. We do a lot of work with the third sector, which is a really important part of the economy that often gets forgotten when we are talking about organisations that work with people, particularly those who work in the community and who are looking to upskill and reskill. We have also done things like our business barometer survey, which tells us that 63 per cent of businesses have got a skills gap. The areas that they are telling us that the skills gaps are in are in management and leadership, particularly technical skills and industry-specific skills, and the sectors in which we are seeing the biggest gap are agriculture, fisheries, IT and hospitality. Those areas are well determined. What we are doing and what we have done is to develop our micro-credentials in those areas. Most of those do not have any entry qualifications at undergraduate level or postgraduate ones. What we are doing is targeting those sectors. We are working with organisations such as PACE, SDS and industry bodies that are representing those organisations. We are promoting free courses and fully funded courses to those sectors. We are working with them to get people on board with that. It is multifaceted and multi-layered, but what we are looking at is bringing as many people into that pool as possible and getting as many people upskilled and reskilled as we possibly can. Thank you very much for that. Chris, if you wanted to comment on some of that as well. Perhaps particularly, you said earlier about the number of economically inactive people, how can we make those connections better? I am not going to add anything to the statement that was made by Maria about focusing and targeting micro-credentials, which I thought was hugely comprehensive. Let us just look at a moment for where we are seeing inequalities in the labour market. I will pick out a couple of issues that are emerging quite quickly. Particularly in relation to economic activity, lots of evidence that older workers are the most at risk of being made redundant or becoming economically inactive as a result of the pandemic, and particularly older women. That is a big contributor to the challenge. We are already looking at the extent to which we have provision in place to support those workers. In terms of other inequalities in the labour market, we know that disabled groups—older workers, as I have previously mentioned—and black and ethnic minority groups, labour market outcomes have not shifted at all during the pandemic. They have stayed very—the gap between those and other workers has remained persistent. It is really important that we have a focus, not just in our upskilling and reskilling provision, but through college provision, university provision and indeed apprenticeships, to ensure that we are making those training routes as open and accessible to all as we can. If I can come to you, Richard, can you say a little bit more about what it is in one of those skills gaps around leadership technical skills? What it is that you feel that we need to be thinking about either at a macroeconomic level or at that focused, targeted level to support the people that you engage with and the organisations that companies that you support? Just now, as a business for various reasons, we are focusing on the market that is available to us in England. We are doing a lot of work on the English standards-based apprenticeships. One particular addition to the construction sector, which has been around for a long time, which I feel that they are probably getting a bit better with down there than they are doing up here, is things like BIM, building information modelling. When you start looking at our apprenticeships, some of the framework apprenticeships have not changed in 10, 20 years. I am not going to say that what they are doing down there is better than what we are doing up here, but because it has recently changed, they are looking at new things like engineers that are focusing on digital. I would be promoting the whole idea of digital engineering and making sure that our engineers are coming out of university and coming out of apprenticeships with strong digital engineering skills. Be rude not to pull. Is there something—specifically about the leadership and technical gaps that we are identifying? What is it that we are getting wrong? You have very comprehensive answers, which is the hard bit. I think that what I would focus on is two things in particular, system leadership and cross-silo leadership. The infrastructure here in Scotland is, in my opinion, ahead of England. It is a more managed system here in Scotland, and that is to your advantage. I think that we need a bit more focus and sponsorship in terms of system leadership. We really need people to work together and to be aligned and to have a shared vision. You have to train for that. You have to encourage that. You cannot just hope or exhort that that is going to happen. What we are missing at the minute is something like a staff college in system leadership, where we can encourage cross-silo work-in, transition work-in on the margins, negotiation and project management. All those areas are very important as we emerge and more important as we face the next challenge that is coming down the track. Of course, leadership is key to that, because it is not that engender's teamwork, and that ensures that everyone is included. It is a key part of the committee's work to ensure that it is fair work and an inclusive economic growth. The reality is that that cannot be left a chance. In my opinion, it starts with leadership. Fiona Hyslop, forward by Alexander Burnett. Thank you, and it is great to see a panel in real life. You are very welcome. I want to come to Paul first and then to Chris. Paul, clearly colleges are very agile and responsive, but also, as the Cymruford little report indicated, an engine for economic growth within particular localities. I am interested in what you are saying about the expertise in supply and procurement and the convener's agreement. If those experts have not put into the inquiry, it would be very interesting to get their take on supply and procurement, because that is exactly what we are looking at in terms of the inquiry. From your institution, particularly in Glasgow, as an anchor and an engine for economic activity, what are local businesses telling you about the current labour supply issues, and what are you doing in terms of using your power as a procurer to get sustainability of products and people in the place that you lead in? Thank you, Fiona. You are very on message. Thank you for the comment for a little endorsement there. We work very closely with the chambers of commerce, and we work very closely with the SMEs and the Federation of Small Business. We are very close, as a metropolitan college, as Edinburgh would be, as colleges would be in their island region or, indeed, their other regions are across, and they are 13. They would be aware of these emerging skills shortages, and they would also be—we are talking about supply chain. That is a huge expertise that has resided in the central belt, particularly in our legacy college, for at least 17 years. It never seems to amaze me why not more people know about that. It is a centre of excellence. It is the industry lead body for the UK. The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply Chain Management has designated three or four star centres of excellence, and there are only 20 of them across the whole of the United Kingdom. The challenge here is how do you, if you like, upskill industry professionals to work in the supply chain using the skills that the industry say they need to a standard that the industry wants? Not every centre can engage in that right up to—we engage it up to master's level at the City of Glasgow College, but it does not actually get a master's qualification because the industry does not want the master's qualification. It wants a level 9 qualification whereby, if you complete the professional, if you like, the chartership qualification, then the industry will allow you to put MSPs after your name, and they know and trust you to be a lead professional to lead in that supply chain procurement. As an institution, we have worked with the Scottish Government to provide apprenticeships in supply chain procurement. We have provided HNDs and HNCs in supply chain procurement, and we have gone further than that to ensure that the charter qualifications that the industry needs—if you like the leadership dimension that I spoke about earlier—is at the very, very highest levels. We have engaged in that with very target initiatives such as procurement people initiative, and we have gone in addition to that. We have worked with about 10,000 employees during the pandemic to upscale and reskill them as part of the flexible workforce development fund, and we have developed 125 digital courses that can be fast-tracked for individuals. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, when Barclays came in and said, we really need employees, we need 2,000 of them and we need them now, we cannot wait for years, can you do that in 13 weeks? We said yes, we delivered that, and when we successfully said, can you do that in six weeks? We said yes, we delivered that. That is really an agile solution, and that is replicated by colleges the length of the Scotland trying to respond, as you said, as anchor institutions, as civic institutions, as economic institutions. If you will multiply the economic base of that locality, and clearly there are some lead institutions that do that on a supply chain and procurement bases, and City of Glasgow is at the tip of the spear of that. Thank you. I would also be interested in what your organisation does in your own procurement to help that sustainability as well, but you might want to follow up that later. The other issue that I wanted to ask you about was demography. We all know that is one of the biggest challenges that Scotland faces, but it is not an equal split across the country. Obviously, the west of Scotland is losing population at a faster rate, and the east of Scotland is gaining that. That is a challenge, and I am asking you this with your hat on as the Association of Scottish Colleges. In my part of the world, there are students who will not be able to get into the local college in West Lothian that would be able to get to a place in the west of Scotland because there are more places available. We have a growing population, but we also have a growing demand for labour and skills. Is the funding council as agile and responsive as it could be in recognising the immediate issues that we really face in terms of labour supply to ensure that where there are people and young people in particular, they can be supported to make sure that we are getting that volume of trained young people into the workforce? I will briefly answer your question on procurement, because that is an easy one. Colleges and universities all are centralising their procurement through APUC, which is a centralised procurement provider with a call-off framework. We try to do that as green and sustainable as we possibly can, clearly from COP and clearly value for money. To your particular question about the demography and the impact and the question about the funding council, I think that in recent years, under a current and once leadership, it has much more agile response than in previous, commendably so. It is not just responsible for the funding council but also for the SDS and other agencies, Scottish Enterprise, SDI, HGI. I think that the challenges are all those agencies aligned. I am not convinced that they are. I think that what Cumber for Little, Audrey and I suggest is that they need to be better aligned than they are now and they need to have a shared narrative than they have now. The acute challenge that you are talking about is the demographic movement of the young people west-east. We are fortunate here in Scotland that we have a very cohesive collaborative college network. We can work very closely to try and meet that demand, but we should not say to the fact that, because of uncertainty, because of the pandemic, because even of Brexit, the reality is that we are facing challenges that we did not face before, where students are now choosing to stay on at school rather than progress to their college or university, where young people are suggesting that it is probably better for them to get straight into a job if a job is there and employers are looking for those workers right now because of the demographic downward trend that we have. In one sense, it is our careers network fit for purpose. No, we need to do something about that, because that clearly, particularly at school level, will then help those young people to navigate across the colleges and across the university and across the wider apprenticeship network to get the courses that they need. I think that it was ever thus between movement and migration within Scotland. Clearly, the net beneficiary of that is the central belt, but I think that it is also important that we maintain that network right across Scotland and, indeed, in our island network. As I said at the start, the Parliament's dual and the crown for that and your national infrastructure asset is actually the college sector. I think that it does an extremely good job and the proof is just in the evidence. Over a quarter of a million people every year, over 23,000 courses, and clearly they are quite geographically spread. I think that we work increasingly with Edinburgh College in particular, and Edinburgh College works with satellite colleges as we do in the Glasgow area. We try to ensure that we provide pathways. Sometimes those are very specific pathways and sometimes those are only in certain institutions, but the bedwalk foundation apprenticeships and even the access courses and the national award courses are well spread throughout east and west of Scotland, so we reassure you. Your own college does a fantastic job. I will let them know that. Coming to Chris, it would be quite interesting if you could respond to some of the points from Paul. We are particularly interested in retail and construction and immediate labour shortages and the point that Paul is making about whether we are as connected as we can be to be as agile and responsive as we need to be bearing in mind the estimography systemic issues that need to be dealt with, but are there things that we can move more rapidly on to mitigate some of the real immediate pressures that we have? I will pick up on a couple of points. Paul is quite rightly challenging our national agencies around a common agenda. I am slightly more positive about that. We are aligned around a really common agenda and that is about the need to align the investment that we are making skills behind economic opportunity, but the recognition of where the opportunities are now in the future around digital and green jobs and recognising the need for a variety of routes for people to acquire skills. I think that in listening to Reid this morning and listening to the work that is going on in the colleges with Paul, we are actually seeing the emergence of a really strong focus in upskilling and reskilling as a core part of the role for our skill system. That has been borne through flexibility, agility and responsiveness to the challenges that we are facing as a result of both Covid Brexit and a challenging labour market. That needs to be a consistent focus for the skill system going forward over the next 10 to 15 years because we know that demography is going to be tight. We know that the economy is rapidly changing and that pace of increase is not going to do anything but speed up. Having the tools in our armory to be able to respond quickly and effectively is really important. While the transition training fund has been really important this year, it is only but a small proportion of the total investment that we are making skills. The challenge is to make the best use of some of the additional funds that are available at the moment, but to really focus that long-term investment, the long-term commitment in the skill system towards the challenges of the next 10 years, not the challenges of the last 10 years. Forgive me, I forgot the sectors that you mentioned. In retail and construction, we are taking a particular interest in. Retail and construction are two slightly different sectors in terms of the challenges that they are facing. In terms of retail, one of the things that Covid has done, there are many things. One of the things that it has done is that it has just sped up transitions that we knew were already under way. The shift to online retail over the 18 months of the pandemic was huge. I cannot remember the exact percentage figures, but essentially the shift to online retail that you would have expected in 10 years took place in 18 months. You look at the challenges that we have in terms of people not fully being back in the offices and it is clear that the retail sector is challenged. There are some skills shortages there at the moment. I think that part of those are around attractiveness of some jobs and the competitiveness of the labour market. The challenge in retail is to ensure that we are providing pathways for people to find other newer productive jobs. Again, some of the work that we have heard this morning is targeted very much in that space. Construction is an interesting challenge. The construction sector has been beset by skill shortages and labour shortages of some kind for as long as I have been in the professional world. That is not a new issue. The challenge that the construction sector is facing at the moment is undeniably around labour shortages. We know that that was a sector that was quite reliant on EU nationals and that has exacerbated some of the existing skill shortages. The other big challenge for the construction sector at the moment is about facing in to the opportunities and the scale of the opportunities and the challenge that the transition to net zero can have places. We are working with partners in Glasgow, we are working with the partners in South of Scotland to understand what the specific skill requirements are and the scale of people who will be required for the retrofit of housing or for the development of new building projects. That is clear that that is a major opportunity. However, it is going to need us to train more people in traditional trades, in building trades, in plumbing and in electricians. It is going to mean that at a later stage we may have to reskill those people to respond to EU and adopting technologies. Both sectors are facing pressures, but I think that for quite different reasons at the moment. I think that Alexander might want to be in this area as well, but particularly on construction with the opportunities of net zero and with the richest comments about choking just now in terms of labour supply, is there a danger that immediate pressures might not allow us to get that trajectory of long-term careers in construction that can be dual fuel and you are talking about reskilling later on? Is there an issue to make it attractive? We should be trying to get that modern dual fuel type training going on now in order to make it attractive, because why would people want to go into a career in an area where perhaps it will be overtaken by events as we move into renewable energies? We are working on three axes at the moment. One is about ensuring that the apprenticeship frameworks and the qualification frameworks respond to and reflect transition to net zero. The second is a recognition that we almost certainly need more people in those trades. One of the things that we are considering at the moment is how we can best incentivise uptake apprenticeships around construction trades. That is really within eye to the next five years when we know that the transition to net zero is really going to take off. It is about training now for the challenges of the future. The third part is looking at immediate opportunities around upskilling and reskilling. We are working with Jim Brown at the Energy Skills Partnership in particular to ensure that a lot of the work that is going through the colleges is responding to those challenges. As always, there is more than one solution to what is quite a complex set of problems. I will bring in Alexander Burnett, followed by Colin Smyth. Thank you, convener. Very much, if I could continue on to the end, is our awareness and the alignment of our skills training. It is a question for Chris. I do not know if you had a chance to look at any of the other submissions, but the one from Scottish Renewables highlights 14 skillset categories where we will see an increased demand and potential shortages. I am not expecting you to have the exact number at your fingertips, but I was wondering if you could give us some understanding of your confidence in figures that you work with. Looking at heat pump installers, for example, would you have a number for that particular skill? Can you describe how you reach that figure, both in assessing and in the delivery? Do you hold any geographical spread of those figures? I am afraid that I do not have a number. You possibly saw me looking through my extensive briefing, and of course there is not a number in there. Let me talk you through what we are doing to wrestle with that particular problem. In Glasgow, at the moment, we are working with the city region partners to look at the investment profile on the retrofit of housing. We are engaging directly with employers to understand the extent to which skills that are already there in the workforce will be fit for purpose to meet that requirement and the extent to which skills will need to be remodelled. What we are also looking to do is to build a model in simple terms of conversion. One million pounds worth of investment in x equals y number of jobs. I would treat all of those things with a bit of caution because they run the danger of being spuriously accurate. What I think is really important in understanding is signaling whether we are investing enough in those trades, in those skills at this moment in time. The routes to which we can do that are also broad. Yes, it is about potentially incentivising employers and individuals to consider a career in those spaces. It is about careers as well. It is also about ensuring that we have the assets that are the college system of the city region coming behind that. We are just at the moment embarking on a piece of work with the Scottish Funding Council and the Glasgow City Region partners to take the approach that we have around retrofit and play that out across the city region. Where that gets us to is a shared understanding and position of the scale of the challenge, what needs to be done to fix it and the levels of investment that are going to be required to unlock that opportunity. I was not expecting you to have all those fingertips. I would be grateful if, in your submission afterwards, you could put a bit of detail around particularly heat pump installers, but maybe if you are able to have any figures on the other categories that Scottish Renewables mentioned. My second question is to Richard McClellan. Unite Scotland has talked about the implementation of an offshore training passport to allow workers to move freely before the offshore and onshore energy sectors. I am not familiar with which training bodies or which certification bodies we are talking about exactly. I hope that you might be more knowledgeable on that, but is such a passport feasible? If it is, could you outline what is the process for achieving that and how long would it take to achieve that? I have a pretty negative view of the registration schemes. In my opinion, what happens is that qualifications and standards and apprenticeships become more about the plastic card or the registration scheme or the passport than they do about the qualification that you do to get that registration. I would not be supportive of any sort of passport or registration scheme. Do any of the other members of the panel have any views on Unite's suggestion? I do not know the specific suggestion, but I would say that, in terms of offshore, the maritime and coastal agency provides a regular body for working offshore. It could be contacted in terms of its expertise in regulation to improve some of the standards. A passport only takes you so far, but my colleague is right that when you get there, you have to deliver and have the skills at a required level. In a sense, it is getting the right person in the right place at the right time with the right skill levels, and there is an art to do in that. A passport is indicative of that journey, but it does not confirm that your skills are still current or that you are up skills. The World Economic Forum talks about in its last projections that, coming out of the pandemic, we need to re-skill 1 billion people. That is re-skilling 1 billion people. That is not up-skilling 1 billion. You can probably add that number. Of course, you need to have that document and a passport, but inherently it has to be at the right level. If you do not mind, I will come in. Alexander, I suppose that the crux of the question is transferable skills. To go back to Richard, I do not know qualifications for industry. If you see that as part of future proof in the workforce, because you talked about the difficulty of recruiting people into the sector, if it was a more flexible qualification where it recognises emerging industries, it is part of the thinking of qualifications for industry to look for awarding qualifications that give workers more flexibility to move between sectors. The whole idea of qualifications for industry, from my point of view, was to allow us to compete in those qualifications on apprenticeships markets with other awarding organisations. That is why we went into the sector. In relation to the transferability of skills and whatever, personally, as an employer, I feel the difficulty is that it is not only getting skills, it has been able to pay a salary that allows people to move from their up-to-Eden-bra and live in Edinburgh. When accommodation is much more costly up here, you are having to compete in terms of salary, and you are having to compete in terms of what career you are offering people. That is really all that I can say on that one. That is helpful. Alexander, was there anything else that you wanted to come in on? No, thank you, convener. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the panel. I suppose that this question really follows on from the point that Alexander was making regarding oil and gas. In particular, there is a lot of focus on the immediate challenges that we face over labour and skills shortages, but we know not least as a result of COP26 last week. Governments are going to be making decisions that will mean that many people in the existing jobs are going to lose those jobs. We are told that that is fine because we will have a just transition and people will simply move into the new green jobs. However, one of the issues that the committee heard last week is that there is not really a truly comprehensive understanding of what many of those jobs will be to deliver that just transition. Never mind a proper map of what the skills are that will be needed to do that. Do you think that that is a fair criticism, as I will put Chris on the spot and kick off with yourself, Chris? If the question that you are asking is what jobs will emerge over the next 15 to 25 years, the answer to that has got to be no. The transition to net zero is a major undertaking, a transformational undertaking for the Scottish economy. It will require the deployment and adoption of, in some cases, technologies that are not even invented. To be able to have that certainty in 25 years, we are going to need 2,000 hydrogen engineers in Lerwick, no one can give that certainty at the moment. What we do have is certainty in terms of the investment programme over the next three to five years set out in the Government's climate change update plan. What that is saying is that we know the areas where we need to act fast and we need to act quickly around energy generation, decarbonisation of transport and decarbonisation of heat in domestic and commercial settings. That is where our early focus is on getting into some of the detailed issues around understanding job requirements and skills content. Have we got the provision in place? When we published the climate emergency skills action plan last year, I emphasised to our board and indeed to our colleagues in government that I saw that as a 15-year undertaking. In addition to the short-term focus on what we have in areas of certainty, we have work that is actively scanning, working with industry on what those technologies are and what the likely implications of those technologies are for skills so that when things do become more certain in 2026 or 2030, we have a basis in which to move early. It would be unrealistic to expect anyone to have that picture of 100 per cent certainty over the next 15 years out of 2035. Do you think that the work that we are doing has been done with the urgency that is needed given that the challenges we face? We know that the Government has a climate change plan but that is going to change. Are we geared up to be able to adapt and make sure that we can do that plan and work that is going to be needed? Whose role is it to really do that? Are all the individual organisations that are here to do their own work? Is there something else that is needed to really grab this issue and run with it in a comprehensive way? I can speak on the degree of confidence that we are doing in relation to the skills activity. The climate emergency skills action plan that we published with the Scottish Government last year involved the college sector, the university sector, industry, trade unions, the enterprise agency. That is a collective effort, is the first point that I would make. In terms of the urgency that we are taking and responding to the skills implications, I would of course argue that we are acting with pace and determination. The climate emergency skills action plan is overseen by an implementation steering group that includes all those agencies. We are considering the progress that we have made over the past 12 months, which is significant in terms of the commitments that were made at the plan that were set out in the plan 12 months ago. We are also looking at how we lay the foundations for developing that understanding that you are driving at. Do we know where the transition to net zero is going to hit the ground? Do we know what the skills implications are? Are we ready to signal that into the college and university system? Are we ready to amend our upskilling and reskilling provision towards that? I would argue that we are in as good a place as we can be at this moment in time. Can I put the same question to Mary? Is open university geared up for this? Are you making the changes in your courses to meet those skill shortages? I think that, as Chris was saying, the universities and the colleges are all part of that. The key thing is transition. What we are looking at, particularly at the open universities, is how we can help people to make that transition. Part of that is due through the part-time education and being able to reskill while you are still in that job. It is very much about the transition between one sector and another. We are looking at sustainability and green careers and working with SDS and others. We have just recently launched three sustainability micro-credentials, which are in sustainability. We are looking very much at where we need to get to. As Chris was saying, there is a direction of travel but we do not know where it is yet. We need to be flexible and adaptable. One of the key successes that you have in Scotland is that you have a very joined-up education system. The colleges work very closely with universities and we work with schools, but that can be built upon more. We need to begin into schools and train up kids in renewable technologies, then on to colleges and universities and pathways. What are existing workers? There is always a focus on going into schools, but you should be going into oil rigs. Speaking to existing workers, what is being done to help people that are in existing jobs but those jobs are going to disappear soon? We are working in the Cromity Firth project at the moment, looking at them and doing effectively skills gap analysis on the staff at the moment to see what skills they have, what transferable skills we can actually help them to develop. Some of those skills will be those transferable skills and meta skills that you hear about. It is not all about the technical skills that people need. It is actually about the transferable skills, the adaptability, the innovation, who are the leaders of the future, who are actually looking at those areas and industry telling us where the just transition will be, what the skills are actually needed, because we need to work closely with industry. I think that we all need to get better at that systematically about joining up industry, education, people with skills development in Scotland to actually say, what is coming down the line, what are industry telling us and actually how can we get that training out to people before the skills gap hits, how can we transition people into it. Yes, we are working with industries, oil and gas technology people. As I said, Cromity Firth is one of the areas that we are up there working with at the moment to look at that. Feel free to tell us if policy makers are not doing enough to help you do this job. One of the issues, for example, is getting a college, particularly in rural area, is that it is quite easy to deliver a course in something where there is a demand of 20 or 30 students, because that makes it financially viable to do that. However, if you need 10 very specialist engineers, it is just not financially viable to do that, because you cannot run that class. Is there something that we need to be doing to make sure that we support colleges to deliver that work? Yes, great question. I am frustrated that the Cromity Firth little report has not been fully implemented because it provided the blueprint for many of the questions that the whole panel is asking. I think that the challenge of the pandemic coming one month after that has kind of offset that. Of course, the funding council and the Scottish Government has included parts of that, but actually there has been a bit of cherry picking. What we are arguing for is a whole system approach and a lined approach. In one sense, is enough being done? No. What more could be done will immediately implement and encourage the implementation plan of the Cromity Firth little report. That was a report asked for by Scottish ministers to help economic renewal and development and upskilling and reskilling. It was produced and it was allegedly superseded by other reports. I do not believe that it has been as one of the two authors, along with Audrey Comerford, to very experienced practitioners with over half a century of skills knowledge in them. In first sense, you really need to implement the Cromity Firth little report as a blueprint with all the recommendations that it had without cherry picking those. I think that the college sector has got some lead solutions to you. For example, Nescol and Shetland colleges can clearly play a front line role in supporting that, but so can colleges such as City of Glasgow because the oil and gas industry depends on transport and maritime transport. City of Glasgow is a world leader in maritime education and training, and that was evidenced by the convening power that we had to have the shipping industry come to City of Glasgow during COP and spend two weeks there. You have got the transport skills and the maritime skills and, indeed, as we touched on earlier with Fiona's question about the whole supply chain skills that are going to be needed for the oil and gas industry. However, in addition to that, the college sector has got the energy skills partnership, which was mentioned before, and more attention needs to be paid to that. More funding needs to go to that, but also, quite honestly, the advanced manufacturer training network where 17 institutions, 17 colleges are engaged in. Partly to a little bit to go back to Alexander's point in terms of some of those green skills. The Glasgow City region has identified 75,000 jobs from green skills, so many of the people who work in oil and gas live in the central belt, not exclusively, I understand that. However, there is another opportunity for those individuals who have chosen to either, if you like, retrain. That all can be provided and have identified with my colleagues 13 different areas involved in, if you like, housing retrofit skills alone. Clearly, work is being done to support the oil and gas industry. It is an important area for Scotland, but much more can be done to pump prime the whole skills infrastructure that Scotland really needs. That is very helpful. I will not ask Richard Cullen or anybody any other questions in terms of the time, but if Mairi and Chris want to come back on what else the policy makers can do to assist you, then that would feel free to do that. I will put the same question to you, Richard. You will be adapting the qualifications that you need for the sectors. Is there anything that we can do to assist that and what work are you doing at the moment? My warning body is totally reliant on the qualifications that are developed through the likes of CITB, working with sector skills councils and employers. We tend to offer regular qualifications. When we find that it is very difficult to improve those regular qualifications to get what we need, the information back to those who make the decisions in terms of updating frameworks and whatever. I have got quite a few points that I would not mind making in relation to how qualifications are put together in Scotland. Can Mairi provide some ideas afterwards? I will leave that to the chair if you want to do that just now. You could go ahead just now, Mr McClelland, if you would like to. The biggest challenge for us in relation to apprenticeships is how those apprenticeships are added to frameworks and the contribution that is made by sector skills councils to those frameworks. Sometimes we find that there is a whole different agenda and you have asked a question about registration schemes. You can have a whole framework, but the driver for that framework is to give people more cards as opposed to the framework being there to increase people's skills. We have had a lot of instances where, in fact, we were as a business. I have had three businesses that are education related. One, we had to wind up because of the situation here in Scotland in relation to the delivery of apprenticeships. It is probably not what Skills Development Scotland wants to hear, but it was a pretty negative experience. We were at the cutting edge of apprenticeships and qualifications for the extractive sector, the quarian sector, and the situation arose where a particular organisation was able to influence the frameworks so that they were the only organisation that could provide the qualifications, which meant that we could not provide a service in the sector and that we were driven out of that sector. If you are asking me what can Government do about those things, they could look at things such as the conflict of interest problems that are in the education sector and in the apprenticeship sector, and do something about that. That is very useful. I do not have Chris. I am not going to give you a bottle, Chris, but you tell Mary as well if there is anything that we should be doing to assist you in doing that job. One of the things that you will know yourself, Chris, about in the past is that whole flexibility around apprenticeships. I was at a business south of Scotland last week that talked about why apprenticeships, not three years, not two years. There was that whole flexibility to meet those challenges, but I do not know if there is anything that you think that we could be doing to assist. I am going to make two brief responses. We are going to be short of time when I am waiting to bring Gordon in, but please do answer. I am going to make two very brief responses, so I know that you are not going to allow me a bottle. I do not think that the committees are at time to have a discussion about the Scottish apprenticeship system versus the English apprenticeship system, but there are a lot of things that Richard said that I just do not recognise. Scottish apprenticeships are signed off by the Scottish apprenticeship advisory board. Apprenticeship qualifications and frameworks are signed off by industry. We have got a heavy programme of work that is well under way to ensure that apprenticeship standards are fit for purpose and facing into the future. I will be happy to pick up that up with Richard, out with the confines of the committee. In terms of flexibility and apprenticeships, we are absolutely looking at how we can ensure that apprenticeships are a tool that works for as many employers as possible. In the south of Scotland at the moment, we are working with the two local councils to pilot shared apprenticeship models in a range of sectors. That works very close to completion. I am really confident that we will be able to introduce some innovation into how we deliver apprenticeships in the south of Scotland in particular, but roll that out to employers right across the country. Mary, would you like to briefly respond? Briefly on two points. The first one is on apprenticeships. As a university, we deal only in graduate apprenticeships. To Chris's point, the frameworks that have been established with industry, what we would like to see, and I think that that is already on-going, is the frameworks that have been expanded out into other sectors. In terms of the work that we are doing right across the country, we have been seeing real demand for things such as social work apprenticeships, particularly in health and social care. For healthcare assistant apprenticeships at a graduate level and management level, those have not come through yet. A lot of them are technical and in the skills area that have been absolutely needed, but we would like to see those expanding. Just on the flexibility part as well, because the Open University works with such a diverse population in terms of widening access, we would really like to be able to see a flexibility in that model, which is not just a full-time degree, because we see quite a lot of people who get care and responsibilities, maybe going off in maternity leave, maybe being sick, having to come off an apprenticeship programme and then came back on it again rather than being able to flex that up and down in terms of part-time and flexible. That is starting to impact on the equalities part of apprenticeships for us that we are seeing more men taking them rather than women. We would like to be able to work with SDS, and we are already starting to have some of those conversations about that model with SDS and SFC. On the other question about what Government and others can do on that, in terms of not just oil and gas, but in all sectors, we would say funding and parity of esteem for part-time education as in full-time.  There are elements of things that can happen probably quite quickly that could actually make a big difference to that. The part-time fee grant effectively is the only shown town at the moment, and if you earn over £25,000 you have to pay the fees. What we would like to see is Government, and we have seen that in the SFC review, the recommendations from that at the moment about modular learning, part-time learning and life-long learning. That system has not been about one chance at a degree, about having a learning allowance that enables people to be able to draw that down throughout their lifetime. We think that that would make a huge difference to people being able to transition from career into career. I have more support particularly for SMEs. We have seen that with the flexible workforce development fund, enabling people to have £5,000, and we have seen demand from that in the college sector and also from ourselves. However, the key thing here is that 99.3 per cent of businesses in Scotland are SMEs, and they are telling us that the difficulties that they have got are funding and time. Time is a massive thing. Actually not being able to backfill, particularly the uncertainty around Brexit and particularly Covid, has meant that SMEs are struggling to keep up and struggling to keep the staff that they have. The flexibility of being able to help support SMEs in funding is willing. 51 per cent of them said that they want to increase their funding budget this year, their training budget, but they are still looking for a bit more support on that in terms of time and effort. It is a very long-winded answer to something that was supposed to be short, but that would be my plea. Gordon MacDonald, followed by Jamie Halcro Johnston. Thank you very much, convener. A lot of the areas that I always want to ask questions on has been covered, but there are a couple of points that I just wanted a bit of clarification on. The first one is that we have talked a lot about upskilling and reskilling of the existing workforce, but in the SDS paper we have got highlights that Scottish businesses who provide training for staff have fallen from 70 per cent to 59 per cent over the past seven or eight years. I was just wondering, Chris, as a starter, if you could maybe give some background to that. Yes, sure. It is a purely factual position, but let me just explain the facts that are sitting behind that. That data is pulled from something called the employer skills survey, which takes place every two years. The survey was not undertaken in 2019, but it was undertaken in 2020. The fieldwork took place between October 2020 and December 2020, and we know that that was right in the midst of us moving back into a second wave of restrictions. So I think that 2020 figure is absolutely an outlier and is explained by the economic restrictions that we are quite rightly facing in respect to the pandemic. We have, over a long period of time, been fairly consistent prior to that in the number of businesses that were training staff. Do you think that that is an outlier that we are probably lying roughly where we were pre-pandemic? I have a terrible record in terms of predictions and bets, so I am not going to comment on where we are now. I will say that looking over the period from 2013 to 2017, you are right that the percentage of employers in Scotland who were providing training to their staff was fairly consistent at around 70 per cent. That was slightly above the UK level, so if you were to assume, and it is a dangerous thing that things post-Covid are going to be the same as pre-Covid, you would be right, but I am not willing to slap a bet on that. The only other issues that I want to cover, we spoke earlier on about the problems of people supply. We have seen a whole range of vacancies from HGV drivers to people in the agricultural industry, to hospitality, manufacturing, construction and so on. What should the Scottish or indeed the UK Government do immediately to try and address those issues? We have had various calls from Visit Scotland, Scottish Chambers of Commerce and Royal Society of Edinburgh asking for the UK Government predominantly to intervene, and I am just wondering what your views were about how we improve the people supply. I want to just say a couple of things about why I think we are facing this people supply crunch at the moment. Part of that is down, as I said earlier, to the implication of Brexit in EU nationals potentially leaving the country and not coming back in. Part of it is down to economic connectivity. Part of it is down to just the relentless pressure of Scotland's underlying demographics. Those three things combined mean that, for me, there is no one simple answer or response. The response that we need to have needs to be quite broad-reaching. I think that there is a case to be made to bring in workers in short-term visas has been made for certain sectors. We should be looking at that as an opportunity to close gaps. We need to look hard at what we can do to bring in those people who are not currently engaged in the labour market for whatever reason, whether it be because they have health issues, whether they think that there are no jobs out there, whether they are looking for a job. We need to have a focus on that group on broadening the labour supply. We also need to think a little bit more long-term as well, and it is important that we face the short-term pressures, but we need to look at how long-term we can turn around some of those challenges. I think that the role that Paul's institution plays and universities play in attracting talent into Scotland is potentially really important. If we can find a way of locking them in here for three, five, 25, 50 years afterwards, those things combined will all contribute to sorting the long-term challenge, which is causing the issues that we are seeing at the moment. Does anybody else want to come in on that? I think that I was name-checked, so thanks, Chris. Maybe for clarity sake, between City Glasgow College and Edinburgh College, we attract every year 7,000 international students. That is not often recognised. Usually that is more synonymous with universities. It is often the plaintive of colleges that they do not get enough airtime—in fact, I would argue that they do not get enough funding. It is common for a little weed evidence that there is a bigger belief why only a third of tertiary funding goes to colleges and two thirds goes to university. That is on the teaching side. I could not understand if that was university, but I cannot really understand why only a third goes to the teaching side. If you look at the international reputation of Scotland's colleges, not just those two institutions, but other institutions have international and national reputations for their areas, that is a good example. We have a very good starting point to do that, but beyond that, it was mentioned earlier about working with industry, and there is at least across Scotland's colleges some 30,000-day release students. That is another way. I think that, personally, we are past peak degree. We have to get into a situation of more agile responses, more in-work training, more release training, a shorter bite-sized piece of learning. I think that the future will demand that, and I think that the young people and the employees will demand that too. The Open University is working across all four nations of the UK, so we are speaking to each of the Governments in each of the areas, and the key focus of each of them is about the skills part and how we can reskill people. We are effectively lobbying on behalf of ourselves, but obviously the entire education system, colleges and universities, is about the flexible nature of both funding and provision to be able to reskill and upscale people as quickly as possible. Whether that is a short-term 30 credit module in a particular area, or whether that is a pathway that enables people to study in chunks and then bring them in from different institutions and have a pathway towards a degree, because a degree is still a very valuable qualification. We are talking about things such as green skills and technologies. Those are things that we can just upscale someone in 10 weeks. There are trades here that need to be reskilled as well, but we have actually been able to do it in a flexible fashion.  If we can do that systematically in Scotland or across the UK, whether that be the UK Government, if we can do that systematically as possible, and we can provide that at scale and work with partners such as the college sector in Scotland to be able to support that education. As I said earlier, there is an envious position about Scotland's tertiary education system. I was speaking to people in the skills system in Northern Ireland last week, and they were talking about the way that there is a pathway through the STQF framework and the ability of colleges and universities, and the industrial sector to work together. It is envied, so I would not be throwing the baby out of the bathwater and building on what we have, but the funding is critical to that. The modular, flexible work-based part of that is really important if we are going to make sure that we can get to people as quickly as possible when those skills gaps happen now and in the future and be able to predict those as well. I suppose that the only point that I would make about HGV drivers is that in the construction industry, you have people working at the most basic of levels, you are general operative, and every person in work is looking for career progression. In the construction sector, a person, a labourer for a number of years might want to progress to driving a machine, so, in the same way that a construction worker wants to drive a machine, there would be a lot of people out there who want to drive vehicles and see that as a progression. If it could be promoted as some form of career progression, to get people seeing themselves as moving on and progressing through getting qualified and skilled in relation to operating vehicles. Jamie Halcro Johnston to be followed by Colin Beattie. Thank you very much, convener, and morning to the committee and panelist. I'm sorry that I'm not able to be with you today and I hope you can hear me okay. It's blowing a bit of a hoolly here at the moment, so apologies for having slightly disrupted. A lot of the areas have already been covered. I just did one to highlight one of the things that Marie Henry said about parity of esteem and just give my support to that. I think that it's vital. There's somebody that was a former spokesman on skills for my party and convener of the DPG on skills. I think that it's a vital area, as is support for small and medium enterprises, as well as an area that we need to do more to try to encourage and support getting involved. I suppose that the first question that I would really quite like to ask is something that's been covered, but it's really just to get a confirmation from Chris Brody. I wonder if you can remind us of the number of vacancies there are across Scotland at the moment compared to those economically inactive, because I thought that was really interesting what you were saying. Do you think that we're doing enough to get those economically inactive back into work, whether that's supporting them or other ways of encouraging them? I suppose is the balance of carrot and stick to use a very crude term right at the moment, and what more could we be doing? I can put that to Chris Brody, please. I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you again in terms of being able to provide a specific number of job vacancies in Scotland. That number's unfortunately not stuck in my head. What I can say with a strong degree of confidence is that the number of job vacancies that we're seeing advertised at the moment is above pre-pandemic levels, and I'll be happy to confirm kind of those numbers in writing. I want to come back again to—I have got a figure that is in my head that I haven't shared, so the Institute for Employment Studies has just looked at mobility in the jobs market over the past three months, and across the UK 2.2 million people moved job or changed job or entered a job in the summer months. That's an absolutely phenomenal number and is the highest number for something like 30 years, and that's been driven by people returning to work, as well as people changing jobs. There is mobility in taking place in the labour market at the moment. Forgive me, I've now forgotten the second part of your question while I try to remember numbers, so would you be okay to repeat that? Well, it was really, as I say, I suppose what I'm trying to get at is—or trying to find out—is of that labour shortage or supply shortage, how much of that can be met by existing—those existing economically inactive and kind of those economically inactive may not be suitable for some of the positions other—but it was really about whether the balance is right between encouraging those and supporting those people back into the workplace. Is the balance between supporting them and other more fossil ways of encouraging them to get back into the workplace? Are they correct at the moment? SDS does not have direct responsibility, so I have the joy of being a commentator rather than a deliverer in this area. There are 823,000 people who are economically inactive in Scotland. I think that number is a little bit misleading. I think that the group that we should be focusing on are those who are economically inactive and who are looking to get back into work, and that's in the region of 157,000 people. Some of the mechanisms that we have in place in SDS will be available to those people through the National Transition Training Fund. The route of upskilling of universities through colleges is also open to them. I think that the bigger longer-term challenge for us—and I understand why we are very focused on short-term pressures at the moment—is how we build strength and capacity in the working-age population over the long-term. I think that that leads you to looking at those who are choosing—who are not working because they have an illness or perhaps have some challenge that prevents them from getting back into the labour market. We are seeing investment in some of those underlying causes, for example, around childcare. I think that there needs to be a strong focus from employers as well. We are already beginning to see that. In response to Labour shortages, employers are looking at the amendment of job roles and at different markets and demographics, rather than considering the digital technology sector. That is a great example of the way that they are responding to some of the challenges that they are facing from actively recruiting from neurodiverse groups. We assume that we are the only ones who have the responsibility for fixing that. I think that there is a big responsibility on employers to think hard about how they best secure their talent pipelines over the future. Thanks very much. If I can stay with you, Chris, another area that we have looked at and has come up again and again is automation. We are obviously seeing progression in various areas in terms of automation. We are also likely to see potential changes, for example, in how we meet things such as climate change and trying to get more freight off the road. How does that impact on the need for AHEV drivers? If we are looking at more local sourcing, which again could be a positive rather than a negative, how that impacts on demand and need within certain sectors. Can I ask you how Skills Development Scotland engage with business in terms of future needs? Where automation is likely to lead to either pressures or relief pressures in certain areas? How easy is it to do that? On the ball, if I may be a slightly unfair term, how do you think you are in terms of where you think automation might be able to relieve some of the pressures going forward? I will answer the question in two parts. One is about how we engage and two is about how on the ball that is, because I think that they are slightly separate. Our engagement with industry is pretty deep and wide-ranging. Over the last 10 years, we have established an infrastructure in the shape of industry leadership skills groups. We have published a series of sectoral skills investment plans and we keep that work live. That is essentially based on the premise that we inform our skills investment plans and our own apprenticeship programmes of investment skills, driven by what employers are telling us is going on in their sectors. We are picking up evidence already of automation becoming a really hot issue in elements of food and drink. We are seeing automation playing out really heavily in terms of advanced manufacturing, as it has been for a number of years. The implication of that is that, in the medium to long-term, perhaps fewer people will be needed to service those industries. What we are also hearing is about the limits of automation. In some settings, in particular, tourism and hospitality is an example of where you can, but sometimes the customer experience is not what a business wants to deliver, so it will play out separately in different areas. I said to him, how on the ball is that? That is not an easy question to answer across the piece, but what I would say is that our approach is based on understanding that as an agency, but also on understanding where employers and industries are at. That is reliant on how far sighted employers are about the changes that are coming down the track. That is really what I have got. I do not know if there is anybody else on the panel that would like to come in on that, convener. I will take Mary, and then I will need to move on to Colin Beattie, who will be the final questioner. Just a really quick point and maybe an example on the economically inactive part of the question. Maybe just an example of something that we have undertaken with funding from Skills Development Scotland and their Digital Start fund. During the pandemic, we worked with the Department for Work and Pensions and took 100 people who had been long-term unemployed through a 13-week coding skills course that gave them industry certification at the end of it. At the end of that program, we also worked with employers in a career capacity as well. At the end of that 13-week programme, we got 10 people jobs in the tech sector. They had been long-term unemployed and one of the participants actually cried because they did not think that they could ever do a university-level qualification and never meant to get back into the job. Part of attracting and being able to get to the economically inactive people is about us working in partnership, so providers working in partnership with business, working in partnership with agencies such as the Department for Work and Pensions, but also those agencies in the third sector who are working with people who are economically inactive and finding the right thing for them that there is a job at the end of it. We can do that, particularly because we have open access, but that means that it is open access to the entire education system. It is not just to an OU qualification. We can do the first part of it and then pass them on to Paul's college or other colleges or pass them back into industry because they are part qualified. It is about finding that it is working in partnership that is really key for that, and that is what we do quite a lot of. We might be able to play a part in that. It is just an example to show some of the stuff that can be done if we get the funding right, we get to the right people and we provide them with a job at the end of it, and that is a really quick time frame as well. Having had the opportunity to listen to all that has gone before, there is clearly no quick fix to our current problems with the supply chains in terms of the labour shortages, the skills shortages and so on. Chris has mentioned about the £823,000 economically inactive of whom about 20 per cent are actively looking for work. Is that in line with our competitor economies? It seems a very high figure, but is it in line with our competitor economies? Chris, do you have a figure at your fingertips? I am going to have a really stiff conversation with my briefing team at SDS on the numbers that they provide me with. Again, I apologise, I do not have an exact number. What I can do is say a couple of things. In terms of where Scotland compares in terms of economic activity to the rest of the UK, the Scottish economic activity rate is typically higher than the rest of the UK. What I would say about that 19 per cent figure, and I am rarely surprised by numbers. On the contrary to appearances today, I work with a lot of numbers. That 19 per cent figure that I have referenced today of economically inactive people looking for work is the lowest proportion of those economically inactive for a long time. I think that there is a story that will emerge from the outcome of the pandemic that we have seen lots of people make the choice to leave the labour market, particularly older workers, particularly older women. Being able to quantify what contribution that has made to the labour choke that we are seeing at the moment, I would find difficult to do. I think that that is an emerging story that we should be keeping an eye on. It would be interesting if you could give us some comparative figures in terms of, with our competitors, truly important. Just to move on from that, there are 157,000 people who are actively looking for work, and there are obviously disconnects with skills and so on. Consistently, over the years that we have heard from companies such as B&Q that focus on hiring older staff, they are more productive and more loyal and consistent in their work than perhaps some of the younger workers. There is clearly a resource that is valued by a lot of those companies. I am assuming that, within that 157,000, there is a proportion of older people looking for work. We are looking for a quick fix in some ways. Is there nothing that we can do to tap into those resources better than we are in order to provide immediate cover in certain areas? Maybe I will ask Paul to view on that. For me, we have many of the tools at our disposal here in Scotland. We just need to scale them up and scale them up in pace. We talked about minnows, economic and active. The college sector deals with a lot of those students. If you think that one in three of all students in general, in all colleges, comes from the most disadvantaged areas, there are deep pockets at disadvantage still in Scotland and deep growing inequality because of the pandemic and 10 years plus of austerity. For the colleges to have a 93 per cent success rate for 25 per cent of all higher education to be delivered now in colleges for many of those for older workers and older adults. The Comforter Report talked about the importance of lifetime learning. In the good old days, that used to be called lifelong learning, but we managed to dismantle that as well. There are reasons why we did that. We had an urgent focus after the last crisis in finance and developing the young workforce, but we seemed to do this to the exclusion of everybody else. We did not do the young workforce and we did not continue any form for the older workforce, so we still have in our colleges the residual infrastructure to do that. If many of the recommendations in Comforter Report were to implement it in fast, I know that I said that once, so I am trying to push that, then quite honestly, after the consultation with all the key stakeholders, I think that you will get greater alignment, and you will get a greater and a fairer response to the workforce. You can get the older workers coming in and getting the skills that they need in shorter bits of learning at a level that they want. Where else can you get, comparably, any in the UK, I would argue, 23,000 courses to choose from? We are not a massively diverse country, like England, where it is very fragmented, where it is very cohesive in that sense. Scotland, as I said, has got many of the tools, but the narrative is not shared, the narrative is exclusive. The challenge here is how do we ensure that the narrative is not exclusive, how do we ensure that it is inclusive, and how do we rebalance and refocus after the pandemic? It is a fantastic opportunity to reboot a fantastic opportunity to give hope to the older workers that you are talking about in lifetime learning. Of all the many, many things colleges do, you can, in essence, describe them as lifetime learning and support for business, particularly symbiotic support for business. It is the blueprints there. Let us scale it up at peace. Richard, is there a way to bring older workers back productively into the supply chain to ease some of the pressures that we have now? It is like everything else, you just have to encourage them to come back into it and see a valuable contribution that they can make. We find in our sector that older workers just love this idea of mentoring the younger people coming through. They see that there are a lot of older construction professionals and civil engineers who just want to mentor their young engineers and want to contribute to their training on their development and their upskilling. It is about making them feel valued and valuable to the sector. That is the answer. You would not think anything other than that from the open university. The older workforce is recognised that it can make an amazing contribution, particularly if we are upskilling and reskilling people. One of the great examples of that has been the success of some of the graduate apprenticeship schemes, because a lot of the graduate apprenticeships have been used for people who are already in the workplace to be able to upskill. We have seen a lot of people who might work in software engineering taking on our cyber security post graduate apprenticeships. It is a way of engaging with staff who are already there to upskill them into the careers and jobs that the industry needs and that people are getting upskilled into. The ability of graduate apprenticeships to be able to work with people over 24 means that, but employers absolutely see the loyalty that they get from that staff. We obviously work with quite a lot of over-25s at the open university. We work with younger people, but we also work predominantly with the over-25s. Back to my point again, I think that if you are going to encourage people to come back into the sector, whether they be economically inactive or whether they need to upskill for careers, it needs to be worthwhile for them. The skills need to be available there, the training needs to be available for them there, that is flexible, that fits in with their lifestyle, because when you are an older learner, you have more life going on at the same time. You might have kids, you might have caring responsibilities, lots of different things that are happening. The funding needs to be there, the flexibility needs to be there as well. We are doing quite a lot of work in the health and social care sector at the moment, which is obviously a massive area of skills gaps, and we have been able to look at people who might be working in that sector, training them up to be nurses, doing our introduction to health and social care qualifications, working with the triple SC, utilising both the young workforce and the workforce that are actually in the care sector at the moment and upskilling them into managerial careers, or into nursing careers as well, because the care sector really sees the older workforce there as being key to that. They have the skills, the loyalty, and we just need to get them trained up and into the higher-level skills there as well. Chris, is the older workforce potential quick fix? As someone who is rapidly moving to becoming an older part of the workforce, I would say yes. I think that we need to exhaust all possibilities for re-engaging people on work, and I am really encouraged by what I am hearing from Paul-Marie in terms of the focus of what they are doing. I would not go as far as to say that it is a quick fix, but it is an important part of the solution. I will take a brief supplementary, which is related to Michelle Thomson. It is following on from the theme that we are exploring in terms of the role of women. Chris, you triggered it in your opening remarks about economically inactive. Here we go again with the numbers, but I wonder if you have any statistics as to what percentage of the population are women who are economically inactive.  It is very quickly. No, I do not have those figures to hand, but we will provide what analysis we can as a supplementary to the committee. In terms of what we do to disaggregate data, we capture data on characteristics of individuals who participate in their apprenticeship programmes and their other training programmes by a whole range of characteristics. Again, we can provide that as a written supplementary. As a widening access institution, we actively promote women into careers, particularly in STEM, and we have a really high proportion of women in STEM courses, which we are proud of. We do that, and we also look at it cross-functionally. Women with care and responsibilities are women who are carers and women who live in multiple areas of deprivation. We do that across sectoral things to see if there are other aspects to that as well. I will increase my briefing team for the numbers. When you consider that 75 per cent of the population is women or young people, and when you also look at my own institutions, about 49 per cent male to 51 per cent female, and that figure oscillates, you also then look at, for example, some of the most disadvantaged that we talked about earlier, for example, mothers trying to learn English to provide money and benefits for their family. Presently, in Glasgow, we are able to support 3,000 of those women in returning to learn that language, but there is a weight list of 10,000 to do those. Quite honestly, it is the tip of the iceberg, but it is very much about inclusion. Colleges have, for centuries, been involved in providing those local opportunities, particularly on a part-time learning basis. That lifetime learning that you go back to and whether that is superseded now or enhanced by those micro-credentials that we spoke about earlier, that will be a great opportunity to say to your mother or an elder relative saying that you can actually get a qualification that is recognised, nationally recognised after 20 hours. If you said that you are going to spend the next three to four years doing that, they are just not going to do it. Do you have any comments on—you do work in, it seems to be predominantly traditionally male sectors, do you see an increase in need to attract women into the workforce and what can be done to support that? That was the only point that I would make. It is about making the sector that you work in more attractive to people, more attractive to women, and breaking down the jobs into jobs that might not have been considered under, say, the construction industry. However, if you start talking about things such as people who work in web bridges, people who work in labs and material testing, you can open up opportunities. There are people who start thinking about constructions just about driving a machine or digging a hole. It is about making it more attractive to everybody that might need a job. That is great. Thank you. I would like to thank all the witnesses this morning, and thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us and contribute to the inquiry. I will now move to agenda item 3, which is consideration of the Scottish Government consent notification to a UK statutory instrument that is in papers 3 and 4. The committee is invited to consider the consent notification for the EFTA and TCA international agreement procurement SI. Are members content to consent the notification? I will now move into the private session for the remaining agenda items.