I welcome everyone to the third meeting of the Education and Skills Committee in 2017. Can I please remind everyone, including myself, present to turn the mobile phones and other devices on to silent for the duration of the meeting. I have received apologies from Richard Lochhead this morning. The first item of business is the decision on whether to take item 5 on a work programme in private. Are we all agreed? The second item of business today is on the commission on widening access and I welcome to the meeting three members of that commission, Dame Ruth Silver, the chair, Maureen McKenna, the executive director of education services at Glasgow City Council and Professor Petra Wend, principal and vice chancellor of Queen Margaret University. Dame Silver, I understand that you have agreed to make an opening statement outlining the work of the commission. Thank you very much indeed. I am delighted to be here. I have been longing to come before you and help to open up this swiftly written, slightly dense but crucial report. We had ten months to do it in and my colleagues were incredibly industrious and supportive. However, if it is okay, I would like to start by telling you what we found at the end of our investigations, which led us to make the recommendations that we have made. After scurrying around the whole of Scotland, people were generous and hospitable to visit us from all of us, some of us, and came to see us from far from parts of Scotland to tell us of their thoughts and experience of access. The conclusion—this is a headline, but I am happy to go into more detail of that. Scotland knows how to do it very well, but it is in a difficult developmental stage. The work that we came across, in some cases inspiring, was innovative in many institutions, based on a dedication to this work. My personal and professional standpoint is that access work is a specialism in its own right in the way that physics and other things are. The pedagogy is important, the development of staff is important and the portability of the experience via credentials is crucial. However, the state that it is in at the moment is, in some parts, exciting and in some parts, very frail and in some parts, stale. I say that because I went to every visit and so everybody. It is heavily dependent on inspired individuals who really believe in the cause of access. It is institutionally based, so what is a terrific practice in one institution is very different from practice down the road. Sometimes there is duplicate practice and sometimes the portability between very neighbouring institutions is not quite right. The deficit on the whole is placed on the individual learner instead of deficits in the institutional behaviours. However, the good news is that there is a decade of terrific professional practice and access work and there are layers of good professionals who just need pulling together around some overall framework. I think that that was the state of what we were looking at. To remind the commission that we decided to go for an appreciative inquiry, so we wanted to see what worked. That was part of our remit, to see what good practice could be taken further. With that conclusion, let me say a wee bit to open up the report. I am sorry that we wrote you a long report, but we did not have time to write your short one. It is really quite simple in that spirit. I am glad to be here today especially to open up the report a bit with the help of my colleagues who have been introduced. The timing is terrific because the report is ready to move forward with the appointment of Professor Scott. To remind you to trail back the origins of this commission was a statement from the First Minister who said, I determine that a child born today from difficult circumstances will have equal access to going to university as children born in better circumstance. The verb determine was particularly inspiring and very cohesive I think for the commission. That was a good lifetime, a good lifespan. We worked with an imagined horizon of 2030. That chunked into three five-year plans because the development stages are different. The first one is about gathering together good practice, shaking it about to see what is good enough and what is not and what should be removed. Moving forward with the agenda, we set out in our 34 recommendations. Just to say that 12 good people joined me around the table, and the first thing that we did was induct to one another. It was a very important reason and working with the civil servants to get the kind of commission that I thought was needed to give a 360 degree look at access because it is not just access to education, it is access onwards to economic life. We wanted to reflect employer views and so on. We were able to find 12 people who were in their independent professional rights but who also represented the subsystems around the work of access. Schools, universities, skills development and so on, the care community, the students themselves and staff themselves. We worked in our induction phase on what the philosophy of the commission was. I will say it because it is really important. There are many accusations in the press about social engineering and so on, but our philosophy is a simple one that access work and education is simply about fairness, that it is also about belief in academic excellence for all and it is a social and economic good for the nation. Our working principles, we had five of them, were that our work would be systemic, appreciative, analytic, evidence-based and collaborative. The root of the commission having been established and with the commissioners in place and inducted and themselves representing something systemic and agreed philosophy, the organising principles established, we launched a call for evidence for over the summer and we commissioned research pro bono, given pro bono basis from the universities to look at what was going on in access in Scotland. We had a working process established where we met monthly, there were themed meetings, we had visitors from the different subsystems and students themselves and the care specialist come to talk to us. Many visitors came, we made many visits into some very cold parts of Scotland in wet evenings and waiting for trains and stations and we were absolutely available all of us to talk at events. I was very heartened by the number of invitations that we got from membership bodies and representative bodies, including trade unions, generally and of course the professional unions. I asked one thing of the commissioners that each of them would steward an interest on the agenda. For example, we had people working on different parts of it, we looked at SIMDs with joint working parties, we had missions and so on. So there was always a steward available to talk to, to explain things to our own colleagues and indeed we had the induction with our own members telling us what was going on. We set up in the end a group of specialist groups and I'll say more about that but I want to mention them for the sake of the commissioner because the idea always was that people have specialist groups to advise us and they were not commissioners, they were people from the field and mixed people from the field in terms of sectors they came from. We wanted to leave scaffolding for the future so that when the commissioner was appointed there were groups there who had explored the themes, the working papers existed or they were not published in hard copy. So there was a dowry of something to pass on in the spirit of generativity and of course we had the interim and final report and then the handover. The stance we took as we did this work was again a simple one, inequality is damaging, it's unsustainable and it's unfair and it was time it stopped. The work process as I said was 10 months and our organising principles with the commissioners were that they were independent, they were specialist and they were linked backwards into their own areas of work and institutions around our table. As I said we tried to create the system around the table. We had arguments on able to resolve them, some of them will take a while but also the timescale was very short indeed but the arguments I tried to maintain a cheership of them not being personal but being issues between the subsystems, so staying curious the whole time and trying to get on there. As I've said we were delighted that Scotland, you have terrific professionals and practice is some groundbreaking systems. The systems here I've not seen the like of anywhere but they are in the institution and modest as the institutions are, they don't get talked about much elsewhere and that has to stop and actually more than anything else this is the sincerity of a tent. The problem you have is actually that they're not all the same, they're not all connected and some of them need refreshing. The conclusion was innovative as things are they are idiosyncratic in Scotland and that needs to change. There's focus on the individual's deficit, the territory of institutions, there were cities where I saw three summer schools and it could have been wonderful and it could have had young people meeting people who were different from them. It is unsystemic and it's an easy move I think from institution to unsystemic in planning terms of course it takes time. There's a lack of portability in the system and the data is poor to inadequate I think. It was very hard because of the way it's organised and that became a big issue that needs to be picked up soon but Scotland also has untapped gifts. I'm thinking of the open university where deputy head teachers were able to find units of philosophy from students from very difficult areas and they would present those to universities and actually get the credit for that. So some smashing defiance in your institutions. So the strategic shift that Scotland needs to make is clear for me. It is from individual passions to institutional change, it's from institutions to a system at work and at work together of course and a place being the focus of that. So people working together, institutions working together, better I think gets a lot of bangs for bucks. I know that there are a lot of recommendations and I've explained why. But really they categorise I think into three very helpful categories. We talked about the leadership of this system change including political leadership. We talked about the access is about learning, it's not about funding or cutting deals, it's really about how do you manage the teaching and learning and assessment in institutions so that it actually shows people for the talents that they have and it's about finding the places of leverage. There were 34 recommendations. Not all recommendations are equal in my view but there are some foundation recommendations and let me just say what they are. There's eight foundation recommendations. That is recommendation one, the commissioner and the leadership of this change and that's happened. Commission two is about the framework for fair access. If this isn't about learning, if it's not about what's being taught and assessed in portable then it's not going to work. Learning needs to be looked at and pruned and supported. It's about the framework for fair access, it's about funding being congruent with the funding for access. In time we should not be supporting work that's not leading anywhere for the learners. Access thresholds of course, those are separate and ambitious but those have to be looked at because learners presenting are presenting from very different routes and from very different opportunities and I think we're clear about that. That doesn't mean that we're anywhere in the disputes but nevertheless the view of the commission that that should go forward. The threshold and contextual admissions are the important ones, they need to be known, they need to be published and acted upon. Care experience, we were delighted at the instant response from government actually on a few of the recommendations and particularly that one. The non-refundable bursary for care experience learners is crucial as well and the targets need to be worked at in line with this development sense of the five-year plan. All of the other 26 recommendations have three intentions to strengthen the work that needs to be done, to support the work that needs to be done and to stretch the findings into all the institutions involved in access. I know we're going to talk about priorities going forward and maybe I'll leave that for other colleagues to contribute as well but I hope that that opens up for you some of the thinking in that 10 months, some of our ways of working, the things we believed in and I'm very happy to open up and take questions along with my colleagues. Thank you very much, Dame Silver. I'm always delighted to hear somebody who says that we're really looking forward to coming in front of the committee. I have a question based on comments that you had made previously. It appears obvious to me that you were right when you said that simply can't be the case, a large majority of Scotland's best talent happens to reside in our most affluent areas. But what evidence is there to show that the bright pupils from depressed areas can do just as well or better than a more affluent peers, even if their qualifications aren't as good? I don't have the references to hand, but certainly the report from Sutton, some of the work done in Scotland, shows that actually coming from a disadvantaged background—I'm talking about school backgrounds as well—when those young people are treated, taught, assessed and in the company of others on the same course, they do very well indeed. So there is evidence, not enough, and we need more of that. That's why the sense of five-year plan is to say, let's start getting the basis for that. I know that my colleague has a number of questions around data and stuff, but just one last question on that then. Is there any evidence to suggest the money lost to the economy because we aren't at this stage getting those people into university that could be benefit in the country? There's evidence from other places—in England, certainly—about the cost to the economy of these young people, not doing as well as they could do, the sort of support systems, how hard jobs are to find and actually some of the issues that they're facing. Again, in the ten months that we had, we didn't have enough time or stuff to really get under the skim of that. There is evidence from other places. Good morning. I wonder if I can pursue this issue about data. You were very clear indeed in the information that we received about some of the ambitions of what you are flagging up to the commission, and that includes a shared understanding of the barriers. I think that's extremely important. We've got a list here of eight barriers that have been suggested as being really key to this issue. I'm actually quite interested in the data that supports your findings in this area and, obviously, on a broader issue, how that data supports the decision by the Scottish Government to insist that universities will accept, in their intake, 20 per cent from the disadvantaged communities by 2030. Could you say a little bit more about your concerns over data, which you highlighted in your introduction and your answer to the convener just now? Because what this committee has sat through a lot of education evidence recently, particularly about the curriculum for excellence, and it was a point that was raised by the OECD and by lots of experts in Scotland that the actual data that we need is not really all that great. If you don't have the good data, it's very difficult for the committee to make decisions about scrutiny and deciding what the policy should be. Can I just ask about this data problem? What is it that we are missing that would help you better to inform this committee and, obviously, the wider public about what we should be doing? I think that it suffers generally from the same disease that is not systemic. There is very good data in strands about particular sectors. We were surprised to find that the exchange of data between, for example, the funding council and the inspectorate and some of the local authorities and some of the central body, some of the civil service itself. There was no way of it working together. People didn't know a lot of the data that other people heard. Once we got them together, they worked well together, but they had never had common cause to do that before. Can I just ask about that? In your introduction, you said that you thought some of the data, the collection of data, was poor. Is it a question that we don't actually have the available data to hand, or is it a question about communicating that data? I think that it's both. Scotland has been through a lot of kind of febrile time in policy changing education, so the kind of linking the early years data, I think, is now strengthened in being established, but it didn't go back far enough. So there's a difference in the timescale, there's a difference in the kind of concepts used behind that. We were surprised because certainly the team and I, trying to find some information, found that teams inside the funding council had the data, they had them in regional data, some of it was regional, some of it was national. So there's just something about taking the chance to have an overarching framework where different sets of data can talk to one another. This isn't just Scotland's problem, by the way. I sit in a group at the Royal Society looking at how we can bring, now that we have super data and how we can bring that together. So it's a problem generally in England as well and in other places. But there's something, the changes have all happened, some of the data hasn't happened, some of the data has been developed in different ways. I'm saying, have a look at that seriously. Institutions have their own data, local authorities have theirs, to serve the reports they have to make to their politicians and so on and to government. I think that Professor Vendwood wants to come in. Could I just ask one more question before that? I think that our issue is that we've obviously got your excellent recommendations and this is a very important issue. I don't think that anybody disagrees with the principle behind widening access. I don't think that there's any disagreement about that whatsoever. There are some disagreements about how it should happen and it's very important that, in that debate about how it should happen, that the data that underpins the decisions that are made is comprehensive, that it's coherent, that it's consistent and that it's as valuable as we possibly can. Otherwise, I think that we will be in danger of pursuing policies without the factual basis that we really need and particularly from a scrutiny angle. Would you accept that? We had a specialist group looking at that, a joint working party with University Scotland and the civil servants and some of our commissioners, again chaired by an independent commissioner from the Sutton Trust. There's working parties going on in lots of places and I think that they've moved that forward. I know that work has gone on since we finished the commission. Some parts of the system have taken that up further. I bring the committee's attention. The University of Glasgow on West of Scotland local authority partners published a report in December 2016 on the back of really taking all the data that was available and drilling right down from 2009 to 2015 about impact for access and that's sitting with the SFC just now and I would recommend it to the committee to read it. So that will be published? Yes, it's published. I know that it's published because I've read it but would there be a wider dissemination of that because I think it strikes at the heart of what Dame Silver was saying about the issue about good data being sometimes out there but not necessarily available to all the people who need it and particularly not in terms of this committee. There's a different or another aspect to data as well which is the definition interpretation of what deprivation means and the report makes recommendations in terms of SMD and has got targets for 2030 and beforehand as well and we did realise that SMD is not the right way to measure deprivation because two out of three deprived children live in non SMD 20 areas and this is what we need to realise as well and this is one of our recommendations is that there should be a unique learner number allocated to each child whereby we could actually follow the progression of the child through life in order to measure long term where our successes are and where interventions can succeed obviously we are not there yet we haven't even started yet so in the absence of that we our targets were an SMD but we had a special session on deprivation and data in that context as well and University of Scotland for a long time has worked on on a definition of deprivation and looked at a basket of measures and this is something we need to take on in the absence of SMD being the only measurable way of looking at it. Joanne, you want to come in on that point? Just briefly on this question of SMID except it's not the only measure but did you not find that there is an issue about concentration of deprivation within a community impacting the ability of schools to deliver services for example and therefore a young person who themselves are very supported perhaps not the reason for one coming to family but learning in that school will have different pressures than a school which doesn't have that and therefore it is an important it's not just about the individual child it's a cumulative effect of deprivation on the services within the communities in which they're learning. No, I completely agree with you but it cannot be the only measure there's a lot of deprivation in rural areas which we need to look at and they are not in SMD 20 so we're talking about a basket of measures which includes SMD we need to take it into account. Do you accept that there is a question of the impact on a school and its ability to support the young people in the school in a community which is deprived because the pressures are on it they won't happen in other areas and I accept the point about rurality and I think there are other factors that can be used to measure that but there is a very specific question around the learner journey which is about the pressures on that class or in that community. You've touched on what I was going to ask you about. I come from a rural constituency up in the north-east of Scotland obviously Aberdeen University and Robert Gordon University have made recommendations to you and asked about this. I specifically want to ask what's come out of that discussion about where you have potential students who would qualify that are getting missed because they're not in those SIMD areas. What criteria have you added to the mix there that maybe could identify those students that may be living in a street, be living in a town that looks on the surface of it fairly affluent but in that particular household there are issues there. I'm interested to know what your findings were there. To add at the basket of measures I think they included four or five and I can't record them all but low performing schools was part of that because it isn't always the case that low performing schools are in SMD 20 areas. Free school meals I think we looked at as well. What else did we look at? Family histories of dense HE, the number of pupils that schools sent on into higher education so the schools' success at higher education, pay and success? Absolutely. However, I would say that we didn't come to a conclusion that those were the right basket of indicators. The commission didn't have, as Dame Ruth has already said, the time to be able to take those indicators and be able to say, oh yeah, for sure, let's use that one. I think that there still is a lot of work needed done in that area and I think that there still is a view and it came through in the evidence to the committee today that the role of the admissions officer is still a very critical one around what a contextualised admission would be and that relationship. I think that it is the tension between the institutional based approach, getting a systemic approach and then allowing those individual circumstances that are really necessary to be taken into consideration, because you are absolutely right. The rural dimension is a very important one and it is not to say that there is not deprivation and not challenges for those young people and those families living in a rural area. Therefore, it is the school who would know that information. How does the school get that link into the admissions officer? How does the admissions officer have time to sift in amongst all that plethora of information that comes in? That is where we need to get better at getting a systemic approach but also not forgetting each and every young person that we want to show that has the potential out there, because that is the fairness element that comes out from the commission. If you have those universities, it could look, for example, like the University of Aberdeen, may have hidden individuals that, because they are not identified as being from those areas, that they look like they are not meeting any kind of target that has been the other way around. I agree with you. University of Scotland, we have already started with three work streams and one of them is on admissions. We are particularly looking at contextualised admissions, but we are also looking at the various criteria that we want to use for contextualised admissions. We want to agree on a framework for that across all universities. We are going to look further into that. SIMD was not designed to help people to choose young people. SIMD is a measure that has another intention. It has been used elsewhere. It is a monitoring measure, more than anything else. That is why we badly need the work that is going on in contextualised admissions. We have given you examples of that. They are hypotheses. The work needs to start. The work that is going on, the working groups that are set up, are self-authorising in a way, and I am delighted about that, because that is exactly the spirit that we need. Both groups decided that we should crack on with that while other things are happening. That needs the leadership and needs to be focused on learning. SIMD is not about learning. The discussion around SIMD has also been discussed at the Public Audit Committee, as we looked at Auditor General's report. Following that, if I have my own discussions with Aberdeen University, Robert Gordon's University and something that has come through in those discussions, is that, with the current funding settlement for universities and the cap places for Scottish students, if we are going to be increasing demand and having more homegrown students going to university, there will be fiercer competition. There was some concern expressed to me that we could displace able students. How do we avoid doing that? It was one of the issues discussed at the commission, no doubt, because it came up as a topic. We decided that it was not up to us to make recommendations as to whether student numbers are capped or not. It was up to the Scottish Government to react to our recommendations. Now whether displacement or not is taking place is arguable, but it is clear if by 2030 we want to have 20% of SMD 20 students in universities, it means that there are some students who would have got in, might not have got in. Now the question whether that is fair or not is a different matter because somebody who would have got in now, where the particular grades might show less potential than a student who wouldn't have got in now and who would actually succeed. So it is not right to say that we need another 20% students or places for that, so that doesn't quite work. But there is a danger that some students might be squeezed out and it might be those who are just about getting into university, so they either squeeze middle, so to say. So we need to look at that very carefully in all of our three work streams in University Scotland, so we have already addressed the three meters of the work streams. We meet regularly to look at that as well, but all we can do is work within the environment that we are working in and then doing our best. I am independent now and I stood down the day after we launched the report that you have displacement now. You have displacement now. You have displacement of bright young people who don't have the right badges through no fault of their own. Scotland in the Four Nations, of course, has got the highest percentage of advantaged young people going to university than the other nations. Thank you for the question and then very briefly the day after that. Yes, thanks a lot. It is just a sort of second to the composition we are having just now about the exam idea and the area that I represent as an area for high deprivation. I think that for me, I don't know whether you detected when you were looking through it, it is still about an attitudinal thing. When I went to, I was lucky enough to go to university when I finished school and, like a few of my friends that I went with, I was sort of the first in my family to have went, but I still feel that going around schools and going around the area, there is still a consensus among a lot of young people that university is not for me. I wouldn't be able to go to university so there is that whole societal attitudinal thing, but I wondered when you were investigating the circumstances what exactly you found in SMID areas or other areas that were preventing that. For example, welfare, the situation around welfare reform, how is that impacting? I think that you are spot on with that. The attitude is a big problem. Actually, some of the university, Robert Gordon, has got this fabulous setup where they have pre-freshers. You really have all of the problems cracked in some place or another in Scotland, but I wanted to say that that attitude is not just about getting in, it is about staying there and it is also about the jobs people apply for when they leave. It can be a lifelong burden if we are not careful. It is definitely there. The young people who have broken through tackling that have done so with support for learners as well as support for learning, but we are very aware. I did a couple of the summer schools, I went along as a summer school learner and sat in on some of the teaching. People were saying that these learners would not come to summer schools because they needed to work and they did not have money. They went to summer schools and worked hard at weekends. They mentored one another on how to have more confidence and not to be put down by the posh ones, as one of the young women described it. However, it is a big problem and it is really palpable here in a way that I am not sure. I have always worked in areas of deprivation and access is my specialty, but I noted instantly how hard it was for them to see themselves in those positions. However, there is work going on in early years, for example, when you walk in and the teddy bear on the desk is sitting there in its gown and mortarboard. Work is going on reaching back down the system to take some of the stuff on because it is a big problem, even when you have the qualifications. Let's come back to what Professor Wend said, that we have not mentioned the role of colleges in this. I do not particularly agree with the displacement idea because there is always a place. What would you say is the role of colleges in higher education? Of course, colleges provide higher education and also a route to university for people. The work streams that we are leading on in university Scotland is on articulation. Colleges play a big role in that. I think that universities and colleges in Scotland can improve on that. What we need to be mindful about is that the courses taught in colleges are not only feeder programmes for universities and this is something that we need to find the right framework for. Those who are able to go to university should and that should be encouraged, but we also need closer working relationships between colleges in Scotland to look at the curriculum so that it fits because we do not want the articulation students to fail once they get into university because the curriculum is just not matched at all. This is again something that we are looking very closely at in one of our three work streams. Colleges play a huge role, but we must not forget that colleges also offer skills and prepare people for work and do not just feed the courses for universities. My own background is further education. I am a college principal and I am greatly admiring the concept of articulation and some of the work that I have seen is splendid. Scotland is on the cusp of a risk of how it sees articulation. It feels to me something like this. You will know that the expansion in Scotland in widening access has been through your college system much more than through your university system. Let us be clear about that. It is wonderful and I brag about it in England. However, there is something really wrong at the engagement end. We found young people and older people doing the same level for certainly twice. They moved from a college into university but actually crossed over to the same level. There was no progression in it for very good reasons. That is why we have the framework for access. The modules did not fit or there was a specialism that they needed. Articulation on the whole is not portable. What you do for getting into one university is not nationally portable. It is an agreement compact between institutions. Nevertheless, it is a fabulous way of working and it worked for Scotland. However, it is on the cusp of risk that it will be seen as second class, it will be seen as not portable, it will cost more money and people will waste money doing things on the same level. That should not be going on. That is not right. In the case of the variation in the country, there are examples of very good practice, in which college and universities have arrangements that are absolutely gel. University lecturers work with the college lecturers on the same programme with the same students. You cannot tell the difference. Other ones do not see one another. Fulton very briefly. Did you find that there was any difference at all in two sort of groups? This is a bit broad brush in general, I took the two groups. Groups of young people who had been intending to go to university or college for a long time, possibly all their life, and if not that long, maybe a good few years before that. Other young people who get to the age of 15, 16, 17 and realise that they need to do something because their life before that has been taken up with dealing with parental issues, mental health, alcohol, drug abuse, being young carers living in a dire poverty. So, maybe they have not been thinking about it. Did you detect a difference between those two broad groups of people? Of course, because she runs Glasgow schools. In terms of the commission, we did not look at that level of detail. Drawing from my own experience in Glasgow, we work incredibly hard with our partner universities and colleges to pull those experiences further and further down the school so that we do not have young people getting to age 15 and suddenly thinking, gee, I do not really know about college or university. We have an incredibly wide range of initiatives that are on the go, and that is one of the issues for me. There are too many, and there is overlap, and we are battling over the same group of young people. In order to get best value, we need to streamline—and it is back to Dame Ruth's point about institutional-based, so university of Glasgow runs its summer school for young people going to university of Glasgow. Strathclyde does the same, so why is there not one summer school that gives young people access to any university in Scotland? There are little things like that, but the importance of having young people and children right down from early years exposed to that broader range of experiences with their parents, too. We work with, for example, Glasgow Caledonian and Run Their Caledonian Club in learning communities where they work age 3 to 18 all the way through with a wide variety of experiences, but it is about making going to university normal. Actually, it is about learning. It does not have to be that university. It is about showing that education makes a difference to people's lives and how important that is. Family learning that is being pushed just now and a whole range of places is very important, but the families need to get qualifications. It is not just about coming and learning how to read together with your child. That has a place, but if we really want to make a systemic difference, we need to encourage our families and the research evidence to show that a young person's potential is highly correlated towards mother's qualifications. Using that as your baseline, we need to have families who are qualified, and that means that we need to be more flexible about entry. A lot of the talk is about schools and rightly, because that is the bulk of what we are talking about. We also have young parents who, for a whole range of reasons, have had to move out of education. Do we provide enough pathways to bring them back into education? Is the way that we fund our college sector and our universities, does it enable fair access for people whose pathways might take them a little bit longer? We have taken steps around care experience, but that is tricky territory. That is about individual people and the experiences that they bring, so it is not easy. You will have to forgive me for asking this, but are we obsessed with universities? Are they the be-and-all, be-and-end-all of life in Scotland? I find myself in a position where I brag about Scotland in England, but I really have to say different things up here. I used to sit in, I grew up in London and stayed there a bit when I was here. I used to love going in the train to Glasgow in the morning, because I should hear young people having a debate about the currency. Should I go to this university because I get an extra year and I get work experience, or should I go here? I do not hear those conversations in the tube in London. It is there, and it is to our credit that people value education so highly. Less because it is a route to work here. It will change, but the education in my experience here is being a good thing in its own right. The evidence is, of course, that more people here go on to university than the other three nations. I will nail my colours to the last. Of course it is. What is offered in Scotland is different from what is offered in England. There are other things going on there as well. I can talk a lot about one of the strengths in your system, the college system, because higher education and higher-level skills in Scotland are stronger than in other parts of the country. That is because people in Scotland want to have a job, and that has always been there. To be honest, I was not so worried about England. I was more worried about being part of a parliamentary committee 15 years ago who wrote reports about parity of esteem between vocational routes into economic life and university education. You have rather confirmed that we have made any progress on that in 15 years or have we? Me, too. I wonder if I am chasing the right thing. I have become much more addicted to the concept of parity of outcome than parity of esteem. You cannot dictate esteem, but you can measure, monitor and target outcomes. Parity of outcome is the test of access. Add to this one. For me, it is very much from the child's or person's perspective. They need to have the options available to them, so barriers need to be removed to whatever the right outcome is. If I look at the academy's programme that Queen Margaret University is running, it is a two-year programme that is jointly taught with schools, colleges, universities and employers.  Are there? It is possible, so it is about removing the options. It is not about saying, is the university be at end all. It is removing the barriers so that it is possible and that children know about the possibility. In the same vein, children's university as well, which we are running in Scotland, it is getting children and the parents and carers into the university to see that it might be an option. Not that it is where they should be going, but that it could be an option for them going into university. I lead on the bridging programmes for Scotland, and if you look at the commission, the report, it talks mainly about summer schools, but I want to widen that, and I want to look at all kinds of bridging programmes, but all of them will have in common is that university is an option and that children and parents are well informed to see what might be possible for them. Its children's university might be part of that, going right back to a young age, 5-year-old to 14-year-olds. It is raising aspirations, and perhaps as an additional point as well raising aspirations, this is so I wanted to respond to your original question. The four universities in Edinburgh, for example, have already got together to look at a raising aspirations programme together, so that we do not overburden schools to get programmes from all sides to us, and we help you to get into universities. We want to have a coherent programme so that schools can make an easier choice. I was quite interested in a comment that Professor Wendt made, and I would like to confirm that. He said that two out of three young people lived in areas that we would not consider to be deprived. Two out of three, that seems a high proportion. Three are deprived, but do not live in a deprived area. Okay. Two out of three are deprived, but do not live in a deprived area. Where did that figure come from? It is research that we have done as part of University Scotland's research working out the basket of measures for deprivation. I haven't seen that figure before, so obviously I'm quite interested in it. I'll dig it out for you and send it to you. Perfect. Do you know what proportion of that is rural? No. I'm sure we do, but I don't have it here, but I can send you as a chair the information. Obviously targeting is quite important here, and there's been a suggestion that obviously the SIMD data isn't as accurate as it should be, and that's being discussed around the table today. There's also a suggestion that we should complement that data with information from other sources. For example, it's been given a parental occupation, which seems to be a very dodgy one to use. It smacks a bit of elitism there. I mean, my constituency, there's not many stockbrokers, but there's lots of very well-off plumbers, joiners and electricians. How would you do that? Look at that in our admissions group. We are still very uncertain about all of that. We need to come up with a framework that we all understand, but most importantly, that the potential students and the teachers and the parents and carers understand as well, because that is part of the problem. We already work in and contextualise admissions, but even we universities do not quite understand what the other university is doing, so if we don't understand it, how can the potential future students understand that? That's the recommendation about the contextual admissions being published and known to parents and schools, so that doesn't happen. I mean, I can see you picking up, for example, parents that are unemployed, but there's a huge chunk of working poor out there, people that are just making ends meet and bumping along at the very bottom. How do you pick them up? Easy to ask. It's not going to be easy. Is it possible? I think it is, but I think it's a mistake to look for one factor that will identify that. We need a system of factors that gives you the texture of the young person or the older person applying to university. It's a combination. Each factor has to be robust, otherwise you won't get the desired result. Okay, but no, absolutely. This is a phase of exploration of this, but in the end it is about the compound disadvantage. And you can't be completely mechanistic because every person is different. You cannot say, tick, plumber, tick this. That's impossible. So we need to look at interviews, getting to know the person. It's going to be very time consuming, but we need to look at a more individualised approach. But if we're looking at something that can be put in place across the country, an individualised approach becomes quite difficult. I suppose what you're talking about is as if the person just fills in the application form and that's the first time that the universities get to see them. What we're talking about is a range of programmes with the universities such as Queen Margaret do with their schools, so actually the universities are getting to know the young people and getting to know them from a younger and younger age, and the young people are getting to know the university. So that contextualisation is beginning to be from points of knowledge, so improving the young person and their family's knowledge, but also improving the university's knowledge of that young person in order to be able to have that contextualisation to be more robust. But it will never be a, if you're in that category, that gets you in, and if you're not in that category, you can't get in. What we need to do is to get that, as I come back to that difference between that tension between the systemic approach that is needed in order to get better value from what we are delivering and also that individual, and that requires people in schools who have better connections with universities and who know them better and equally for universities. In Glasgow, we phone up admissions officers around individual cases and engage in conversations about those individual cases. Sometimes that results in the young person getting in, sometimes it doesn't, but on each side we've learnt more about, so next time we know more about how we are going to contextualise and get the right qualifications and the right experiences for that young person to enable them to succeed. One of the phrases we used in the commission a lot was the notion of building ladders down into, down into the communities and schools and so on. We saw an example at Glasgow University whereby students who had been contacted earlier through the schools and participating in pre-university programmes were on an MIS system that identified them in a way that when they came into the university they could then be targeted for particular deficits in their background. Actually, it looked like it was ordinary, so they would send flyers to young people from school where there had been a problem with maths teaching, for example, to offer extra maths stuff, but it looked to the students themselves as if everybody was getting this leaflet. So that very delicate and sensitive way of handling that, before they come in and when they come in, as I said already, access is not just about getting in, it's about staying in and moving on from that. It's access, success and then progress. You have to have success in the middle and that means people working together. Another suggestion that's been made in terms of complementing SIMD data is level of education, but should have that already picked up through contextualised admissions? How would that feed in when it's already there itself? Can you rephrase your question because it's not part of the basket of measures? There's a suggestion that, for example, SIMD data should be complemented by a number of other sources. For example, parents' occupation was thrown out as one thing, level of education was thrown out as another, but when I just look at level of education, I look at contextualised admissions and think, well, isn't that already being taken into account by the universities? We're just wondering if that's the parents' level of education, not the individuals? Well, the youngsters' level of education, because obviously somebody coming from a school in a deprived background who might be achieving less than someone from a better background could be deemed to have done better simply because of the background it came from. Universities are already taking all this into account, but we don't do it in a systemic way across Scotland, and it's not very clear what university does what how. At Green Market University, yes, we have UCAS entry points, but we do admit students who do not fulfil these points because we are looking at the overall person. So every university is already engaged in that, but it is not very clear and obvious to the children, to the parents' teachers and so on how we are all doing this, and we need to become clearer with that, and it needs to be a clearer framework across Scotland. One last question. How would colleges fit into that? I mean, how do colleges fit into this articulation and so on, but how would colleges fit in with the SIND, the identifying of youngsters and so on? Actually, you have the advantage in Scotland having regionalised your colleges in governance terms, so you have regional boards now that now know what's going on in the area where they lead to, and I think that that's an enormous help. They are key in the whole ladder of access because they are focused on place. I think that I mentioned that as being one of the key components, and therefore they are focused on place, on learners as well as opportunities for work and for study. My favourite phrase about colleges is that we are the mezzanine floor, actually, in the education system. We are not protected by the law because we're not compulsory and we're not protected by the Queen because we don't have royal charter status, so the changes that go on in colleges are absolutely in the moment. Okay, thank you very much. Before I go on to Joanne, can I just remind people two things? One is supplementaries are supplementaries to the question asked, so if you want and for a supplementary, make sure that it's relevant to the question just being asked or the answer just given. And the second thing is that we've still got a fair bit to go through, so could we make our questions and their answers as short as we possibly can because we have got another panel after us. I'll not take it personally that you said that just before I mentioned it. I'm interested in what you say about colleges and what the evidence is about the benefits of regionalisation, to be honest, because I haven't seen it on the ground about them. I suppose the question that I would ask you on for their education and the basis of what you've already said is if it's not about parity of esteem, it's parity of outcome. Do you have a view on the issue of parity of resources? Because we've seen the college sector cut, we've seen disproportionate cuts to part-time places so that young parents with caring responsibilities would not be able to do college courses. I don't know if you looked at that in your work. When they did a look at it, I lived my life in similar circumstances. I do have views. That's what happens when you're not protected by the law and not protected by the queen. You are the place where actually on the whole politicians turn to first to bring about change. It's not a protected budget. In not having that, you are making great big holes in the stepped approach to widening access. Let me just say a bit about regionalisation. I think that I first met you when I did the curriculum review for the Glasgow Colleges, where we looked at every course in every college and looked at my favourite phrase, curriculum intention, and found overlap and so on. It's not just in governance. It's in working together to make sure resources are being employed and deployed usefully, not by doing the same courses as one another, but making sure there's progression within the institution. It's early days. Regionalisation is a revolution. With respect, my observation is that within the community where I taught, the outreach work done by colleges no longer happens. There is an issue for young people in some areas that they won't travel. Having a quality institution near them encourages them and draws them in. I have grave reservations now about the capacity of the college sector to do that second chance learning when we in the school system failed them. I do think that there's a big question around that. Perhaps that's a— No, I completely share your concern. It's a disaster waiting to happen, but that's policy-led and funding-led. It's not my policy and not my government. In terms of a question of if we're looking at access and fairness, we have to look at the way in which the college sector has suffered if, in your report, you're saying that colleges are important. Will you be interested in what you looked at in terms of our schools? I wonder if you looked at the disproportionate disadvantage, even within disadvantage, so boys are less likely to do well than girls. There's not just a bit income there are, and I wonder if you looked at that as an issue around ethnicity and opportunity as well. Did you look at drop-out rates at school level? I think that there are so many young people who don't even get to compete. They don't even get the opportunity to be denied a place at university because they're no longer in school. Absolutely. Again, we didn't have much time to look at that, but we know it to be a really big issue. We looked at solutions to that, so we looked at some of the programmes in the Glasgow schools and what was being done to compensate for that. If you remove the middle—it's the squeezed middle, not just in terms of individuals but also in terms of institutions—if you lose the college sector, and the college sector, I think very cleverly, has been able to find ways of still working with young people, but that's to the credit of their creativity and good links with the education authorities and with employers, but it's not systematic. If there are cuts to school budgets, those cuts very often come to the bits of the system that support people to stay in school. There are programmes like that all over the place. Does that in itself is, in effect, a barrier to a young person learning? It is, and it's a growing barrier. In your recommendations, have you addressed the question of the importance of the soft supports around young people? We've talked a lot about the importance of learning support, but the heart of the matter that you raise, of course, is the matter not for the commission to discuss its Government's policies on funding and resources, as we took the decision not to talk about that. Is there not a contradiction being asked by the Government to address the question of fair access and not commenting on some of the issues that may actually be creating the concerns? We certainly commented, but we didn't make recommendations on it. We made recommendations that we talk about a holistic approach. We cannot just talk about admissions without talking about schools and colleges, and that's why our recommendation came to have a commissioner for fair access who might have the oversight to make recommendations to Scottish Government on schools, colleges and universities, because we had not only schools and employers and colleges represented, but also early years, and we could see it was a question from the cradle to the grave. This is why we made these concrete recommendations that it has to be a holistic approach, but for practical recommendations, this was commission on widening access to universities. The practical recommendations had to concern universities, and that was our remit. Dame Silver mentioned compound disadvantage. I was wondering if you could lay out a little bit what findings came from the report in relation to young people with additional support needs, because young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are proportionately far more likely to have additional support needs, which, if they go unsupported, act as a multiplier to the existing disadvantage. I heard plenty of anecdotal evidence of young people with ASN not being directed towards even making an application in the first place. I was wondering if you could lay out what you found in relation to ASN. I mean, it is exactly as you described. One of the successes that we found, if I can just talk about that because we were in an appreciative inquiry, was when the receiving end of the progression is the one doing the laying support, to be supported by this idea of a pre-fresher summer. That just made things become more real. It boosted motivation. Actually, there were young people themselves and also mentors from the university, people who had graduated working with them. They saw the next stage of what they could become, and there is no way that you can do access without learning support. There is such a lot of catch-up. It is compensatory education in its truest sense, but it has got to be in the hands of the right people. I think what I saw in Scotland was compensatory education in terms of learning support all the way, not done institutionally alone, volunteers in the community, all sorts of employer projects, school staff and university staff working differently. It is crucial. Do not widen participation to further failure. Ffattifan Roche. Then we have Daniel. In the interests of summer, I will just ask one question. If you will allow me to explain what will happen. I will do if it is going to be one question. We have already talked a lot about articulation. It is very important. In my discussions with, especially at Strathclyde University, people running the engineering academy, they told me that an awful lot of wraparound work that has gone in both before students joined them and actually once they have done that. Bearing in mind what you have said about making sure that college qualifications and, indeed, other routes to university are not just routes to university, the work to make articulation work has to be a lot more than just routes to. There is actually that support that is required both for students before and after they articulate. I was just wondering if you would agree with that sentiment and what investment and support do you think needs to be put in place to really make articulation work properly, both from colleges, but actually I think there is also another point around other routes potentially from apprenticeships and the wider skill sector as well. The joint articulation is, of course, that origins are in vocational technical scientific training. Lots of the students spoke to had no wish to go any further than getting the college part of the qualifications. Others did. Others came back later. This notion of portability is not just about locations, it is also about time. Running a curriculum at that is really complicated. Let me say that I like the wide base of that. I like the vocational focus. There is a famous Scottish report of years ago that talked about the importance of vocational focus in widening access to the Brunswick report. It is way way back in time. We looked at that. We looked at why articulation was great in some places and not so good in others. Actually, we saw one attempt at articulation in an arch subject area, which did not work quite so well. I think that it is the same as some of the access work. It has grown and grown and grown, but it has not had the chance to be reflected upon and refined. There are different streams within, where other people are going to go on to do higher qualifications later. There is a lovely at the mezzanine floor. It is a lovely pausing point to revisit the intention of the learners. Some of them did change their mind and tried work. We met some young people who had started a two by two course in a college that went on to university and did not like university and went back to the college. The college had found a way of working with the university and the open university to actually let that student qualify. Modular credit-based qualifications are just a great answer, which is complicated to get to. I mentioned underused assets in Scotland. I think that the open university, I remember saying, you should be ashamed, you are so modest, you are doing fabulous things for young people. The credit qualification framework, I have seen some degrees being done in Glasgow with that qualification system. It is all there in Scotland. It just has to be harvested, pruned and then farmed in a wide way. Ross, do you have another question to ask? The committee is in a lot of work looking at SQA, Education Scotland. As part of that, it is looked at the interaction between ministers and the agencies. Joanne has previously asked questions about when policy has not been achieving the right outcome. Has there been that challenge? Liz Smith has asked questions about the data and ensuring that the data is there for decisions particularly when we get to a 20 per cent figure, how we got to that and how we will achieve that. Discussion about SIMD and I quote, not being maybe the right measure and maybe needing something more sophisticated. My question to Dame Silver is, as the commissioner, are you able to challenge government and will you challenge government? The commissioner. I was stood down and the commissioner is right behind me waiting to come on. The leadership of the system, the system involves government as well. Government is not outside the system. It is a very important role in that. If I were the commissioner, absolutely yes, but you can ask him in a minute, can't you? I will. In that case, do we have anybody else who wants to ask a final question very briefly? I am very interested in this issue about contextualised entry and access thresholds, which I think we have already indicated are pretty complex and it is a very difficult decision. You said a little while ago that you felt that there was lots of evidence that Scotland is already doing most of the good things but it is not joined up and it is not universal across the system. Do you believe that decisions about contextualised entry, particularly when it comes to the access thresholds, which is obviously a specialised part of that, do you believe that that is a matter for individual departments and within universities to take or do you think that there has to be intervention from government? Well, I think that the universities, we are trying to lead on that to make the right recommendations, so we are going to be in contact with Sir Peter regularly on that one just to make sure that we don't only work in parallel but that we are working constructively together as well. But University of Scotland, as I said before, we already started to work stream on that one. I am sure that we won't come up with one access threshold for each particular subject or one, so it needs to be slightly more sophisticated because universities are different, but we will come up with a framework that will be easily understood and that will be far more accessible. I just make the point in the context that you are all supporters of the autonomy of the system and I know that the commissioner himself is a long record of being supportive of that autonomy. Therefore, when it comes to the decisions that it appears in some universities working extremely well, that decision should rest with the individual institution and indeed the departments because obviously there is different demand and supply and therefore there will be different conditions on what that and is that something that you are working on? Universities are autonomous and this is what we are continuing to defend, but we also made clear as lead persons on these three work streams that we don't just want to come up with a narrative that pleases the commissioner or Scottish Government or others, but something that universities really want to embrace and do. We very fiercely believe in and have already agreed as the three chairs of the programmes. I just want to point out that the report does actually trust the professionals in the first phase, the first five years. Let them deliver, let them see, you know, my claim that Scotland knows how to do this. Let's see what they come up with and see what that is in five years' time because my clear view was that actually this is doable. It will need looking out of course and be ready for the next five years, but actually give people the space to do that. They are the professionals. Two courses need different entry requirements that depend on subjects and levels, so we need that professional intricacy, I think, to be there, but also to be observable, published and scrutinised. OK, thank you. Tavish, did you have a supplementary? Well, can I just—a different issue, if I can. Well, I'll let Gillian infos down, Gillian. You want to talk about carers? Well, I was going to ask a question about—you mentioned recommendations around people who were care-experienced, but young carers as well have issues about—I wonder, did you have any dialogue with young carers and their families? We had dialogue with young carers as well. Again, looking at the three work streams of University Scotland, we are looking at all the aspects. We do not want to limit ourselves to the groups described in the commission's report. We also want to look at part-timeness. We want to look at adult learners. We want to look at carers, so that is all part of our work. Thank you. Can I just ask about recommendation 17 about Skills Development Scotland and schools working together? You go on to say there that those—that SDS and schools should basically assist learners at key transition phases throughout their education. I guess my question is that, in order to make that recommendation, you must have had some concerns about what was currently happening between SDS and schools. Would it be possible just to elaborate on what your concerns were there? Yes, I'm happy to take that question. We took some of the evidence also from some of the work that had gone on from developing Scotland's young workforce, where the recommendations there, as you know, were about careers advice and guidance and SDS working further down the school. That was part of the evidence that we received to endorsing that, but also ensuring that the advice then stretched into the college and the university that it didn't just remain within the school. In part of the discussion that we just had there about the different entries, you need the data on the skills shortages, on the employment areas. That needs to feed into the university system through SDS and the various organisations in order to be able to ensure that we've got those pipelines coming through. That may mean that you need to alter thresholds for entry at various times. In reference to this, it was really about saying that SDS and their careers advice and guidance had to go much further down the school, recognising that, particularly from the learners from disadvantaged backgrounds, needed those interventions at a much, much earlier stage. We didn't speak about SIMD, it was about learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. I'll throw in my little bit. SIMD is a reasonable metric. I don't think that we should discount it. It is a basket of indicators, but no statistic is perfect. If you're out there looking for a measure that's just going to give the answer to everything, then that's a lost cause. That wasn't for me the issue here. It was actually Schoolsville in Scotland, and that organisation being flexible enough in terms of how I read your recommendation. Do you think that it is? My view from a Glasgow perspective, no. I think that they try their best, but no. You'd be suggesting that we kept an eye on that one? I certainly do, yes. In that case, in this time, we have finished with the evidence. I'd like to thank the witnesses for their time and for their information today. It was very useful for us all. It was nice to meet you, and I'll close this session, and I'll give the panel a couple of minutes while we change over. The third item of business is an evidence session with the newly appointed commissioner for fair access. Can I welcome Peter Scott to the committee and congratulate him on his appointment? I understand Professor Scott wishes to make an opening statement. I'd like to make a very brief opening statement. I have made the written statement, which I hope is useful. In terms of an opening statement, it's a great honour to be appointed to this position. I'm keenly aware of the burden of expectations that are pressing on my shoulders. It's a great opportunity. As Ruth Silva said, I think that there are many great examples of good practice in the area of fair access across Scotland. In my written statement, I've tried to do three things. To be open and frank about my starting point and my beliefs. I hope that I haven't done that in any dogmatic way. I can assure you that I'm certainly not prejudging any issue. Secondly, I've tried to foresee what might be some of the key debates. It became apparent from your questions that those are some of the key debates. In my opening statement, I emphasised that although those have a very strong and particular Scottish resonance, they are more general issues. I think that they are very familiar across the United Kingdom, across Europe and, in fact, across the world. Thirdly, I have briefly touched on a number of more specific, more detailed topics, which again came out in the questions, offering a very preliminary review of those issues. I want to underline that I emphasise that there are many other issues that I don't cover in my opening statement, which may be equally important, particularly in relation to student support and funding. I want to allow the maximum time for you to ask me questions, which I will do my very best to answer, of course. One I think I've already had pre-notification of. I'd like to really just make two other preliminary remarks. One is to say that, in a sense, the founding text of British higher education was the Robin's report that was published more than half a century ago now. It established a famous principle that said that higher education should be available to all those with the potential to benefit and the willingness to do so. That has been widely accepted, I think, for the last half century as a fundamental principle. In one sense, fair access, we are pushing it an open door. I don't think I've ever come across anyone who doesn't believe that action should be fairer than it is currently. There are, of course, great difficulties about defining how we might achieve that. Also, in the Robin's principle, there are one or two key words. The first one, of course, is all. It doesn't say people who have particular social advantages, people who have parents or graduates. It says all, and that's crucial. A second word is potential. The emphasis should be on potential, and I think that leads on to discussions of contextualised admissions and so on. In the UK and in the Republic of Ireland, unlike most of the European countries, higher education institutions effectively choose their students. They decide which have the greatest potential and choose on that basis. There's no automatic entitlement, as they would be in France if you passed your baccalaureate or in Germany if you passed your abitur, or as there would be in some American states where if you graduated sufficiently high in your high school class, you would be automatically entitled to a place in higher education. Universities, in a sense, have always been in the business of measuring potential, although that's difficult. A second preliminary remark I'd like to make, in a sense, is a very personal one. I recently acquired a new grandchild, who's still less than two. I can be 95% confident that she will go to university, and she will probably go to a good university. Both her parents are graduates. Both her grandparents on my side are also graduates, although, by baby boomers, we are first generation graduates. My concern is that other babies born in that same hospital, that same night, I know that they will not be so certain that they can achieve those ambitions. We all have a responsibility to ensure that we at least strive to create greater fairness in the system. At that point, I'd like to stop and answer your questions, if I can. Thank you very much, and let me congratulate you on your new grandchild. That's always one of life's blessings. The final comments that you made there play into my question about targeting. You said in your letter, your submission, that you saw SIEMD as a sophisticated metric. I know that there was a difference of opinion, both round here and maybe even from the witnesses, about just how effective it is. I'm sure that you're not saying that's the only method, but there are other methods that have to go along with that. Could you explain to me what those other methods are and how you would capture them? It's a relatively comprehensive measure. It takes into account multiple aspects of deprivation, as opposed to single measures. There are strong links, as has already been said this morning, between areas of deprivation and lower-performing schools, a much more limited range of people who have graduated qualifications living in those areas. There's a range of things that come together to intensify disadvantage. However, as I say in my written statement, I'm very aware that any kind of area-based metric there are issues that produce what might be called false positives or false negatives, and we should be sensitive to that. The work that the University of Scotland is undertaking in looking at these areas, and frankly, the scepticism that the University of Scotland has about how appropriate this is as a measure to determine targets, I think that's to be welcomed. I think that any work that can be done to develop more sophisticated basket measures should be encouraged. However, I think that it's not a bad starting point, I think, is what I'm saying. No, I think that that's a fair thing to say. I'm going to move on to Liz Woodlite to come on on this, I think. Professor Scott, I think that one of the most interesting things to ask him, we heard it from the panel previously, that obviously there are certain things that universities are doing extremely well just now, and there are obviously certain things where there are weaknesses and things that still need to be done. In the short time that you've been in the job, would you be able to flag up to this committee where you think there are already strengths that need to be built upon and developed across the institutions, and particularly could you flag up where you think there are particular weaknesses that we really need to address? Would you be able to do that? Well, I'll try. I hope I won't be unfair in any comments I make. I think the strengths are very much in terms of bridging programmes, summer schools, links with colleges in relation to special programmes. The major weakness is much too strong a word, but I think articulation could be very much improved as I outline in my written statement. I think that's my broad conclusion at this point, yes. If I could just add to that, and I think Ruth Silva made this point herself, of course a lot of this practice is very customised. It's for a particular college and a particular institution working together, often in a particular subject area, so they're very, very targeted. I think the challenge is to generalise some of that experience, make it more compatible so that students are not locked into necessarily a limited range of choices, that they can have a wider range of choices. Equally, I would not be in favour, I think, of trying to produce an overcentralised and over-determined system. The problem about data that we referred to in the previous session, I come back to the point that I think the data set is extremely important both quantitatively and qualitatively in leading us, not only to be able to identify where the problems lie, but obviously to give direction both to yourself and then obviously to the Scottish Government. Do you agree that, generally speaking, there is quite good data out there, but it's not put across in a systemic manner, or is there a lack of data? What would you like to see to be able to help inform you and allow you to do your job as well as possible? Well, certainly there is a lot of data available. I think it's often not presented always in a terribly helpful form. In fact, I can just give one example. Data is often divided into younger insurance and older insurance, more mature insurance. In the reality that we now face in universities and colleges, that's not always a helpful distinction, yet it's quite difficult to get data that is not compartmentalised in that kind of way. In terms of data at a more qualitative data, at a more individual, institutional or programme or subject basis, I think there's a masses out there. It's often, again, very customised. I think one of the comments made in the commission's report was that they were concerned about a lack of evaluation of things that worked well and things that worked less well. I think it's certainly true that people who are very enthusiastic about fair access and have put on a lot of personal effort and commitment into developing a programme, frankly, they don't want to be told that it didn't work very well, so there's a bias to actually say that this has been quite successful. Maybe we need to find ways in which we can be a little bit more rigorous in terms of evaluation. Without in any way dampening the enthusiasm and discouraging people from experimenting with new ways. You're absolutely right on that. In what you said earlier about the fact that nobody has a divine right to go to university, that's absolutely correct, and I think that's a great strength of the system that it is left to the decisions among the institutions as to who has the right potential. The issue, however, comes back to this data, that if we go down the road of more consistent contextualised entry and obviously looking at some flexibility when it comes to the access thresholds, the knowledge that the institutions have and their departments specifically is absolutely critical to making the right decision about to whom they offer a place, that's absolutely essential. Do we need to do more to allow those institutions who are autonomous, and I know that you're a great supporter of that autonomy, to have a better understanding of where that data could come from? Yes, I think that that has to be true, and I think that it's absolutely right that, as Ruth Silver said, we should trust the professionals. I mean, I think that we should always trust people who are actually working in these areas themselves. I think that the approach to contextualised admissions, the best approach, should be of course to leave the detailed work with institutions, and I would say not just with institutions but with subjects. I think that the key thing is to actually determine, I mean, people who understand contextualised admissions in relation to fine art will be very different from the people who understand contextualised admissions in context of electrical engineering. So, its subject expertise is much as the institutional perspective that I think is important. But I think there is value, and I hope that the University of Scotland and their work will carry this forward, in trying to develop in some broad guidelines of the kind of factors that might go into the mix in contextualised admissions, and perhaps approximately the kind of weight that should be attached to them, some sort of broad guideline, some broad guideline, not a rigid prescription by any means. So, I think one should of course rely on the expertise of the people who are directly involved, particularly on a subject basis, of what's appropriate in terms of factors that might be taken into account. But I do think one wants to struggle to generalise this a bit to make it transparent so that that experience can be shared across institutions, and also crucially, of course, that it becomes more plain, I think, to potential applicants, how they will be judged. Tavish. Thank you very much, convener. Professor Scott, thank you for the breadth of your submission, and therefore the weight of the tasks that you've obviously planned to undertake. In that context, how many days a month are you contracted to provide in this role? I'm contracted to provide three to five days a month. I think I'm realistic. I think that probably it will take more than that. So my assumption should be that I should spend at least five days a month physically present in Scotland, and I suspect that I might spend as much time again in reality thinking and reading and communicating in other ways with people. But I think that this was determined for funding reasons to put a cap on the commitment, and I absolutely agree with that. I mean— Has the Government given you a budget and some staff as well to support the rule? I've been inherited excellent staff who supported the work of the commission, and in the short run they will be working with me. I'm afraid I don't have a budget, so I notice that there are references in the commission's report to commissioning research, and at the moment I have no resources to do that, but I would certainly argue in specific instances if there does seem to be a need for research. I would go back to the Government and suggest that they might provide some resources equally. I think one needs to work with other research organisations to try and shape their research agendas. Do you think that the research that Liz Smith has just been asking about, and you mentioned in your submission about SIMD, is that something that you consider to be important enough to ask the Government to provide some resource to do that? I think that in the first place I need to do a lot of work to understand those issues better. I think that it will be premature for me on perhaps a half understanding of some of those issues to make demands, but I would certainly think that, as I said earlier, that the search for the most sensitive possible metrics should be encouraged as much as possible, and I see myself as playing some role in that. Thank you. The other question that I was going to ask is of the commission, obviously made, I forget now exactly how many recommendations, but many recommendations. Is your job description such that you are tasked with implementing those recommendations? First of all, I should emphasise that, of course, some of those recommendations are directed to me, but some are directed to the Government and some are directed to the funding council. I suspect some of my responsibility might be to manage down expectations of what the commissioner individually can deliver. Equally, I accept that the commissioner has a key role, and that is the challenge for me. How I might work, I have given a great deal of thought to that. At this stage, clearly, I am in the mode of listening to people, meeting all the relative stakeholders, and also meeting visiting institutions to find out on the ground what people are doing. At some point, I need to move into a more proactive mode, if I can put it like that. For Government and for the funding council, do you see your role as overseeing those and therefore keeping those organisations? I think it's certainly my responsibility to comment on that, if I think that's appropriate. One of the few formal responsibilities I'm given is to produce an annual report, and I can assure you, perhaps pre-empting another question, that I would do so without fear or favour. Equally, I hope that it will be grounded in evidence, and I hope that it will be well informed, I hope that it will be sensitive. I think that trying to establish precisely the degree to which I should become too deeply involved in things, and at what point I should stand back so that, since I can make judgments, I think that could be quite difficult in certain situations. I'm the first commissioner, not only am I new, but the role is new, so I think, to some degree, it's experimental. I think perhaps in a year you will have a better idea, and I will have a much better idea of whether it's worth it. One thing I can promise you, I have no intention of trying to operate via a Twitter account. It's very popular these days. At least you're not a czar. You should be grateful that they haven't called you a czar, I suspect. One last question, if I may convene. If the week that you plan to spend as a work physically in Scotland proves to be insufficient, will I take it on the principle of no fear or favour? You'll certainly say to the Government, look, I need more time to do this job adequately, given the challenges that exist. I certainly won't demand extra resources in terms of personally, but I would certainly be prepared to take on more time. Equally, I need to be realistic. I have other responsibilities, other fixed points in my diary, which I have to keep to. But certainly, I've accepted that this is a major commitment, and I think in my mind I'm thinking of it as a kind of half-time commitment. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ross Greer. Thanks, Rorch. Convener, that makes a broad question start off with, but I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the definition of fair access that you'll be working with, because I know that it's a concern that the NUS has raised going forward. That is a very broad question. I think that one of the issues is that there are many dimensions of fairness, and to some extent they come into conflict with each other. It is clearly unfair that people are categorically disadvantaged because of their social situation from having a hope of participating in higher education. Equally, it's unfair if, as a result of encouraging them to participate more, other people are excluded. So there are many, many dimensions of fairness, and I think one of the ways I can contribute is by encouraging a very open and very frank debate about precisely what fairness means. Because as I say, if it was simple, I think we would have found a solution a long time ago. I think we have to work at this in many dimensions. One of the concerns that the NUS has raised was about the balance between getting more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into university and the issues that have already been raised in this committee session of party of esteem between further higher and vocational education, breaking down the privilege and the idea that further and vocational education are somehow lesser than. How do you see the balance in your work between getting more disadvantaged young people into university and creating parity of esteem between the levels of education? I prefer to emphasise higher education rather than the universities. Colleges in Scotland make a very important contribution and a substantial contribution to the delivery of higher education, and I think that that should be preserved. I think there are many people south of the border who might feel that pendulum has swung too far, and universities have become too dominant an element, and that has added to a downgrading potential of more vocational-oriented institutions. The university of course themselves are very vocational-oriented. I think that it is access to higher education rather than access to universities. I think that we should respect the contribution that colleges make, and in many ways it is appropriate. Of course, I think that we should be worried if it appears that the social composition of students in universities is very different from that in colleges, but I have to say that I think that you would find that also in England, that the social composition of the more traditional universities would be very different from that of the post-92 universities, which of course represent a much larger section of the university sector in England than they do in Scotland. We should be concerned that there are not barriers. Equally, we should not say that the only desirable outcome is an honours degree from a university. I think that there are many other desirable outcomes of higher education. On that cultural point that there is a culture that parents would see in some situations, in some sections of society, parents would see that their child is getting an HND or an HNC as lesser than getting their honours degree. What is your role? How do you perceive your role in shifting that culture? I think that the major thing that I can do is not to be focused too strongly just on the university's contribution and to give greater recognition of what colleges can deliver and do deliver without, in any way, diminishing the ease of articulation—the ease of transfer from one to the other if that is appropriate. Who knows? It might be appropriate to transfer in the other direction in certain occasions. It is very difficult. The amount that one person can contribute to changing a culture I think always has to be limited. I start with a supplementary question about contextualised admission. You said that there is a need to make it planer for learners. You need to know whether you have got the grades or not. There is a danger with contextualised admission that becomes less obscure. I wonder if you could elaborate on what you think needs to happen to make it planer for learners. I think that it is true that universities—although, of course, they all publish tariffs in terms of UCAS points for each subject, what they require for entry—in practice universities vary those. They take into account prior educational experience and social circumstances to some degree. They may also traditionally have taken into account other things, which may have even intensified privilege rather than diminished it. I think that it is important that people should understand what factors have been taken into account or will be taken into account, not so that they can then aggressively gain the system in terms of their own CV. That is the risk, of course, but that they have full knowledge of the factors that might be taken into account and the weight that might be attached to them. I think that is fair to people. I think that it is also fair to someone who, in a sense, has achieved higher grades who does not get a place. I think that they need to be helped to understand why the university actually chose another person who apparently had a lower tariff point than they did because these other factors were taken into account. I think that it is fair on both sides. I mean that there are a number of factors which I can be taken into account. I think that it might vary between institutions and it might vary between subjects. There are some subjects, frankly, in which prior detailed educational experience in quite a technical sense is absolutely required. There are other subjects in which it is, frankly, less necessary. All this should be brought out. The important thing is that the person applying to university has a better understanding of how they are going to be judged. I suspect that, apart from UCAS points, it is pretty opaque. Thank you. That is absolutely right. I look forward to future work on that. In your written submission, you mentioned the need to look across what is happening in other parts of the UK. We recently had the Diamond review in Wales, which, as it is starting point, really looks at sustainable levels of student income while they are studying as being a critical starting point, which is interesting and quite different. What do you think the lessons of the Diamond review are for us here in Scotland? How much will you be looking at student support? That is an area that I do not particularly cover in my written statement, but the Diamond review is a very interesting experiment. To some degree, a change of policy was forced upon the Welsh Government because the policy that it had of subsidising fees was probably not financially sustainable. It also led to what appeared to be a large outflow of resources to English institutions, which, as you can imagine, Welsh institutions who felt that they should have benefited from that are objected to. There are particular circumstances in why that previous approach had been needed to be modified. Nevertheless, it is interesting to emphasise student support rather than either higher fees with fee waivers and loans as in England or free tuition as it applies in Scotland. My instinct is that there is no right model, and in a way I think it is useful to be able across the United Kingdom to look at different ways of approaching this and their different impacts potentially on fair access. I return to one of the points that I made in my written statement, and that fair access or rather inequality of access reflects much deeper cultural and social factors. Regardless of the particular funding arrangements that you might have, or even whether student numbers are capped or not capped, I think those inequalities persist and need to be addressed. Just one final comment. I think the experience from England has been that to approach this purely in terms of financial incentives, providing bursaries to students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, that that often is an intervention that comes too late, and we need to address these issues much earlier. Outreach activities, bridging programmes, summer schools, all the things that we have talked about earlier this morning are actually more effective than a financial incentive of some kind. Equally, you should make sure that there are no financial barriers to participation as far as possible. I quite agree with those set of assumptions. I think that there is a wide set of factors at play, but I think that fordability while people are studying is a very important one. On that basis, what role indeed have you discussed in terms of your participation in the student support review that has been announced? I know that one of the recommendations made in the commission report was that within three months work should be commissioned on the implications, the impact of student funding and support on fair access. My instinct today is that it might be premature to rush into that, although it is clearly an extremely important factor. What impact do you think the prospect of student debt has in terms of perceptions and encouraging or otherwise people to go to university? You could say that we are engaged in a gigantic experiment south of the border in relation to this, but Equally, of course, in Scotland and in Wales, people graduate and they have levels of debt. It is lower than it would be in England, but it still exists. I think that we still have a rather insecure understanding of perceptions of debt, particularly by younger people. So far, the evidence is that for many young people debt is perhaps not as intimidating a prospect as it probably was for me when I was younger, so I think circumstances change in that respect. On the other hand, I think that we need to have a better understanding of perceptions of debt among different social groups. I think that there are some people who are probably much readyer to accept and not worry about debt and see how it might be funded and pay back. There are other people who clearly, perhaps because they lack that self-confidence, it is a much more intimidating prospect. I think that it is much more about perceptions of debt Equally, I do not think that it is fair to expect someone to graduate from university with, effectively, a second mortgage already to pay. Daniel Johnson has touched on the majority of questions, because I have the diamond report here and met with Serene recently. My question to not cover the ground that Daniel has is that the report was quite clear that in moving from the tuition-free grant towards improved maintenance support arrangements for undergraduate students, those with the highest level of grant support covering the full cost of maintenance for all their living costs, said that they felt that that could help to support wider access as well as retention. Would you reflect on that as part of the annual report that you are bringing forward? When we are looking at learning best practice across other parts of the UK, is there something that is covered in the committee that you would reflect on as you go forward and as your report back to the Government? I certainly would, yes. That is a key aspect. I am sorry if I am being a bit tentative, I think that it is simply that I do not want to claim understanding that I do not currently have. I think that that is probably the area in which I have most to learn, but I agree that this is a key area. Comparisons across the UK are very valuable. I will certainly keep in touch and I already know and have met my approximate equivalent in England, the director of the Office for Fair Access, who is a former colleague. I think that I will share as far as possible any lessons that could be learnt equally in the case of Wales. I think that the Diamond Review is, as I said, an extremely interesting experiment, although it is at a very early stage. That might yield very interesting information as well. I will certainly address that topic in my annual report. Thank you very much. I do appreciate that. Something that was quite interesting about the report was the reaction from students as well. It seemed to welcome a lot of suggestions. You have already preempted one of my questions in response to Liz Smith. I take that as a genuine commitment that, when you feel that there may be policy, it is not always achieving the objectives that it is set to achieve that you will be fairly robust in highlighting that to the Government. Yes, I am very determined to maintain my independence. All I can say is that if the Scottish Government has any doubt on that count, it has not done its preparatory work very satisfactorily. I have a reputation for being independent. Equally, I hope that I will be sensitive. I think that my role should be challenging but also very supportive and respectful of the work that is currently being done. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Gill Lynn, do you have a supplementary question? You just said that the task that you have got before you surely has made significantly easier given that Scottish students wanting to go into university do not have the burden of potential debt of having student fees. That is one barrier that has been removed that has had an effect on the people that we are trying to target getting into university. Sorry, could you just rephrase that slightly? We have a situation where you are dealing with widening access in a country that does not put tuition fees on its students for higher education. Would you agree that that is going to make the widening access agenda easier to achieve? I would say that in very broad historical terms, providing free tuition does on balance produce fair access, but it is by no means a simple equation. I think that it would be a great mistake for anyone to conclude—I do not think that anyone in Scotland is concluding this—that simply because tuition for Scottish students is free, that somehow that has solved the problem. There are many, many other issues that I say have other sources. However, I think that I have no doubt that that is the right starting point. I have to say that even regardless of my own personal views, I think that that is the starting point and that has to be the starting point because it is a policy of the Scottish Government and it has been the policy of the Scottish Government under different political administrations since it was established. In practice, it would be very difficult to move to a different kind of system. As conversely, sadly, it would be quite difficult now in England to unscrambl retreat from a system that is dependent on charging high tuition fees. I think that one has to accept that political reality. In terms of my own personal beliefs, I think that the Scottish approach is much more likely to promote fair access in the longer term than the approach of the English Government, acting as an English Government, or the UK Government acting as an English Government. Please be no end to talk about independence in English Government. Sorry, I am abusing my position as convener. Can I say first of all, there are two things that are particularly said in your opening contribution, the papers that are really welcomed. The first one was to put it in context of a child, two children born, one with guaranteed opportunity, but the reality is that, for too many of our children, their life chances are determined by the time they are five. I hope that, where it may not be your particular remit, you will continue to have that in your head, because it is so important in terms of Government policy more generally. It is not going to be sorted by some kind of system of making it fairer for the ones who actually manage to get through the process, but recognise that we lose so much potential all the way through the system. The second thing that I really welcomed was the fact that you said that your work would be evidence-led, because, in my contention, education policy in Scotland and evidence-led policy are completely different things. I would hope that you would recognise that. We have just heard it around the question of tuition fees. I note your personal view, but I wonder whether you are still open to the fact that you will look at that policy in terms of, perhaps, unintended consequences. If you are looking at it in terms of evidence, first of all, the universities tell us that it is underfunded. Secondly, it is cross subsidised from fortunately having students coming from across the border who do pay fees. Thirdly, it is rationed by a quota. There is a cap on the system, and I am told that it is more difficult for a young person in Scotland to go to university now than it was five years ago, or 10 years ago, precisely because of our system of funding, and it is funded at a consequence of cuts to college education. Do you have a role in looking at that evidence and either saying that, if you want to call it free education, you will have to put more money in, or you will have to recognise as a balance there if the resources remain the same? I think that, to some degree, I can make those points. Equally, I think that I have to accept, and I do accept that these are political decisions that the Scottish Government has to establish its own priorities, and it has been elected on that basis. I think that all I naturally, of course, would argue for increased expenditure on higher education and education more generally, but I am very aware that there are people who think that the national health service or other areas might be of priority. Although I think that additional resources would be very welcome, I think that realistically we have to accept that there is always going to be some limit on what resources are available, and the choices in terms of priorities are ultimately political ones. You mentioned the cap on student numbers. I know that there is quite a focus on that in Scotland in terms of the impact in my attention, in terms of displacing Scottish students, but I have tried to emphasise that in a sense that there are always going to be constraints on capacity in any system, so issues like displacement, notionally, logically, can arise in all circumstances, I think. I also should point out that it is only this year that the cap on student numbers in England has been fully removed. It is very early days to see how that will work, so to imagine simply by removing the cap or raising the cap significantly that that will solve all of our problems in relation to fair access, but I absolutely accept that we need additional resources and I would, if I feel that it is appropriate, make that argument. The argument is the way in which resources are shared and, of course, the capacity is there. It is simply that Scottish students cannot get those places because of the way in which the tuition fee policy operates. I should add that our young people are the most indebted, disadvantaged students in Scotland are more indebted than in other parts of the United Kingdom, but you say that that is a political decision. Is it not your job to challenge political decisions that are not evidence-based? There will be a contention about what I have said around evidence, but is it not your job to say that you define it and you are describing it as one thing, which is free tuition? In fact, the consequence of it means that there are other consequences, particularly around access that I would contend. Is it not your job to say that you may want to make that political decision, but you will make it in the knowledge that it is contrary to a policy on fair access and opportunity? It is certainly my responsibility to point out the consequences of both the student cap and the level of overall funding, but the decision obviously lies elsewhere. No, I certainly think that it is correct that I should point out the consequences and the evidence that supports the conclusions that I have reached. I suppose that what I am keen to hear from you is a recognition that a decision that has consequences in terms of access ought not to have the credibility of a label of free education if it is counter to what we are looking at. Rather than simply saying that that is not a matter for me, that is a decision for government. I should certainly look across a very wide range of policies. I, in my written statement by saying that you should try to make all policies sort of access proof. You should evaluate, even if it appears to be in an area comparatively remote from entry to higher education, you should try and make some kind of assessment of what the implications of that might be positive or negative in relation to fair access. I certainly think that it is my responsibility to try and increase the sensitivity across all areas of Scottish Government to the impact of their policies in terms of fair access. It would be fair. I think that probably everybody here would want to be in a position to support what you have said, which is that you value higher education for everyone and that it is difficult to just see how that fits in with the tuition fees policy. One last point on ground access. Will you be looking at the four-year degree in Scotland and its necessity, given that many young people now say that the first year of university is very similar to the sixth year at school? I think that it would be very abode to suggest a total reconstruction of the pattern of undergraduate education in Scotland. After all, we should recognise that Scotland is the standard across Europe and across the world. It is England and Wales that are exceptional by having a shorter undergraduate degree, but I do accept that you need to ensure that any overlap between final years in school and first years in university is managed sensibly. There might be instances in which high-performing students might be given some form of advanced standing, but, in general terms, I think that the fact that you have a four-year degree gives a flexibility in Scotland, which is not available in England where you have a rather narrow range of possibilities. I have to say that flexibility has always been used, certainly in relation to articulation. My understanding is that roughly half the students with high nationals who then transfer to a university are given no credit, no advanced standing at all for that. In fact, the proportion is rather lower in England, despite the fact that there will be effectively coming to perhaps the final year of degree programme rather than just year three, so it should be easier to manage articulation in Scotland than it is in England, where there is a shorter degree programme. I think that one should encourage a degree of flexibility, perhaps in some circumstances—a limit number of circumstances—by allowing some form of advanced standing even for first-entry students from school. I think that, certainly, that flexibility should be used to improve articulation and make it more common, but I do not think that it would be sensible for me to recommend any wholesale changes in that. On her, I think that it is a great advantage that should be used more commonly. Professor Scott, can I just ask for a clarification on that, and notwithstanding the fact that, obviously, we all have different views about higher education funding and not asking about that difference of perspective? Given that your title is commissioned for fair access, do you believe that, within the current system, there is a problem as a result of the fact that different categories of students, whether they are domiciled Scots, European, international or rest of the UK, because of that categorisation, have different perspectives when it comes to the payment that they make for the university. Some are obviously paid for by the Government, some are paid for by their own means. Does that concern you—and I am not asking for views about the future of higher education funding, but does that concern you about fair access, and just to take up the point that Johann Lamont mentioned earlier, where, by the competitive edge for the places, there is a knock-on effect for that competitive edge because of the capped system, which does not exist for some students? Would you actually look at that aspect of it? Yes, I think that we should be frank about that. It is not a new problem, as I say in my written statement. It is a problem in a sense that it existed for at least half a century in relation to students from outside the European Union, but a new dimension of complexity has been created, I agree, by the decisions, or rather the different decisions taken by the UK Government and the Scottish Government in relation to tuition fees. That produces areas of potential controversy, and they produce areas of fair complication in relation to fair access. I see the primary responsibility of this role, and I think it was the prime focus of the Commission to focus on fair access for Scottish domiciled students. I do not think that I have any remit to make access fairer for students who come from England or Wales and attend Scottish institutions, although I accept that the social composition of those students does change the flavour and affect the culture of at least some Scottish universities. I am just looking at some of the figures that the NUS has been providing us with. Looking at the ancient universities, it says that only 6 per cent of students at ancient universities come from deprived backgrounds moving from college to university. There are 113 students who are being involved here. There are 91 who are made to start again in the first year. Ten more are made to duplicate a year of study. Does that seem fair? On the face of it, it is not fair, but we always have to start from where we are rather than where we should be. If you went to the most famous American universities, Oxford or Cambridge, you would find a very similar pattern that there would be a limited number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Despite the great efforts that those institutions make to search for those students and to welcome them and to support them when they enter that institution, I think that rather than commenting in detail on specific universities, I would like to make the general point that I do think that it is important that the institutions with the most privileged social intakes have a responsibility, a kind of leadership role. I do not think that it is appropriate to say that this is taken care of by post-92 universities or colleges. I think that the responsibility is for the whole sector. In a way, I think that perhaps Edinburgh or St Andrews or whatever institutions that you might have in mind may have a heightened responsibility to exercise some leadership in this area. I have to say that they make major efforts when I was in St Andrews last week talking to the new principal, and they had organised a conference that brought together people concerned with fair access from across Scotland. I was very impressed by their commitment, her personal commitment, and I know that St Andrews has some quite interesting programmes. I would not expect everyone to approach fair access in the same way, but the statistic that you give is an alarming one. Looking across all institutions, it says that 51 per cent of articulating students are forced to repeat years of study, which seems a very high proportion. It does. It seems a high proportion to me, and as I said, I think it's a higher proportion that would be the case in England, despite the fact that England has a shorter degree programme. I think there are two areas of concern there. One is, of course, for the individual student. They are effectively prolonging their education, so issues of debt and worry about entering the labour market and so on and getting a job. They're worse for them if they're being forced unnecessarily to prolong their education. Second, of course, it's a waste that, if you're duplicating a funded place, which could have been available to another student. I think more could be done to improve that. I think sometimes universities will start from the position that a higher national student is guilty and to approve innocent. It has to be proved that the experience that they've had in their two years articulates sufficiently well with the university programme for them to be allowed on. I think that we should try and shift that round and say on the whole that it's innocent and to approve guilty. On the starting point, you should be given advance standing and appropriate credit for that unless there are compelling educational reasons in relation to particular subjects, why that's not appropriate. Of course, there will be midway positions. In the interests of fairness, is that an area that you would be very much looking at? Yes. I think that articulation between colleges and universities, which I would have expected performance in Scotland to be superior than in other parts of the United Kingdom, actually appears on the face of it to be rather less good. I think that it's an area that one could work on. Groups like the NUS say that articulation is a success story, but clearly behind it there are other issues that perhaps need to be addressed and looked at in the interests of this widening access and fairness of access. Yes, I agree. Thank you very much. Fulton, you wanted to come in. Thanks, convener, and welcome to your post, Professor Scott. I wish you luck going forward. I think that this has been a very interesting discussion today. A lot of the points have been covered, but I suppose what I would like to stress again and ask you is a similar question to what I mentioned in the previous panel. For me, it's about making sure that people have choices. It was raised by Tavish Scott already that maybe there is an obsession with university or even college or further education as a whole. Young people across the country have choices and whatever they choose, they feel that they are on an even keel with everybody else. I know that you have talked about it and you have answered it in different parts from specific points to other members, but I wonder what your overall thoughts are taking that forward. Well, I certainly think that you are absolutely right that you shouldn't indicate that there are standard ways of success and there are routes that are inherently less successful. I would certainly resist very strongly any suggestion that a college experience or the courses and qualifications gained through a college are somehow inferior to those gained in the university. I think that that would be wrong. The key, though, is to make sure that people have the correct information to make choices. I think that people start from the same position, so they have the same chance of realising or reasonably similar chances of realising the choices they would like to make, that they are realistic choices for them, as I say, to level the playing field. But I think it will be very unfortunate in the process of pursuing fair access, you narrow down the choices that are available to people. My guess is that looking into the future, there will be a proliferation of different pathways that students might follow, apprenticeship modes of various kinds, a whole range, so I think we have a much more diverse range of pathways that people follow. So fair access shouldn't be narrowed down too much to success in a particular way. Have you got any scope or plans to do any work with the business community or through the apprenticeship scheme or anything like that? Is that on your radar to look at it as well? I think that it certainly should be on my radar, yes. As I said, I think that I should try to resist as far as possible seeing fair access simply in terms of access to universities and maybe to particular kinds of universities. That's important, but that's only one aspect of fair access. Fair access, as you say, is trying as far as possible to respect the choices that students might make if they're following less traditional routes. It's not at all a criticism of the commission's report, which I think is a wonderful document in most respects, but it is focused very strongly on younger initial entrants and I think mature students, adult students and part-time students, people because of their circumstances, need to study in a more flexible way. They also need to be addressed, so, yes. I think in a way I need to try and cover as much as possible, but also I need to be realistic about it. I mean, clear there are certain agendas that people wish to see progress on and the Scottish Government has established some targets which and of course the funding council itself in terms of outcome agreements establishes effectively targets for institutions to meet, but I don't think that we should be too constrained by these particular targets. I think that we should try and see fair access in a very broad and open kind of way. I appreciate that those were very broad questions, but I also acknowledge that you're just in post and I do genuinely look forward to perhaps you've been back in front of the committee at some point in the future when you've had more time to develop in the role and I'll be keenly interested to see how that's going. No, no, I recognise, I'm very clear that I'm offering very general answers to answers that really should be much more specific and I certainly need to think hard about, certainly in the first year, the areas I should focus on and I would hope to determine three or four areas I'd like to focus on and make that publicly known that those are the areas that I intend to focus on without losing a sense of the need to encourage your kind of debate about what fair access means. Thank you very much Professor Scott, I'm sure that the next time we have you back we'll be asking you questions about those particular areas of interest. That closes the public session, can I thank Professor Scott for his time and his evidence and wish him well in his new post. Thank you.