I welcome to the 16th meeting of the Education, Children and Young People's Committee in 2022. I would just like to note that Oliver Mundell has sent his apologies for today's meeting. So on agenda items 1 and 2 is the declarations of interest, but prior to that I would like to welcome Sue Webber, who is joining us this morning for the first time as a member of the committee. Sue is replacing Stephen Kerr on behalf of all the members. I wish to thank Stephen for his contribution to the work of the committee this session. As Sue Webber is joining us for the first time today, our first item of business is to invite Sue to declare any relevant interests. Thank you, deputy convener. I suppose for the purposes of being complete I should state that I was a councillor for the city of Edinburgh, and that would be my only relevant register of interests, but that ceased at the most recent elections. Thank you. The committee's next task is to choose a convener. The Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party are eligible for nomination as convener, and I understand that the Conservative nominee for the convener is Sue Webber. Do we agree to choose Sue Webber as our convener? Thank you. I will now hand over to Sue to convene the rest of the meeting, and congratulations. Thank you very much, co-cab, for that. Great to be along today, and thank you for what looks like a very exciting meeting. Our agenda item 3 is the subordinate legislation, and our next item of business is to invite the minister to move motion S6M-04165, that the Education, Children and Young People Committee recommends that the cross-border placements effect of deprivation on liberty orders Scotland regulations 2022 be approved. The committee has taken oral evidence on this instrument at its last two meetings on 18 May. The committee heard from officials from the Office of the Children and Young People's Commissioner, and at its meeting last week, the committee took further evidence from the Minister for Children and Young People, Claire Hohie, and Scottish Government officials. The minister has returned to the committee this morning to move the motion in her name. I would like to invite the minister to speak and to move the motion. Formally moved, convener. Thank you very much, minister. Do the members have any comments? No comments for you to respond to either minister, so that seems to be quite straightforward. The question is that the motion S6M-04165, in the name of Claire Hohie, be approved. Are we all agreed? I'm looking, just checking online for nods. Yes, okay, that's great, we are all agreed. Thank you very much. The committee must now produce its draft report on this instrument. Is the committee content to delegate responsibility to the deputy convener and I to agree the report on behalf of the committee? I would like to therefore thank the minister and her officials for their attendance today, and we can now move on to the next agenda item. We will have a short suspension to allow for a change of witnesses. Thank you very much for coming in this morning. The next item on our agenda today is our first evidence session for our college regionalisation inquiry. I would like to invite Audrey Cumberford, commission on the college of the future, who is joining us in the committee room, Professor Sir Peter Scott, commissioner for fair access, who is online, and also Nora Senior, chair of the enterprise and skills strategic board, who is also joining us online. Good morning to you all. A bit of housekeeping today, our session is hybrid, and some witnesses and some committee members are participating virtually. As those attending remotely won't be able to catch my eye, when you want to come in, can I ask that you put an R in the chat box when you wish to speak, and the clerks will be keeping an eye on that, and I will bring you in when I can. I also want to assure you that it isn't necessary for every witness to respond to every question. If you don't think that you have anything to add on a particular question, that is also fine. However, again, should you wish to speak, use the R in the chat function, or Audrey Cumberford, who is in the room today, if you can catch my eye, I will be able to bring you in. I would all like to thank you for your time today. Our session should last probably till about 11.45, is that correct? Okay, so the public part, no, that's it. Kicking off then, I suppose, we had an announcement yesterday in terms of the budget. In terms of the real-time funding cuts that colleges are facing, what do you think they might be doing to putting at risk some of the benefits of regionalisation and what might they mean to you? I'm going to go online first, if that's okay. Professor Scott? Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to give evidence today. That particular question, I'm not especially sure, I'm well qualified to answer. Obviously, all institutions, colleges and universities would like more money. Obviously, Governments always have constraints on what's available, to the extent that contribution is made. I'm sorry. Obviously, having an issue with that contribution will set that out, so perhaps in the meantime, Audrey, would you like to respond to that question? Well, I'm sure you can imagine that every principle in Scotland was following events closely yesterday afternoon. Essentially, what is a freeze over pretty much the full length of this Parliament going forward and then real-time cuts is no question going to be a challenge to colleges and universities across the sector. That's on top of a situation where, as a number of reports, recent reports by Audit Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council through their sustainability report have demonstrated that the college sector is at a very unstable point with respect to its funding. Of course, that potentially has an impact on the benefits of realising the full potential of regionalisation. If I was to try to put it simply, essentially, what does that mean for Edinburgh College? We are looking to find in the region of £5.5 million worth of savings over the next three to four years. That's on top of savings of around £28 million that have been realised since 2013. If we continue to do what we do in the way that we do it, we know that that is not sustainable. As I said, recently published reports would indicate that that is not sustainable. Therefore, something has to change either what colleges do, how we do it and the amount of activity that we do. I would be a very strong supporter of saying that the solution is not solely in the gift of the college sector and, in fact, the Government. It is about looking at a whole-system approach to what Scotland needs out of its education, vocational system and the wider tertiary system and skill system. Willie Rennie, I believe that you want to come in. I am quite happy for Nora Signe to answer first. I think that I concur with what Audrey Signe has said that this is going to be a very challenging time for colleges. Although Audrey Signe mentioned £5.5 million worth of savings, it is fair to say that the system needs to be freed up so that colleges can be more flexible in what they deliver and how they deliver it and where they can get funding from. In tandem with looking at savings, we also need to look at how we flex the college system and that infrastructure framework to make it easier for colleges to do things that they perhaps have not looked at before. That might be more international contracts, it might be closer working relationships to business, it might be closer partnerships and collaboration with universities to obtain funding perhaps through universities that can be repaid by colleges. We need to be more innovative about how colleges can deliver or creating the conditions for colleges to be more creative and able to deliver what they deliver because investment will be required to maintain that vitality and sustainability of the sector. We also need to look at what Scotland requires from its whole education sector. We cannot just look at taking funding away without being able to flex the system and the rules around the system in order to make the college sector more productive. I will come back to my original one a minute. I am intrigued by what Nora Signe has just said. What does that flexing mean and why is it not happening already? At the moment, colleges see funding based on teaching and learning. The whole mechanism of audit is probably better to answer this than I am, but the whole mechanism of funding is based on the credits for the amount of people that you send through a college system. There is a pro-rata payment for colleges on that, but even if there is an anomaly in that, five colleges receive a higher per capita payment than Edinburgh College. There is a disparity with Edinburgh, where they provide the same service but they get paid a lower rate. That means that they cannot invest in people. It means that they cannot invest in support training to the same extent as other colleges in the sector. There needs to be flexibility in how we look at how funding is delivered to individual colleges. There needs to be more flexibility around the types of courses that are delivered so that businesses can participate more closely with colleges and universities around the skills demand and skills need, and how colleges can deliver that. Colleges currently do what we are funded to do, and that funding is predominantly around activity, volume and inputs. I think that the funding is all geared towards that, so that the capacity and the space to do other things is significantly reduced. To the point that the core grant and aid that we now receive is no longer enough to even pay the staff bill, so there is no capacity. Our focus is completely on learning and teaching. As some of you will know, the symbiotic relationship that colleges should have and do have with industry is really important, but we could be doing so much more if we had the capacity to do it. I think that Nora's point is really important. The answer to that is not always additional funding, but it is potentially about looking at the resource that is currently in the system and how best to deflect that and target it for what outcomes we want to see within our regions. Nora, you have put an R in the chat, so you are wanting to come back. Just to answer Mr Rennie's question a bit further, one of the key areas is around innovation. In the innovation landscape at the moment, funding is really geared towards universities and innovation centres, but colleges have an important role to play within innovation, particularly for live challenges for business and making sure that the skills needs of business demand, particularly in skills planning, are met. However, colleges are not funded for innovative development, if you like. There is an anomaly about how funding is distributed and what Audre has said there. There perhaps needs to be a greater scrutiny and debate around what money is in the system and how it is actually used. Sorry to dig in on that a little bit, but I am intrigued because all of this sounds very sensible. I am just wondering why it has not happened already. I agree with you. It sounds very simple and it is very frustrating that it is not happening already. However, the solution is a wee bit more complex in that, if you take the whole college sector at the moment, I would describe it as being at quite an unstable point in our existence. Institutional stability across the whole sector is really important to try to maintain that. Therefore, when it comes to doing things like what needs to happen, which is changing funding models, not just funding levels, but actually looking at funding models and methodologies. Funding distribution is the funding in the right place in response to the demand. If you start to change all of those, you can see very quickly that you could have the consequence of destabilising. For example, in Edinburgh, I know that all the evidence is there that the Edinburgh region is growing. Therefore, as a college, we absolutely can evidence the fact that we could grow as a college. Now, the resource that is available to the whole sector for Edinburgh College to be resourced to grow means, by definition, that another region then is going to have to potentially go in the other direction, which could absolutely be the right thing to do for all the right reasons, but maintaining that funding stability to allow that to happen in a way of transition is really important. The Scottish Funding Council has recently reported on the tertiary sustainability. It points to that that there is a recognition that funding models have to change, there is a recognition that funding distribution has to change, but it goes back to a point that Norah has made. The environment has to be such that it allows that transition towards that happening. The Scottish Government has accepted in the main, almost all of the recommendations in that report. I guess that the collective challenge is how do we get from here and where we are now to where we know we need to be. It is not an easy question, but it is not an easy answer either. Let me ask my original question then, if that is okay, convener. Sorry for going on a bit. For as long as I have been in the Parliament, the colleges have been facing significant cuts in funding.  Even a regionalisation was supposed to strengthen the institutions and make the sector stronger, but the result is, as you have described—I know that you have talked about stability, Audrey, but I would probably, and I am fairly described by that situation, that you are in a crisis and you just have to hold things together and you are facing potential industrial action. Things are not easy within the sector, a significant number of places have been cut. Is that a characterisation that you would agree with? If it is, why are we in that situation? Does the Government not value you? Having been a principal pre-mergers and pre-regionalisation and then during that whole reform, which took place around 2012 over an 18-month period—so very fast, I think, that sets a record in terms of public sector reform and how quickly it was done—being honest, the biggest disappointment for me at that time as a principal was that all of that potential in creating colleges of scale, of influence, of a footprint that they could take the lead, so anchored in their local communities but regional coherence and deliveries, etc. In its very much a personal view, we missed a trick in terms of also putting investment in colleges exactly at the same time to realise that full potential. Merger and regionalisation coincided with circa 10 per cent cuts in funding, which is actually what we are experiencing at the moment. I would argue and have argued in a number of reports that I have been involved in that there does seem to be an equity across the whole system and that if we are focused on a skills led, wellbeing, economic recovery, economic transformation, skills, people have to be at the heart of that as does vocational professional technical provision, and therefore colleges should be at the heart of that and working with our university partners and industry partners. It is frustrating and that is why I said earlier, Willie, that something has to change. This is not and no longer sustainable and therefore the solutions have to be about how do we use what I believe are very strong foundations in terms of the regional reform of the sector but how do we now take that to the next level because there is real potential but it is not in the gift of colleges on our own to do that. We need to be doing it with other partners in the region, with our university partners, with government, with union colleagues and with industry. Thank you. Bob, you said you have a short supplementary. Credibly briefly because Audrey made just have addressed it in her answer there. Yes, you have said there is an opportunity at the point of regionalisation and undoubted tough financial budgetary outlook in years ahead but has regionalisation provided resilience and a stability greater than there would have been in the sector had we not underwent regionalisation, in other words, you mentioned I think strong foundations so is there a stability of foundation that otherwise wouldn't exist because we are evaluating the success otherwise of the regionalisation process, is there a foundation that because of regionalisation which gives greater resilience? Yes, absolutely. I think you addressed that in your previous reply. Brief a response than the question. Nora, you want to come in on that or are we happy to move to the next supplementary that I have got from one of the members? You are okay? Sorry, I forget there is a delay. Sorry, in terms of the wider regionalisation benefits, again, Audrey's experience is probably greater than mine on the ground. I think there have been benefits from regionalisation in terms of scale. Providing anchor communities or anchor institutions within local communities. I think that that means that there are perhaps greater access to courses across the region, so there is the benefit of reducing duplication but still having access to the type of education courses that will be available across the region, rather than in one institution. However, that also leads into a debate about, depending on which college is running that course, how do you get the individuals to do that? It can be a barrier in terms of travel expense to get from one place to another, so it opens up the whole debate about widening access and fair access. There have been opportunities that have opened up by regionalisation, but I do not think that it has been as effective as it potentially could have been in terms of use of budgets and use of outcomes. That goes back to how funding is allocated to individual institutions. The budget settlement for 2022-23 has been passed on to the colleges and for almost all colleges, so it means significant cuts to the staffing and the programmes that they are running. Principles and other senior staffing colleges are expressing concerns to me that they have received letters from the Scottish Funding Council telling them that they have to do exactly the same things that they did last year. I suppose that in terms of talking about the ability to flex, as we have talked about, the understanding that they make longer term, in the short term, is the system responsive enough to the context that they are existing in, I mean the Government system, to reflect the money that is allocated to colleges, to the job that they want them to do? I think that that is where the opportunity lies actually over the next year to two years. The measures that currently exist in terms of what colleges are expected to do and what we are funded to do are there, and there is an agreement that that needs to change, but there is going to have to be a transition towards that change. The transition is not recognised in the current requirements from the SFC, is it? What SFC are recommending, yes, would address that in the sense that that report absolutely acknowledges that both funding distribution, funding models, funding equity, multi-year funding, removing funding, siloed pots, all of that is in the SFC report, and there is an acknowledgement that that has to change. Sorry, I think that we are maybe talking slightly across purposes here, so it is not by the SFC report that it is about the letters of requirement that are being sent to colleges telling them what they have to do for the money that is allocated, and the SFC has produced a report about reform. What I am concerned about at the moment is the clash between the amount of money that is allocated and what they have been asked to do this coming year. I mean that is not realistic, is it? Colleges can't do both those things, cut the posts and do the same job that they did last year. Sorry for misunderstanding your question initially. Yes, so colleges have received our grant information in terms of, so we know financially what we will receive next year and what will be expected of us in terms of delivering that volume activity, which is still a big issue. Individual colleges are having conversations with the funding council about how realistic it is per region to achieve those activity levels. There is no question that it is becoming increasingly more and more and more difficult to hit those input activity volume targets. What has happened to date is that, as a college, if you were not to achieve those levels of activity, the funding council would claw back funding from you. That is where there is an on-going debate with the funding council around actually is their scope for some kind of leeway around what colleges can realistically achieve within the finances that we have. Many colleges, like my own, are giving very real feedback to the funding council that there is now a very real scenario where we will be looking to reduce provision, reduce activity and reduce staffing levels. We have a volunteer seven scheme that has literally just opened in the past few days with staff. What is the collective reserves position that Scotland's colleges now set against what it would have been pre-regionalisation? I do not have the figure to hand in relation to the whole college sector, but I am sure that we can get that to the committee. Certainly, over the period that I have been a principal, which is 12 years, is that in any of the colleges that I have been in, we have never generated reserves since regionalisation and reclassification. If we were in the luxurious position of being able to generate reserves, we would not be allowed to keep them because of reclassification. The absolute main focus for principals and boards of management is actually delivering balanced budgets in a sustainable college on an annual basis. The comment from Nora Senior earlier about Fife College was the example that she gave, receiving a higher level of funding than Edinburgh. Is that to do with rurality? The basis of that is a historical model of funding and how that was determined. Again, there is a recognition in the funding council that, although it may have been fit for purpose a number of years ago, it is no longer fit for purpose. One of the main reasons is that all colleges through national collective bargaining have staff costs that are determined nationally. Therefore, our cost base is exactly the same. Therefore, why would your funding for doing the same thing be any different across colleges? In fact, just with the recent allocation that was referred to earlier by Michael in terms of allocations, in the case of Edinburgh College, there has been a slight adjustment to our funding to try at least start to redress that inequity, which is a serious inequity across the whole of the sector. We move to questions from Colcab Stewart. I just wanted to explore a bit further the key achievements of regionalisation over the past 10 years. We are entering into looking at this and scrutinising it, so it might be nice to look at that. If I can push you on to looking at what improvements are still to be made, or could be made, I will go to Audrey first, if that is okay. In terms of provision, I would say that the amount of provision, the choice of provision, the access to provision, all of that has improved because of taking that regional perspective on coherence. If I could put it quite simply, pre-merger and regionalisation as a college, you may be running courses where viability is just not achievable, so there is not enough people want to do a particular course. One of the benefits of regionalisation, and in Edinburgh's case, we have got four campuses, is that that efficiency of scale actually gives you an opportunity to keep provision and provide provision where, historically, you may have had to take a very difficult decision to stop it. It is really important, and the point was made earlier, that local access is really, really important. It is one of the defining characteristics of colleges is that we are absolutely the heart of local communities and local provision, particularly for those who are furthest away from education or who have the most support needs at the lower levels of education and skills training. As provision has increased to your HNCHNDs and, in some cases, degree-level provision, that is where you can get and encourage more student mobility across the region. Social mobility and economic mobility are really, really important, and that has been a real benefit of regionalisation as well. Another key area of benefit for me is the role that regional colleges now play very much in terms of that leadership role across the footprint of the region. Often in most regions, the college is the only institution that has that footprint and therefore has a real opportunity to bring partners, local authorities, businesses and other people together to look at what the region needs, what the people need in the region, what industry needs within the region and what the wider stakeholders need within that region. To answer the second part of your question, and those are just some examples of the benefits, but to answer the second part of the question, which is what are the next benefits of regionalisation? That was really my previous point, which is to fully realise the full potential of regionalisation and the importance of place, which is really important, is that the environment has to change, the wider system has to change. We need to take that wider system perspective that would, and again this is a very personal view, where we have very clear national priorities. We have got a national economic transformation strategy, we have got national performance outcome frameworks, and we have set national priorities but very much have regional autonomy, regional responsibility and regional outcomes of a collective of partnerships and collaborations. For me, that would be the ideal, but we are not there yet. I apologise for the connectivity problems earlier, I am not quite sure what happened. I have been hearing you fine throughout. If I could address perhaps the whole conversation that we have had so far, I hope that you can hear me still. I think that it is undoubtedly the case that colleges are under more financial pressure than higher education institutions, although universities I am sure would like more money as well. From my perspective, a fair access, the colleges play an absolutely crucial role here, so any excessive financial pressure on colleges has the potential to damage efforts to move towards fairer access. Colleges, after all, deliver an awful lot of higher education in their own right, and they are also a key channel into degree courses. If you look at entrants to higher education from more deprived backgrounds, 40 per cent to degree courses and 40 per cent to them come through a college route, so colleges are absolutely crucial there. Obviously, there is always scope for greater efficiencies. One of the things that I would like to have seen would be that more high national students are given full credit for what they have already achieved. That is potentially to benefit them, but it also creates greater efficiency in the system. I think that the funding council would like to see at least 75 per cent get advanced standing, in the words, full credit for what they have already achieved. The current figure is 58 per cent, so there is progress to be made there. Colleges pay a key role—I think that Aldry has made the point—in having strong local footprints, and then that is mediated through a regional level, and then at the university level. They do play a key role there. Whether they could do better, I think that I am not best qualified to say. Obviously, I can comment largely on the role that colleges play in promoting fair access, which is absolutely crucial, as I said. One of the points that I did make in my written statement was that there is potentially a dilemma for colleges. Of course, they need to maintain as strong a local footprint as possible, thinking of Edinburgh's four separate campuses. At the same time, at the other end of the system, in relation to the higher education provision and the links with universities, the geography is somehow rather different. I think that colleges have to manage to have a local geography, a regional geography and, to some extent, a national geography at the same time. That, I can see, is for a source of quite significant pressure. I think that Nora Orr has much easier access to businesses and is able to flex the courses that they are offering to suit the type of needs of business. That begs the question about what they do better. For me and what the strategic board found, there needed to be greater collaboration between higher education and further education, so colleges and universities. However, what became quite obvious was that institutions need to have greater awareness of what each other does within the ecosystem so that they can identify opportunities for collaboration. One of the ways that you might be able to look at that is that, in business, we have knowledge exchanges or transfer partnerships where there are placements, so that empowers institutions and individuals to have greater access to knowledge. I think that there is greater scope to learn from those types of skills and adapt them for colleges and universities. I think that innovation is really one of the great drivers of productivity, but we need to be live and real. I think that that is an area that colleges have started to do well with employer hubs but could do better with greater collaboration with universities. The other area is about being able to gear more towards specialisms or needs of industry. Universities are less flexible in the offer of courses that they have, and it takes them longer to deflect. During the pandemic, colleges were very good at introducing short, sharp courses and giving micro-credentials or accrediting them to some extent. Again, what could they do better? More of those types of courses so that businesses can upskill their staff or reskill their staff, but also be able to have or acknowledge through accreditation through qualification micro-segments and be able to certify them is an area that could be done better going forward. That is really interesting to hear the bits going forward, because that is part of our job as the committee to look at those areas. I am glad to see and hear that colleges are very responsive to individual, local and national demands, which is a very complex picture and ever-changing, as it were, as well. Just as a last question, convener, is there any evidence of the impact of regionalisation on students and the student experience? I do not know who would be the best to answer on that one. The student experience is measured in a number of ways and is monitored very closely by colleges absolutely in terms of satisfaction, in terms of positive destinations, which are in the high 90 per cent in terms of people going through colleges more often than not. Absolutely go into a positive destination, either further study or into work. About three quarters of the 30,000 students that study Edinburgh College are part-time, and they are already working. This is about supporting people who are already in work through upskilling and reskilling. As I said earlier, choice absolutely has, in my experience, the choice of provision and access to provision has increased over the period. The number of students going through Edinburgh College has, year on year, got higher and higher and higher, despite the fact that the funding has remained pretty static and being cut over that period. However, one of the points that I make in my paper is that the nature of demand—you have just touched on it—is changing, and it is changing quickly. I go back to Nora's point about agility and responsiveness. We need to find ways of embedding that in the system so that we can be more responsive. Again, a very quick example around demand. NHS Lothian, it was not that long ago that Edinburgh and the wider Lothians had something like 700 vacancies. They were in crisis in terms of needing people and people with certain skills to fill those jobs. What we did with the NHS was design what Nora described there, a very short, fast-track six-week programme, in which she knew that if somebody got through that programme, they would have the skills to get on to the payroll of NHS. We recruited students on to those programmes. NHS reduced their recruitment process by half. When a student started on that six-week programme and finished it in most due, and we are now doing it in a rolling programme, they were guaranteed a job by NHS Lothian. They finished with us on Friday and on Monday they were on payroll of NHS, but it did not stop there because we are now responsible for still working with those people to upskill and reskill to allow them to progress their career through the NHS. That was funded through the Young Persons Guarantee and the National Training Fund Pots of Money, which were discrete pots of money in response to the Covid pandemic. The beauty of those funds was their flexibility and how they could be used. If we could almost learn from that and apply some of that learning to our core funding and loosen that up, then again a great example of what we could do to respond really quickly and flexibly to demand. Thank you for that. I am quite happy, convener, unless somebody else... I think Nora wants to come in on that as well. Thank you. It was just to add a kind of supplementary point about student experience, if you like, and the impact. Covid impacted in a number of ways, so there was the change to digital. That created a hybrid, if you like. I think that many students suffered from not having the interaction with their peer groups and courses. The access to technology was a challenge at the outset, but I think that most colleges managed to resolve that in some way. However, it is a consideration going forward about how we manage that hybrid. It was also looking to delivering lectures on-screen rather than within a room full of people. It was also challenging for staff in terms of delivery of knowledge. The benefit for the student was that they could chip in at any time and re-listen to the learning that they missed. It was a little bit more difficult within practical courses because a lot of that had to be done on their own, and it was obviously sent by technology down the line to be assessed. That was challenging. We need to be able to look at what are the benefits that we learn from that Covid environment and how we can up-still and move to digital to open up greater access, particularly around rural communities. Stephanie Callaghan, you are wishing to come in with our supplementary. Is there anyone in particular who wants to direct it to us? Just when we are talking about student experiences, I just felt my question kind of fitted in quite well here. We have achieved the access target of 16 per cent of students from the most deprived areas that that was met. I wonder what progress has been made with improving access for students with disabilities and learning disabilities and those from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. I am probably not the best person to answer that question. Audrey may be being more from the operational side, might be better in place to do that, or Sir Peter, in terms of widening access and common access. Direct that to Sir Peter if that is possible, please. Yes, certainly. I suppose that one of the criticisms of the drive towards fair access is simply that it is the one metric that matters. It is the proportion of students from SRMD-20 areas, and that has been often criticised for a number of reasons. I have tried in one of my annual reports to look at multiple forms of deprivation, and that would certainly include disability and people coming from black and minority ethnic communities. Often there is a significant overlap between those different groups. However, it would be nice to move in good time towards a more comprehensive definition of disadvantage and use that in measuring progress towards fair access without losing in a way the central focus on class, which I think is really crucial, and also not just a social class but community disempowerment. Those are really important principles to maintain, but the downside, of course, is that other disadvantaged groups potentially get ignored. That is certainly not the case with care experience. It is a strong focus on care experience, students. Disability is a different dimension to some degree, but there are also older students. There are many, many dimensions of disadvantage. It would be nice to see them in a more comprehensive, more holistic kind of way. Do you have any particular recommendations on how that could be taken forward? The big debate has not been so much on the points that you raised, which were disability and ethnicity. The big debate has always been on whether, in fact, you should use SIMD, which is an area-based metric, or something that is focused on individual disadvantage like free school meals. Not much progress has been made on moving that debate forward. It seems to me rather static. We have the same arguments and we circle around around again. It would be good to see that debate resolved in some kind of way. The impact of Covid, of course, made that difficult to make that kind of progress, but I would like to go further, as I would say. I would like to see a measure of disadvantage that brought in as many dimensions as possible. Ethnicity is particularly important. Disability is very important. I think that age, I mean, I think that older students suffer forms of disadvantage and we are focused still very much on the needs of young adults, I think, in driving forward fair access. It is a kind of urgent agenda in which not enough progress has been made, I feel. That is great. I think that we all have an issue with perhaps thinking of young people. What progress has been made with ensuring that students' voices are actually listening to our students' influence on the future priorities for the sector? I am also wondering as well as the drive towards net zero and the priority prioritised green skills for the future. Is that a priority for our students and for the sector? I am happy to answer that. Actually, the student voice is extremely important in every college and should be. Going back to the benefits of regionalisation, one of the recommendations around that reform was the place of student associations and how we could strengthen student associations within the college sector and also strengthen that voice. Not just voice, but the influence that students have on colleges as a whole. For example, student associations, vice presidents are represented on college boards. The investment budget that goes into student associations is significant. Pre-merger in any typical college that might have been in the thousands. Where as Edinburgh College, we are investing a quarter of a million pounds just in the running of the student association, where we have full-time student representatives who are hugely valuable in terms of shaping and influencing what we do and how we do it. Sustainability is not unexpectedly very important and increasingly important to students. Students are very creative. Student associations are separate charities in their own right. They can access and tap into all sorts of funding opportunities and can again help them to support and drive the addressing climate challenges and drive to net zero in colleges across Scotland. That is really important. Michael, you had a supplementary question. Thank you. It is very brief. It is regarding the access to university. Obviously, college has been a critical part of that. Peter, I was referring to his report and some of his work in that area. There are some reports this morning following on from your report. The First Minister has said that Scotland is leading the way in university access, but the Yuckers figures this year show that in Scotland the application rate from disadvantaged backgrounds is 35.4 per cent in Wales it is 37.5 per cent. In England it is 44.1 per cent. In Northern Ireland it is 52.6 per cent. Do you agree with the First Minister that we are leading the way on that regard, given those figures? So Peter, is that over to yourself to perhaps respond to that one? Okay. Yes, I heard the question. How is on? The whole rate is, of course, that you can pick. I think that it is factually correct to say that in Scotland, first of all, it has the highest rate of participation in higher education overall, which is significant. I mean, there are essentially people who go to higher education in Scotland who actually would not go in England. They would go to some other form of post-secondary education.  In terms of the targets that the Scottish Government itself has set, good progress has been made. I mean, but 16 per cent of entrance to higher education, first degree courses in higher education should come from the 20 per cent most deprived areas. That was a target for last year. That has already been met. There is a target in 2026, which is only four years ahead, after all. That should be pushed up to 18 per cent. I think that that will be more challenging, particularly because we still haven't had time to properly assess the impact of Covid on school attainment levels, but also aspiration levels. I think that young people have been a great challenge to them in many ways. The challenge has been great from those most deprived communities. Although it looks as if we should be able to meet that target fairly comfortably, I don't think that it's by any means guaranteed. The target by the end of the decade in a central level playing field does look challenging. No country in the world has achieved that already. It's fair to say that good progress has been made, but it's a nuanced picture. There are always aspects of it that I think there are areas of concern. I mentioned earlier the need to look at disadvantaged across more broadly. We're focusing a moment on people from deprived communities and other forms of disadvantaged, not least disadvantaged people living in less deprived communities who potentially get missed out by current policies. One more general point that I'd like to make is that I think that Audrey, at an earlier stage, really emphasised the need for a whole-system approach. I think that in relation to fair access, that's absolutely crucial about a whole-system approach. This is about schools, colleges, universities and, of course, beyond moving into employment as well. Just to mention one other nation in the UK, I think that the UK Wales has adopted a very interesting approach to trying to bring together a fully comprehensive tertiary system of education and training, having a single agency that manages that, looking at further education, higher education on-the-job training and, of course, community learning. Adult learning often gets missed out of this equation, and that's also extremely important. Sorry, I've probably gone on too long. Thank you. Nora, you've put an R in the chat bar. Would you like to come back? It might be to respond to Stephanie Callaghan's question. It was more direct towards Ms Callaghan's question, however, it's probably still relevant for this one, both in terms of student voice and the decision to move from further education into university and applications. I think that some of that is around careers advice and what happens across the system. Is it necessary to go to university to have the skills that will get you a job? I think that Audry's case study or looking into what happened with NHS Lothian, if there is a job at the end of it, then do you necessarily need to go to a full-time university? It becomes perhaps more important to move into a job and then take more qualifications as you are, perhaps as a graduate apprentice rather than full-time education. Although we look at the numbers of the 35 per cent against 37 per cent, for me it's more about what is the end outcome. Is it going to be better jobs for people and there are different routes to get them into those jobs and then up-skill and reskill through lifetime learning rather than go for a university degree and then actually you've got to be filled anyway as you move into a full-time job? I think that the debate around student voice and what is the best route to progress through education as a system-wide area to look at raises questions around how is it that we direct and guide people of all ages into careers that are both necessary and relevant to the long-term aims of the country, for example, net zero? I don't think that Graham Smith has carried out a review into the careers system across the tertiary system and I would welcome some of the recommendations that he is going to be making around how we more closely align what we are guiding people towards and where finding ought to be focused and then guiding people into the long-term education pathways. For me it's more artificial to say is 35 per cent any better than 37 per cent because for me it's more about what is the end outcome. Thank you very much, Nora. Now, Bob Dorris, over to you for some questions. Thanks, convener. I've been struck by that conversation around the student pathway, I suppose, irrespective of age but I was more interested in part of this question from school through the college process and into potentially higher education. In the evidence we've heard that 4 in 10 young people at university from SIMD 20 came through the college process. That's got to be a huge achievement for the college process. I suppose I'd like to ask Sir Peter whether that's about right. Is that up in previous years? Is that about right? What should that figure be but more importantly he's a little bit more about the experience of young people from the most deprived backgrounds. However, we define that, Sir Peter, from schools through the college process and potentially into higher education. I'm conscious a lot of those community outreach programmes were disrupted through Covid so could we be storing up some issues in the next couple of years for those young people to go through the college system in that way? Sir Peter? I think the college route is absolutely crucial because colleges clearly reach people that universities in their own right are finding much more difficult to reach even with their best efforts. It's really important. I think that Scotland's record in terms of fair access would be much diminished if it wasn't to colleges and that's one of the key differences why Scotland's done better than England. 27 per cent, as I say, of higher education is delivered in colleges in Scotland. It's only less than 10 per cent in England and that's made a crucial difference. I think it's right to say that we still haven't had time to really assess the full impact of the Covid pandemic, school disruptions, which would clearly probably be worse in many instances in more deprived areas than in more prosperous areas. The problems that Nora herself mentioned are digital poverty and having a place to study. I think that people from deprived backgrounds had it much tougher during the Covid pandemic than people from more advantaged backgrounds. The impact of that still hasn't worked its way through the system. My particular concern is not so much people who were just on the threshold of higher education because they were already on track. I think that the issue is much more people in the early years of secondary education or even the middle years of secondary education who just may never get on track to go to higher education, whether it's in a college setting or in a university. I would guess two or three years for us to really see how that plays out. That's a concern that I have. I agree with all the points that Sir Peter has just made, as restrictions may have lifted, but the impact of the pandemic will undoubtedly be felt well beyond this year, potentially next year and the year after, just to see how that starts to settle in terms of access, progression and so on. It is fair to say, though, again going back to the nature of demand changing, that the journey through education from school, colleges and universities was often seen as quite linear. Increasingly, we are now seeing that as being much more about actually personalised what do people need and when do they need it and where is the best place to access what it is they need. Therefore, people will dip in and dip out of the wider system as they go through a lifetime, potentially, of education and skills training, either in work or out of work. Push a little bit further on that. One of the consultation names for regionalisation was a range of courses for the community to serve. That's what colleges were hoping to provide in my experience, because they do that, but local colleges tell me, convener, that a lot of the work they do are short-taster courses in communities that are labour intensive with staffing on the ground and building up those relationships. It was those types of activities that gave me quite expensive activities that were one of the first to fall. You couldn't recreate that digitally, convener. Do you think that what we're looking at in the next couple of years, some of the positive statistics that we've heard today start to decline in challenging budgets, I know, doing more of a focus on that going forward? There is no question that the provision that you've just described, which is right in communities, reaching the hardest to reach, is the most intensive, whether it's in relation to the support, the wraparound support that needs to go into place, the costs of it and actually the importance of partnership working. A lot of local authorities are very involved in the provision of community learning and development in partnership with colleges, and that is really, really important. That is a challenge about making sure that we continue to protect and continue to invest resource and time and priority into those communities, particularly where it's the hardest to reach. Primarily, with the outcome of actually tapping into those people and getting them into colleges, certainly, in the first instance and our work. Question, convener. I'm not sure who will be the best place to answer it, is how we can track some of that progress. I get disrupted for two years because of Covid, but what the data exists to monitor the success of that intensive community work to getting young people and others into that education pathway through the college system and with partners. Is there something that you could point to to show the data about, well actually, one in ten or one in fifteen of the young people that are engaged with, eventually find themselves in a full-time college course and they go on to achieve whatever? I'm a certain of these opposite things, convener, but how do we track the data to see that they have been successful, that it feels successful, that my colleges appear to be successful, but how do we monitor that? I don't have the specific percentage figure for Edinburgh to hand, but absolutely that data and data is becoming much more important as we all know just in terms of getting that intelligence and really robust evidence about what is actually happening but also what is the impact of what's happening. Yes, data does exist and data is shared, so in terms of the sector and between institutions where that's appropriate. I don't know if any other witnesses want to add to that, but I know a few other questions, convener. Nora, you've just popped up in the chat bar there, yes? Yes, sorry. I just wanted to make the strategic board add a championed understanding of the impact of post-school education and they created a post-school education skills impact framework that was launched in 2019. That looked at the benefits of the investment in education to students, businesses and the economy and it is aiming to look at providing evidence in the return on investment from higher education qualifications, further education qualifications, modern apprenticeships and from the perspective of the individual, the Government and employers. It's the first time that project of that skills has been undertaken. It links education data with HMRC tax data and it's been taken forward by SCSFC and Scottish Government, as well as the strategic board's analytic unit. Results are available from the first stage, which looks at estimates for student earnings and employment as a result of having taken some education and training. The full data has yet to be analysed, but there will be something in there that might pinpoint data of the impact and return on where we're investing within the system, if that's helpful. Yes, thank you very much. I've got a follow-up question on that sort of theme. We've heard a lot previously about the links with colleges and universities and the evidence there about the provision within community learning. I'm curious about the links that we have now with regionalisation with schools from the college's perspective and I'll direct that directly to Audrey first and if anyone else wants to comment on how the strength of links to schools with colleges would be great. Colleges have always had a really close working relationship with local schools. In relation to regionalisation, so if you take again Edinburgh as an example and this will be getting repeated and seen across the whole of Scotland, our footprint is three local authorities, 37 schools in total, and looking at increasing the opportunities for school pupils across that full regional footprint to access college provision at a whole range of levels, so including primary school children who are coming to college and focusing very much on STEM, which is a big, big focus for us. Of course, the introduction of foundation apprenticeships and starting to look at that wider apprenticeship family and how we can start to look at getting work experience as well as skills training as well as qualifications for school pupils. There are a range of programmes being developed actually in partnership with our university partners where it's not just the college, it's actually the universities who are also and again in Edinburgh, the four universities we work with, each of the four universities very closely on schools provision and where we are clear back to Nora's point is that we are taking that collective perspective on actually what are the demands, what are the needs, what can we do collectively to make sure that we're getting the provision right at the right time in the right place, but also at the right level. Thank you very much. Just thinking about schools there, I wonder if you can say a bit about how that collaboration with schools can help to hang on to pupils and keep them education, I suppose, and thinking about the combination of academic and vocational studies that can be made available. Again, that's a massive strength of the college sector as a whole, as it is about vocational, technical and professional, not just qualifications but skills training and part of the attraction. We hear this absolutely from school pupils directly, but also from the schools themselves is that colleges are not schools. It is a different experience and that that is really, really important, particularly when pupils are at school, is to literally show them the potential of career choices or choices of areas that they want to go in and learn and start to lift and raise the aspirations of those pupils and actually what is possible. That relationship is hugely important because it's part of the pipeline, it's part of creating that solid pipeline of people, but trying to access people as young as possible so that they can see clearly what opportunities and choices are available to them. Has regionalisation impacted on your reach into schools, if you like? It has impacted in the sense that it has increased opportunity and increased choice, but there is still work to do. Again, just to use Edinburgh as an example where we span three local authorities and each local authority has its own priorities in relation to schools and responsibility for those schools is that we are working with those three local authorities with a view to saying, Luke, are there better outcomes and greater value and impact to be gained by taking a regional perspective on school provision and school links and collaborations with the college as opposed to working with three individual local authorities. Your gut instinct would say, actually, that there has to be more opportunities there. That's very much in discussion at the moment and I'm sure we'll be getting replicated across colleges and other regions. Thank you very much, Audrey. Over to your questions from Graham Day now, please. Thank you, convener. My questions are directed to Professor Scott in the first instance. In your report of this week, you note that the University of Scotland and Cods of Scotland established a national articulation forum, which produced its final report in 2022. However, very little, limited progress has been made. I wonder if you could expand for us on why you think that has disappointingly been the case and maybe highlight some areas where you think progress could be made to the greatest benefit? Progress has been disappointing. I think the key area is at the moment the attitude tends to be that the student themselves needs to justify why they should be given an advanced standing. So, in a sense, the ownership of proof is on them. I think the default position should be the other way around. Essentially, it should be assumed that a person with an HNC should enter the second year of a degree and an HND, potentially the third year of a degree. I know that, in some subjects, the curriculum fit between the HND and the degree is not that good, and therefore there is a need for some students perhaps to repeat some work or to take on some stuff that they previously hadn't covered in their HND. The overlap is sometimes the other way. Things are covered in HNDs which are not covered in the first year or second year of a degree programme. There are genuine difficulties, but one of the problems is that there are many people in universities, perhaps more traditional universities, who are relatively unfamiliar with higher nationals. It is really important that that better understanding of the standing and of HNDs is better understood by people who take key decisions in universities. I think that progress has been too slow. The funding council itself, as I mentioned earlier, has a target of 75 per cent of students, HN students getting advanced standing. We are still way below that, and that target stood for some time. The progress towards it, I once described in one of my reports, I think, is rather glacial, and I still think that that is probably a fair description. I think that this is the one area where I think that there is need for much, much greater urgency. We are asking for that. Thank you. That is very useful. Would it be fair to say then that what needs to happen here is the curriculum being tweaked on the part of the colleges, but a change in culture and attitude from the university side of it? I think that we always have to remember that high nationals are, in a sense, freestyling qualifications in their own right, and they are highly valued by employers and well understood by employers. I do not think that high nationals should be seen simply as transitional courses leading into degrees, because in many areas that just does not happen. The areas in which there is quite a significant number of HN students who go onto degree programmes. I think that more tension needs to be playing to matching the curriculum, but that should not just be one way of matching. I do not think that colleges need to adapt their curriculum. I think that universities and modern occasions have to adapt theirs. To some degree, there is a difference of culture. The arguments are put to me that university students are more autonomous learners than college students. I think that this is a terrible stereotype, but those old stereotypes go around in people's heads and influence their attitudes make them more positive or less negative. We need to address those issues of culture and stereotypes as well. It is quite disappointing that all those years into the process were still in this situation. I do not underestimate the issues that people in universities face. Obviously, they want to ensure that their students not only succeed but get good outcomes, not only in terms of degrees but also in terms of employment opportunities. That emphasis on continuation rates and success rates can, to some degree, act as a bit of a drag on what they might be seen as taking risks when it comes to admitting students. I sympathise with the university point of view, but I think that more pressure should be put on here. The default position should be flipped in a way. I think that the default position should be that HN students are given full credit for what they have already achieved, unless there are reasons why that is not appropriate in those particular circumstances or because they fit between their course and the university course is not that good. You have got to remember that some people will be switching to an entirely different subject area. In that case, I think that there is more justification for saying that they need to start at a station in a degree programme. However, when that continuing effectively in the same subject area, the argument is much weaker there. I think that it would be reasonable to bring Audrey Cumberford in on that, given her lived experience of that. I do not disagree with much of what Sir Peter has just said. Advanced standing has improved, and there is no question. There is a 22 per cent increase in our students who have HNC and HND moving on to either second or, in some cases, third year of a degree programme. That is often dependent not just on your relationship with the individual institutional level in the university but also in those curriculum areas and provision. I think that Sir Peter makes an important point, which is that the purpose of HNCs and HNDs is not to create a pipeline of articulation to universities. That is right for some people, but it is not the main driver, because those qualifications exist in their own right and are very much focused on work. In fact, increasingly, people in work are looking for upskilling and reskilling opportunities. It is complex to get underneath the reasons why there has been slow progress, but there is definitely progress. I agree that there could be more progress and faster progress. Presumably, convener, it is a mixed picture across the country. There will be areas in what your own way there has been progress. Presumably, based on the findings of the commissioner's report, overall, there is an issue. Are there remains an issue? It is difficult for me to speak specifically on other regions, but the sector as a whole has been working closely with University of Scotland and the university sector as a whole to look at how we can collectively improve the position. With respect, after the number of years that you have been at this collectively, Sir Peter still produces a report with that line in it that suggests that progress is the key use of the word glacial in its contribution. It has been slow, hasn't it? Can we anticipate a quickening of that pace in the years to come, do you think? Certainly, in my experience, locally, there is a willingness and a commitment to making that happen. Thank you very much. Now we are moving to progressing on to questions from Michael Marra. Thanks, convener. I think that it follows on reasonably in line with some of Mr Day's questions. I suppose that trying to evaluate the idea of regionalisation and what next steps are around that, I am keen to focus on outcomes for young people in Scotland. I think that some of the evidence that we have had is a lot about inputs, perhaps young people attending universities and numbers from that. The completion rate for 2020-21 in Scotland was 61.3 per cent success rate, and that compares to a figure roughly comparable to 89 per cent in England. Is there a way that we can talk about why that gap exists? Is that—are you referring to a particular level of study? At FE, people entering their courses are 61.3 per cent leaving the qualifications that they started with. Actually, there is a further 11 per cent on top of that, not achieving the qualifications that they desired when they started their courses. People are being recruited in completing the courses. I guess that it is slightly difficult to draw a direct comparison between the situation in Scotland and the situation in England, just because the structures are the same. In fact, the whole system is different in that they have six form colleges, they have technical colleges, they have—and I cannot remember, there is probably at least five other definitions of institutions that we would refer to as colleges. You are correct, there has been over a sustained period of time at that FE level, so that is at the lower level of qualifications. Often, individuals who have the greatest needs and the greatest need for additional support and all sorts of challenges and barriers to overcome that that figure has remained pretty static across the country for a number of years. Again, it is complex to understand why that is and what could be done to improve that situation. I think that I will go back to an earlier point to build on regionalisation. I believe that that is where there is an opportunity at a regional level to get right underneath the reasons for that and to collectively, as a group of partners. In Edinburgh, the universities, the schools, the local authorities, industry partners are to look at what are the outcome ambitions that we want to see in our region, that are right for our region, the people in our region, the economy, et cetera, in our communities and then how do we collectively then contribute towards achieving those outcomes. For me, that would be a big shift forward in terms of how we build on the foundations of regionalisation. We should do that work prior to a further round of reforms. If we are talking about outcomes, we should plan what we want to achieve and find the pathways to do it. Would that be the sensible way to do it? Absolutely. I take on your points on that and I found it difficult to find a roughly and exactly comparable figure, because the systems are different between England and Scotland, but it still seems to me to be a pretty stark gap in terms of those outcomes. The most equivalent that I could find is 89 per cent of young people in England coming out of the other side. You talked about some of the Scottish situation. Is there more that we can learn from other models elsewhere? If we are in the process of reform, is there more that we can do to try and achieve better outcomes? As I said in my paper, I am involved in a four nations group, which is a group of principles but also government officials and ministers as well. It is fair to say that many of the challenges that we face are very similar challenges, albeit that there might be nuances and differences across the four nations just because of structure, just because of systems. In Northern Ireland, there are six colleges and they are much smaller. They work much more closely together. We have the same challenges in the recent reports from the UK Commission to demonstrate that there are very common shared challenges across the whole of the UK. You are correct and that some of the approaches that have been taken in each of the nations has been different. The commission found that the other three nations looked to Scotland in terms of the regional structure and the benefits that that had realised, but probably more importantly, the benefits that it could realise going forward. As a subset, I will bring in Norah senior off the back of the question as well, if I can. The large success rates, as I have qualified them there, range from 52.7 per cent to 73.6 per cent, and small colleges range from 59.7 per cent to 78.4 per cent, so essentially a lower floor in larger colleges. If there is a direction of travel in terms of what has happened over recent years, it would seem to indicate those statistics and I recognise that it is one statistic. There would be a wealth of other things that we could look at on that, but in terms of outcomes sustained getting qualifications for young people to try and help them advance in their life, that is a pretty significant gap. Seven per cent, all of those that represent young people, the floor is a lot lower in these larger colleges. There seems to be greater propensity for people not to achieve. Would you recognise that? I think that there are specific characteristics and challenges associated with larger colleges that are likely to be different in smaller colleges. For example, again, using Edinburgh, we have four campuses. If having a single campus, then in terms of the concentration of support, etc, etc, it might be easier. Again, this has been one of the lessons learned from the Covid experience, is that how can we use technology-enabled solutions to making sure that we get the targeted support that is needed to individuals where and when they need it. There is a lot of learning that is done across the sector. Again, looking at where colleges, looking at figures and outcomes seem to be more successful, there absolutely is a huge amount of professional dialogue that goes on between staff on the ground, between colleges to find out what is different, the make-up of the course, how it is being taught, how it is being delivered, is it the support to try to get underneath exactly what the issues are. However, I share the frustration that there has been a pretty static position for a number of years now, and we need to get on top of that. Nora, do you have any comments on the same? I think that Audrey just answered it in her last point where she was talking about the comparator across colleges, where colleges Scotland should be looking at why one college would have a greater success rate than another. I also just wanted to go back to an approach about skills alignment to one of your earlier points and looking at skills planning and provision. Some people may start out on a college course, but they get a job and their skills education is then transferred to work-based learning rather than institution-based learning. One of the things that the Enterprise and Skills Board looked at was that whole area of skills alignment and skills planning and who does what across the system. There are three pilots, which are on-going at the moment, one in north-east Scotland, one in south-east Scotland, and the other is around the implementation of climate emergency skills action plan. Those three pilots, to Audrey's earlier reference, are bringing together higher education colleges, private providers, local authorities, etc. To plan out who is best to deliver sport, based on the skills demand in various regions and areas or skills needs, there is a greater propensity of people who are graduating or coming out of the system who are skills ready and moving into jobs. The evidence that we have had to date on the written evidence that has been submitted, I do worry slightly that we are talking a lot about coherence and how different parts of the tertiary sector work together. Alongside that, we have an Audit Scotland report talking about the issues that Nora Seniors just mentioned, which is utterly damning of the Government's approach in terms of a complete lack of leadership in that area in terms of skills alignment. We have the Cumberford little report, we have the Scottish College of the Future report, we have the Scottish Fund and Council review of coherent provision and sustainability. We have a team in the Scottish Government that has swole into over 20 civil servants desperately seeking a vision or an idea about what to do. We have a team at the SFC, apparently also working up an alternative piece. To MD have any idea whether the SFC, Scottish Fund and Council and the Scottish Government are actually working together to the same blueprint for the future, or are they developing completely different plans? We seem to have a lot of plans. I wonder if there is any idea about whether those people are actually talking to each other. I think that there is a question looking for an insight, convener, because people have said to me that there is real frustration that they see these things going on in different places. Is it coheren? Is it the policy-making coheren? Audre, your light is on. Are you in a position to answer that? Yes. Certainly, it would be my view that the Scottish Fund and Council and colleagues in the Government are working closely together. There is a commitment that has been articulated that the Government will be working over the coming months on setting out a very clear statement of intent and vision and purpose for not just the college sector but for that wider system. What I would hope is that, if that purpose and statement are clear, what flows from that is things such as, okay, where do we need to put resource, where do we get the best return on investment, et cetera, et cetera. No, senior, anything to add to that? From a business person and speaking personally, I have a lot of sympathy with what you have said there. I think that there is a disconnectable raft of different reasons, whether it is change of personnel, whether it is not seeing policy through. I think that SFCs has been in a difficult position. It is a funding body, it does not mandate and it cannot mandate the institutions, it can direct and give guidance through the outcome agreements, the strategic board highlighted the fact that we did not think that SFCs had real insight and control over the measurements and determined investment that it was making in the funding that it was giving to institutions. The SFC review has worked with Government in order to address those. I think that the outcome agreements will change or are change, have change in order to direct institutions more towards guidance around which courses they do, but institutions at the end of the day are businesses in their own right, so they will make their decisions based on what is going to help their success as an institution. I think that that is a barrier to whole system wide response, unless, to the point that was made earlier, you have one body that brings all this together so that you do not have different silos across the system. That is my personal opinion, and that is not one that should be attributed to any body. I have a question on the subject. We have heard a lot, and Nora was speaking about the pilot regarding the net zero ambitions of the country. I have come from healthcare, and we have heard a committee, and we have spoken about some measures that she has been doing with NHS Lothian. What can the sector do to further improve our outlook to what is really needed for the Scottish economy and Scottish businesses and Scottish jobs in terms of arming our young people and our older learners to really help fill all those desperate sectors that are looking and calling them out for staff? I was going to say, I think that Nora could come in there. I think that there are a couple of things. We always hear that business is never happy about skills. We have skills shortages, but we cannot always articulate what those skills shortages are in. Financial services is a good example of that. The financial services sector has said, well, we do not need specialists in any one area. We need people with certain qualities or capabilities, if you like, personal attributes, and then we will retrain them. There are other sectors such as propulsion engineering, where there is a huge opportunity, but we cannot get the courses to train the people. Again, the strategic board recognised that there was a big disconnect between the skills that we are putting out and what business needs. We carried out a review of the industry leadership group setters. I have now brought them together in a round-table forum. We have looked at a review and guidance on how best to get the data and knowledge that each industry leadership group has, and how does that get fed into the system. The College of the Commission also recommended employer hubs for each of the colleges and universities to engage more closely with their local communities. Universities are not local in the same sense that colleges are. Universities are national, if not international bodies, but they have a local perspective. Being able to identify from businesses across the piece what are the national priorities, say around net zero, say about advanced manufacturing and propulsion engineering. Industry leadership groups can feed that back into government and hope that that will then be directed on to colleges and universities. However, the system is flawed, in my opinion. We can gather all that information, but nobody takes that and directs colleges and universities across or nationally to be able to take that and really be able to drive the direction and the balance of courses that are going to meet the economic needs. Universities in particular are probably more strapped into it, but colleges are too. We teach what we have the lecturers' capabilities for. If you do not have enough digital teachers because they are all working in industry where they can get more money, if you do not have teachers and lecturers around engineering because they are all working in industry because they are going to be better remunerated, we are never going to get to that position where we get the true balance of skills meeting with the demand. It is something that has not been resolved, but it needs to be resolved. On a follow-up from that, Nora, do you think that it might be possible with the collaboration between industry and colleges to have some sort of day release scheme where the experts that are working in the field can then come and teach the young people of the future? I do not want to put a solution on that. Yes, and it was one of the things that I think has come out from the industry leadership groups is that we need to make it easier for business to connect in with schools, with colleges and universities, and for staff from schools, colleges and universities to spend time within districts so that their current teaching is current, which it is not always. I think that business needs to co-design and co-create courses, so we need to create the routes that that is able to happen and not create barriers. Sometimes it is very difficult for local businesses to gain access, not so much to colleges but certainly to schools because it is not seen as part of the curriculum. We need to, going back to the point that I made about careers system earlier, we need to think more openly and flexibly about how we engage a much earlier stage and get industry involved in co-creating, co-designing those types of courses that are going to meet their needs, but we need to be able to do it, but play otherwise we just lose economic opportunity. It has to be a two-way thing, so in terms of that industry engagement, it can't all be about colleges and universities producing people that are just ready to hit the ground running with the right skills, etc. It has to be that symbiotic relationship. Again, we have just opened our new renewable centre in Roosterbosh—I should probably be plugging a company, but anyway, that particular company absolutely have installed and invested absolute state-of-the-art equipment that is not even commercially available yet, but will be at some point, and they have invested that in the college, in a specialist facility, so that we can not only train school pupils, college students, apprentices but staff who work at Roosterbosh on this new equipment so that you are creating that pipeline for when it is actually needed. You are creating the skills training and the content together, so what Nora has just described there is absolutely critical. It is creating the right policy, funding, etc. environment that you absolutely drive and support industry and colleges and universities working much more collaboratively. It goes back to where we started at the moment. We are funded to teach volume and activity, and we have to find creative ways of developing those relationships with industry that we know are really important. We want to do that and to get industry to invest back into the system, as opposed to just take from the system. Thank you very much. I think that it is now moving to questions from Mr Ross Greer. A couple of questions that are probably best directed to Audrake 1. I am afraid that they are a bit negative. Acknowledging that regionalisation has had its benefits, would you characterise the fact that we have had in the past eight years seven years of industrial action as a failure of regionalisation? Is there a relationship between those two? I cannot think of any evidence or anything that would make me draw a causal link between regionalisation and strikes. Do you believe that, if we had not then gone through regionalisation, we would have been in a pretty similar situation in terms of industrial relations across the sector? I know that regionalisation and the introduction of national collective bargaining are not exactly the same thing, but are there roughly concurrent processes that happened in the same period of reform? No, I do not see that. I will explain why. Pre-regionalisation, which is essentially pre-mergers, is that colleges negotiated and had local relations. In my view, very strong, robust local relations. I know in my own case that that is how I would describe it, and I hope that my union colleagues would describe it as that as well. Very much based on local, we worked in the same organisation. We all had the same purpose, i.e. to be the best college in Scotland, to pay our staff the best pay that we could afford, the best terms and conditions. It was predominantly built around trust, confidence and relationships—it was about people. That is easier to do locally. When mergers took place in your point of regionalisation, what happened was that managers, principals, boards of management and union colleagues suddenly found themselves in a situation in which you had a large institution, a merger of, in my case, three colleges, three sets of union colleagues, all different cultures, nobody knew each other. You had to very, very quickly try and rebuild, almost from nothing, new relationships, new trusts, new confidence to work together collaboratively for the benefit of your organisation. I am personally really, really proud of what everyone involved in that achieved at that point, so union colleagues, management, the wider staff and boards of management, where we very, very quickly harmonised pay terms and conditions at a regional level. It was not easy to say, but not easy to do, and it took a huge amount of commitment and work and effort to do that. With, in the main, good relations, I cannot remember strikes taking place, pay went up—average across the sector went up by 12 per cent. What a huge achievement to be able to say that staff and colleges across Scotland have seen an average pay increase of 12 per cent, no detriment effect in terms of terms and conditions within the regions. Then, subsequently, it was policy government policy to introduce national collective bargaining. Hindsight is a wonderful, wonderful thing, and if I could go back, and I was involved in the beginning of national bargaining, unfortunately there was no blueprint, there was no template that you could just take off the shelf and say, this is how a sector that essentially was private could nationalise in terms of collective bargaining and do it well. There was nothing, it had never been done before. The missed opportunity at that point was having all of the stakeholders—government, funders, colleges as the individual employers, which we still are in our union colleagues—to sit down together at that point and say, what is it that we want to see as the outcome and achievements of introducing collective bargaining? What is the funding envelope to make it happen? What are the likely costs? What are the real positives that can come out of that? That was a missed opportunity in my view. In terms of the strike action that has been going on, as you have pointed out, on a regular basis. It is multi-dimensional. There are a number of reasons for that. It does not help that we have annual funding, so we literally go from year to year not knowing actually the detail of the funding that we are going to get. That makes it very difficult. I am keeping everything crossed that in the next few days we will announce that we have reached agreements with both teaching and support unions. I really hope that we do. I would not be surprised if pay claims go in a week later for next year's pay, and we do not know what will be funded for months and months and months and months. Something has to fundamentally change where I believe that part of the issue is that there seems to be a mismatch of expectations of some of what is happening nationally from a union perspective and what is happening from an employer's perspective. I am the principal of a college. Since becoming a principal of a college, I have always wanted to pay my staff the best I could possibly pay them. I have the best terms and conditions. If you compare us across the UK, we are the best in terms of pay terms and conditions. That is a wonderful thing and a great thing to achieve. There is a massive caveat. However, the big thing is that my responsibility and my board's responsibility is to make sure that Edinburgh College does not tip over. It is sustainable that we protect provision for students, protect places and protect jobs. Sometimes, as is happening, the demands on pay are not aligning with the sustainability of the colleges, jobs, student places and student activity. Something has to give there. I believe that, if I was being optimistic, there is potential if the mindset was there that the individuals collectively around the table could work together towards a goal. However, there has to be an understanding of that wider picture. I would be absolutely to be the yes person and just say yes to everything would be lovely, but I cannot do that and principals cannot do that because of the funding situation that we are in. In regards to strike culture, I completely respect the right of staff to strike absolutely. It is disappointing that it has happened every year. It should always be, in my view, an absolute last resort. It has not happened on the support side with our support staff union colleagues, which, again, I was involved initially and I am not involved now. It certainly felt more collaborative and more a sense of collegiate in trying to work together to get the best we possibly could, but within the constraints that we all understood, I think that we have still got a wee bit to go in relation to some of the other discussions that are going on. I hope that that answers your question. It is not regionalisation. Actually, local negotiations are easier because they are local because you can build the relationships with people. As soon as you put it on to a national platform, it was again starting again, but at a national level. Of course, in colleges, we are still the employers and we are still individually. Boards are responsible for employing and protecting your college and your provision and your jobs and your staff, but at the same time negotiating nationally on pay. Sometimes, that is a very fine tightrope to walk. As I said, I am keeping my fingers crossed that we have finally reached an agreement. A lessons learned exercise has taken place, as you may be aware, by the Government. My reading of that is that there are a number of recommendations that, personally, I believe would help to try to get that on to a different footing. Thanks for your huge amount to pick up on that. You are right to highlight examples of things such as payharmonisation as being one of the key successes of the last decade in terms of workforce relations, but, from my perspective, having spent most of that, certainly the last six years in continuous discussion with both unions and employers, the interpersonal relationships around the national collective bargaining have not got better over that period of time because we have been in this constant cycle of negotiations breaking down, escalating to industrial action and compromises as a result, but that are shortly followed by a fresh dispute on essentially the same issue. There is clearly a need for a reset of those relationships there. Without pre-empting that lessons learned exercise that you have mentioned, how do you think we are best going about that at this point? If we are to hit a reset on, as you mentioned, at a local level, those relationships, they were varied, but broadly relatively positive. How do we reset that at a national level where the relationships have quite clearly broken down? That is a really important question, so it is the why. Why is that happening? It is multi-dimensional. Some of it will be down to people in terms of behaviours and relationships, and that is down to individuals to try and make that commitment to collectively make it work. I get hugely frustrated when I hear people using terms like sides, the management side and the union side, such as immediately some kind of confrontational environment. There is something about personalities and behaviours, but more importantly, I think that there is an opportunity to look at how the employer, representatives and union colleagues, can very quickly now get a clear understanding of things like the financial environment that we now know as of yesterday going ahead. What does that mean in reality on the ground? What does that look like? Fair work is an agenda that we are all committed to and should be working in collaboration. Let us look at those really, really important big-ticket fair work, a wellbeing economy. What does a wellbeing economy mean from a union colleague perspective and an employer perspective? I think that there is real opportunity. Again, that is my personal view, but a very simple thing that could happen would be creating a kind of independence to it. It might be an independent chair that sits in those negotiations and might be a way forward. It might be a tripartite group of funding council or Government college and union colleagues looking at making sure that the evidence base, the data that is being used, is that everybody can be confident in it and agree. For example, funding and what that actually means. I think that there is potential genuinely to move that into a different space, because nobody wins at strike action. The staff go out on strike and do not win. Colleges themselves and students' principles are a lose-lose situation, so we need to commit to improving it. As I said, it is far, far stronger on the support union side. There is might be lessons to be learned from looking at how that is working and could we transfer some of that approach? That last point is really important. Just one final question around the role of the regional multi-institution boards. I understand that Edinburgh is not quite in the same position as the likes of Glasgow or where we were and are going to be in Lanarkshire on that. Putting aside the issues that are dealt with nationally around paying conditions etc, have the regional boards provided any additional value in terms of industrial relations and workforce representation? Are they providing a useful forum for some of these discussions to take place about local and regional issues or is that still something that is primarily either dealt with at an individual institution level or through national relations? I am not close enough to the specifics of that in terms of the role of those multi-region boards where you have the multiple colleges and the regional boards. That would be UHI, Glasgow and Lanarkshire, as you have mentioned. I have a personal view on that governance structure. It is right for the time in terms of creating that cohesion across big regions and multiple colleges. I would argue personally that the success of that should be that those boards are no longer needed. In my view, the question that needs to be asked is whether we have reached the point where those boards have achieved what they were set out to achieve and that cohesion, which has been mentioned a lot today, goes well beyond simply the colleges in those regions. It is universities and other local authorities. Sorry, but I cannot answer the specific question. I quite understand why I gave an Edinburgh's position. I think that the question of what value those regional boards now provide is something that I would be keen for the committee to explore through that process. That is all for me for now, convener. One final question to the panel. We heard in that questioning session from Ross about multi-year funding and how it might be beneficial. How might multi-year funding allocations aid planning for the future in the sector? It is a bit of a big question for a short period of time. The college sector has been calling for this for what feels like a long, long time, is that the obvious benefits of having some certainty around your funding to be able to plan strategically, to be able to invest strategically, to be able to, just Ross's point there, to be able to work with colleagues around the transitions and what is it that we actually need, what would the workforce of the future and the college need to be and need to look like. We are, to a big extent, constrained in all of that because we literally feel like lurch from year to year in terms of that very short termism and also siloed approach to funding, where each pot comes with its own scaffolding bureaucracy reporting around it when you just think, oh my goodness, this could be so much more streamlined and efficient and right, is that there's again huge potential to really look at that. I know that there are certainly the funding council in their report and put a very strong call out for multi-year funding, which we would hugely support in those supplementary, and he is going to make this very brief, Michael Marra. I mean, I kind of think that the horse has bolted on that, so the assumption was that we were going to see that in the spending review yesterday, but only goes down to level 2, so colleges don't know for the coming years. So, I mean, is that something you're renewing those calls today? Yes. Okay. No, that's great, so I'd like to thank everyone for their time today, but it's been a great session, my first one, thoroughly enjoyed as well. I'm just looking for my page. I'd like to thank you all for your time today. That's the public part of today's meeting. It is now at an end. I will consider our final agenda item in private, and I ask the members attending virtually to reconvene on Microsoft Teams in a few minutes, and thank you to our witnesses for coming along today.