A lot of that falls into the sphere of our young persons guarantee approach, more generally. Sandy Begbie, who, as you will all be aware, is the chief executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise, the representative body for the financial services sector in Scotland, was tasked by Fiona Hyslop with pulling together a proposition for the young persons guarantee. He has done a great job, incidentally, and continues to progress that activity. He is now making sure that we are engaging with a raft of employers across various sectors who commit to engaging with the programme and offering those opportunities to young people. Graduates, who you mentioned, are a cohort of that population to which we need to pay some attention.
As I hope that you would expect us to do, we are making a concerted effort to support those young people who are furthest removed from the labour market, and we will do that through a range of measures such as the employer recruitment incentive and the apprenticeship employer grant. However, graduates must also form part of our approach.
I recall that, in its report, the committee asked questions about the ScotGrad scheme. Specific activity is under way to learn the lessons from that scheme and create a replacement for it. There is close engagement between Universities Scotland, Scottish Enterprise and Skills Development Scotland to try to ensure that we are delivering a successor scheme as part of the young persons guarantee. I have made it clear that, given where we are, the scale and reach of that scheme will be larger than the one that was in place before it.
In the six years that ScotGrad operated, it supported around 1,400 graduates, which, by my estimation, is quite a significant cohort. My ambition—we are working this through with the organisations that I have mentioned—is that the replacement scheme will support about 500 next year alone, so you can see that that is moving it up a notch again. If demand is higher, we will consider doing more in that regard.
That is some specific information about matching up graduates with employers. Of course, there are many more graduates than that number, and the task is to ensure that we have an environment where employers are recruiting skilled young people, and, of course, those skills can be acquired not only through university but through colleges and apprenticeships.