“Scotland’s colleges 2015”
Item 4 is consideration of a follow-up response from the Scottish Government to the committee’s report entitled “Report on Scotland’s colleges 2015”. Members will wish to be aware that the Auditor General’s report on Scotland’s colleges 2016 will be published this summer. Are members content to note the response, or do they have any comments?
This is probably my fault as I perhaps did not make myself clear at the time, but I would find it more helpful, rather than getting a snapshot of figures for student support for one year, to have the trends in those figures. We hear so often that the figures are going up or down, so it would be helpful if we could get figures for bursary, childcare and discretionary payments over the past five years.
If the committee is going to ask for further figures, it would also be helpful for us to ask for details of the in-year payments, or the top-ups to the budget. There are students who come to the end of the financial year and the budget is spent, and they are not sure whether they will get their bursary for the last few months of the college term. It would be worth while asking the Government why, year after year, it makes those top-up payments rather than giving clarity to students at the start of the term.
Bearing in mind the time that we have left in this parliamentary session, I recommend that we put the issue in the legacy paper for the next committee to pick up after the election.
I take on board the requests that have been made. The clerks will prepare an addition to the legacy paper. We will write to the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council to request the further information to which Mary Scanlon and Mark Griffin referred. Are members agreed?
Members indicated agreement.
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