Education and Culture Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Official Report 525KB pdf

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“Report of the Review of Higher Education Governance in Scotland”

Item 3 is consideration of the “Report of the Review of Further Education Governance in Scotland”. We are fortunate this morning in that we will take evidence from Professor Russel Griggs. Good morning, Professor Griggs. Thank you for attending this morning to provide us with evidence on this most important issue. I invite you to make some opening remarks, if you wish to do so.

They will be short and sweet. First, thank you for inviting me. I am delighted to be here. You are quite correct that this is a very important subject, so I am happy for there to be the widest debate possible on where we want to go on it.

When the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning asked me to undertake the review, he asked me to do two things in particular: to look at the structure of college governance and, within that, to look at the democratic accountability. Governance is an interesting thing and college governance is a particularly interesting thing in that you need to understand first what it is that you are governing—the further education sector—before you can look at how you govern individual colleges. You have to look at A before you get to B.

My bona fides for doing the review is that I have a wide range of experience of doing such things, plus I am the chair of a college board. I have now been involved in the sector for eight or nine years, so I have a background in understanding it. I was happy to do the review, particularly because I know how important the further education sector is both economically and culturally to all the people who go through it in Scotland. It is one of the sectors that in many ways have an influence on everything that we do both economically and culturally. We must not forget that a lot of people go to colleges to learn as well as to seek employment. There is a great breadth of desire of people wanting to learn.

I guess that we did the review in the way that we did because nobody had looked at the issue properly for 20 years. We stood back and looked at what it was. I gathered round me a group of people whom I thought would give me the best advice, so I had a senior official from the National Union of Students, a senior official from the Educational Institute of Scotland, an ex-chair of a college who had been through a process of bringing a number of colleges together and a current college principal. I felt that that group of people, with good support from the civil servants who have been involved with the college sector for a long time, would give us a good basis for doing our work.

I regard the 34 recommendations that we have made as a good place to start. One of the things that we have to recognise is that education is forever evolving, which means that a lot will be involved over the next 10 to 15 years as we learn how to learn in different ways. We wanted to put in place something that would give us a platform to build for the future.

In all that we discuss this morning, I would like us to recognise that this is just a place to start from rather than a place to end up in. I would be disappointed if I were sitting in front of you in 10 years’ time and nothing had changed from where we are today, because we need to evolve.

I am happy to answer any questions on the report.

Thank you for those remarks, Professor Griggs. Neil Findlay will begin the questioning.

Your executive summary for the committee says:

“In effect, therefore, for the purposes of the report we will take our first recommendation of the move to a regional model for the College Sector as being accepted”.

I know that that is just part of your evidence, but how do you respond to the charge that it was your predetermined position—that you went out with a predetermined position and you were determined to return with it?

It was not a predetermined position at all. We met, as you do, we had a conversation, and then we had another conversation. We started by considering one of our challenges, which is that, with 41 individual governing bodies, it is very difficult to govern a sector that needs to be part of Government strategy, because ultimately the vast majority of the money that is given to colleges comes from the public sector. We also considered the inequalities that have built up over the past 20 years in how the college sector has treated students and how it has managed itself. That led us to consider that, if we wanted to change the process as other countries have done—we looked at how things have gone in Northern Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere—we needed a much smaller group of governing bodies to be part of driving the strategy forward for Scotland. That was not predetermined.

I will tell you openly how we got to where we were. We had had two or three meetings and our view was that we were moving towards the idea of a regional structure. Obviously, as you carry out such reviews, if something comes up that is going to be in your final report but you know that the Government is also thinking about it, it is much more sensible to have a conversation. We had a conversation with the Government in about three or four places over time. The initial consultation document, which came out in September, contains one set of regional proposals by the Government. We had a conversation with the Government about those, we gave our views and this is where we have ended up. It was not predetermined at all. I can honestly say that, when I started doing this, I had no idea at all about where we would end up. The regional structure was not predetermined at all. It is where the conversation took us naturally.

In a different time—let us delve into the realms of fantasy—if there was tonnes of money kicking about, would you make the same recommendation?

Absolutely. We say clearly in the report that what we have recommended has nothing at all to do with the economic circumstance in which we find ourselves. We put that to one side and said that we cannot do this just because of where we are. However, as we say in the report, in times when you have lots of money, you tend not to look at some of the hard things that you should be looking at, and it is only when you have fiscal restraint that you do so. On the question of whether this recommendation was predicated by economic circumstances, the answer is absolutely not. We all agreed at the beginning that we would look at this in terms of what was right for the sector, regardless of the funding.

I will remain very sceptical about that. What evidence can you provide to suggest that what we are moving towards has major advantages for the education of students?

It became clear when we looked at certain parts of Scotland that have moved to a wider form of governance, such as Forth Valley College and parts of Fife—we also looked at places such as Northern Ireland, Canada and New Zealand—that if you look more strategically over a bigger area, you can use the resources that you are given, plentiful or not, much better. That involves setting up centres of excellence, if I can call them that—I do not like the term, but that is all I can describe them as. Our view is that everybody needs to go to college wherever they want locally but, as students progress up the scale, there is evidence that you get a better response from the student and a better outcome if you can focus your money in particular areas. If you look at what Forth Valley College has done, by focusing a lot of money on particular areas of the curriculum in Falkirk and Stirling, you will see that it has seen the benefit and that students do not mind travelling when they have reached a certain level of learning.

Our view is that there are two benefits. First, it gives you a more rounded way of looking at how you spend your money. Secondly, it is very clear that there is an inexorable link between colleges and what the Government wants to do in terms of strategy. That has been clear for the past 20 years. In fact, the way in which colleges were set up in 1992 came about as a pure piece of Government thinking at the time. Therefore, we believe that, however many there would be in the group—12 or 14—a group that works with the Government to drive the sector will be much more powerful and will allow much more national and local strategic decisions to be made. However, I return to a point that has been made. We believe that, by creating bigger capacity, allowing student associations to be bigger, and getting all the things that we will get from that type of scale—which have been demonstrated in Forth Valley College, Fife and places in Northern Ireland—we will get a bigger bang for our buck for the student. That is of prime importance. The process must result in something that is better for the learner.

In my area, West Lothian College has recognised that it possibly has a unique case, but there is clear evidence of its co-operative working with the local authority and other partners, including other colleges, and there is no desire to regionalise further. Indeed, it has made a robust case for that. If that is the model for how a college should function, it is being recognised that retaining independent status—dare I say?—works. Therefore, why are regional models for the rest of the colleges being recommended?

Perhaps we would not be doing that if all colleges were like West Lothian College but, sadly, they are not.

Should we not be going in that direction?

No, I do not think so. West Lothian College is unique for specific circumstances. With regard to the rest, I still strongly believe that bringing colleges together with a more strategic governance view that does not in any way, shape or form take away the ability of local colleges still to operate in their locality gives the student better provision and better outcomes in all sorts of ways.

You say that that gives the student a better outcome. Would you please say what you mean by that?

I believe that money will be invested more widely. I return to the examples of Forth Valley College and Northern Ireland. We should consider spending a lot of money on one space to which students from across a wider geographic area can go to learn about specific things. If we always break down X money into a myriad of different pots—41—we will not get the advantages that can be got by breaking it down into 12 pots. Working with a bigger amount of money in 12 pots across a wider area allows that money to be used in a much better way than it would be by giving it to 41 individual colleges.

I want to take up the point about the qualitative improvement that you believe will come out of your suggested reforms. To take up the point that Neil Findlay made, if you firmly believe that colleges have different expertise and skills, why are you proposing a one-policy structure rather than allowing individual colleges to decide on their own whether they prefer mergers?

Perhaps I have misrepresented what I believe. I do not believe that, given the same chance, all colleges could do the same thing. One issue that we isolated is that a lot of duplication is taking place. In certain areas of Scotland, colleges are doing the same things. If things are put all together in one place, things will be done much better and money will be spent much better. All the evidence suggests that, if resource is focused on a specific subject in a specific place in a geographic area, there will be a much better work line than there would be if it were disseminated across a number of colleges in the same area. That does not stop people coming in at the bottom locally but, as they climb the ladder, they will move.

All colleges will say that, over the piece, there have been challenges with getting students involved in them. Giving students a bigger capacity to get involved means that there will be much better student involvement in colleges. There is a raft of issues, but all the evidence that we looked at should be considered. Where boards have been charged with looking at managing money across a wider geographic area, the output for the student has been better.

You have talked about managing the money better, but where is the better education in the model that you suggest?

11:15

As I have already pointed out, the better education comes through focusing your resource on ensuring the highest quality of learning in whatever specific subject area might be best in that respect. That might be in one place rather than in three.

Last week, a college chair resigned because he felt that the changes were being pushed through on the basis of a political rather than an educational agenda. That is obviously his view but, to refute that, you will have to come up with very specific reasons about the educational benefits of this new college change. At the moment, our doubts lie in the fact that, for some colleges, merger on a regional basis is deemed acceptable and a good thing while others, some of which have been alluded to this morning, feel that that is definitely not the case. Is there not scope for greater diversity and autonomy in the system, something that was brought forward in the 1992 reforms?

I think so but, if you look back at the 1992 reforms, you will find that autonomy worked well for a little while but, as things have crept forward, it has given rise to many more bad inequalities than good things in the system. Indeed, we list those in the report. For example, I do not think that it is fair that colleges across Scotland have different systems of choosing who they allow in. That is what happens at the moment and I think that that is not to the colleges’ benefit.

As you can imagine, I speak to a lot of principals and chairs about this issue and no one has disagreed with the need to focus on spending our money better to ensure that we create centres of excellence. If that means spending it on college A instead of college B, that is what has to be done.

For example, everyone is talking about the world moving towards the renewables marketplace. We need to decide on the three or four colleges in Scotland where we want to spend the real money on renewables. Instead of the current scattergun approach to that, we need a national discussion involving the college chairs and principals. A statement that I have made time and again—and which has not been disputed at all by any principals to whom I have spoken—is that focusing where you spend your money will give better outcomes for students.

Can you assure us that you do not feel in any way that the Government intends to drive forward reforms because it would like to see a little bit more control of the college sector?

I can. I have seen no evidence of that in the conversations that I have had with ministers. That is all I have to say.

Thank you.

I am grateful to you for outlining certain examples in which duplication has been a problem in the renewables sector. Obviously, that area is evolving, but did you have the opportunity to evaluate the costs of duplication and how much money was being wasted as a result of it?

The simple answer is no. We did not have the time to sit down and do those sums. However, as the whole sector will tell you, if we had the chance to do this all over again not only with renewables but in other areas, we might get a better outcome if we sat down as a nation around the table and discussed what we wanted to do and where we wanted to spend the money.

Interestingly enough, on Monday I was in Northern Ireland, looking at the creative studies place that has been set up in Derry. The new North West Regional College in Derry has about four different colleges but it has just invested a huge amount of money in a state-of-the-art theatre with new recording equipment that can be used as a centre of excellence not just by that part of the country, but by the whole of Northern Ireland. That is a good example of how investing money in one place and spending it on something critical to the area gives a really good outcome. If they had tried to do the same in a whole host of colleges in Northern Ireland, they would not have got anything like the same focus or technical ability.

Has duplication resulted in people getting a poorer education? For example, does it explain why some courses are not full?

It is difficult to say. As somebody once said to me, rivalry is good, but competition can get unhealthy at times. Rivalry between colleges is fine, but I have heard evidence from principals—never mind the evidence that I have seen for myself—to suggest that, over time, competition can be unhealthy when we are competing for renewables or for people. I could not say that it has made the education any worse, but much of the competition and duplication has not been useful in allowing colleges to focus the money where they should do.

In addition to duplication, I understand that high drop-out rates are a big problem in the college sector. How will your reforms address that?

That is a challenge. The drop-out rate depends on how open the colleges want to be. At my college, for example, we spend a lot of our time ensuring that we get at the most disadvantaged people—especially young people—in our community. It is a really interesting fact: the more that the college focuses on broadening its agenda, the more likely it is that its retention rate will go down slightly, because those people find it more difficult to manage the education process. The challenges that they face in life are not just to do with education, but with a wide variety of things at home, so that has to be managed too.

Some colleges have a higher retention rate because they have decided not to go as broad as other colleges do. I would hope that the reforms would increase retention rates, but one must always be aware that, in some of the areas that we all want to broaden to bring people into education, there are big cultural and family challenges that we must deal with, which does not help. For example, we could get into a long and probably pointless discussion on the impact that changes in the benefits system will have on retention in colleges.

I will bring in Jean Urquhart.

I want to ask Professor Griggs about the structure of the new boards, and the function of the strategic forum and how it will work with the individual regional boards.

I will start by explaining why we ended up with the strategic forum in the first place, which is quite interesting. Part of that came from the view among everyone that we needed to improve the conversation between Government and the college sector on a strategic level. That has not worked very well during the past four or five years—or rather, the past 10 or 15 years—which is as much the fault of the colleges as it is of the Government.

We wanted something in place, because we must make decisions and have good discussions about what we want to do at national level. There are things such as renewables—when they come along—that we will want to sit down as a group and discuss. We felt that Government had to be clearer with the sector—which it has not been—on what it wanted. We needed to put together something that allowed those conversations to happen, and that is where the idea of the strategic forum came from. You will see that Ferdinand von Prondzynski’s review of higher education proposes a similar sort of entity.

The chairs of the new governing bodies of the colleges will be part of the strategic forum, which will allow them to have conversations across institutions. I am a great believer in the idea that, by having 41 individual colleges, we have lost people talking to each other across the way rather than up and down the way. We need college A to be talking to college B about what they are doing and how they might share best practice. There is very little sharing of best practice in the college sector, and there must be a lot more. The forum is the type of entity in which those discussions can go on.

As I have said in my review, other issues will come up as we move forward such as how we market ourselves internationally and how we run back-office services such as human resources and finance, which will require wider discussion among the colleges. The strategic forum is a way in which the college sector and Government can work together to look at the big national issues on which we need to take a national view. Those issues will then go back down to the individual college boards. I hope that that answers your question.

I think that it does, but I have a supplementary. Scotland’s Colleges would say that it represents all the colleges and that the colleges communicate with one another.

I have spent the past four or five years going to lots of chairpersons conventions, principals conventions and other things with Scottish colleges. We could do things a lot better than we currently do them.

I am reminded that I should have declared an interest. I am no longer a member of a college, but I am still a member of the University of the Highlands and Islands.

That is on the record. Thank you.

I am concerned principally about UHI. Russel Griggs specifically suggested that the new regional board structure will require

“the ‘merger’ (through whatever route) of all the incorporated Colleges within that region.”

The cabinet secretary has talked more about a mixture of collaboration and merger. Do you think that merger is absolutely essential?

Let me be clear about what I have said. I believe strongly that there needs to be one governing board for each region. Boards should be given output-driven targets, and I am quite happy for 12 boards to decide to operate in 12 different ways, if they all end up with the same output. I have spent all my life in private business and I have concluded that if someone who is at point A is trying to reach point C there are about three different ways of doing so.

I believe strongly that there needs to be a single regional board and that the regional board needs to be in control—in inverted commas—of what goes on in the region. How that is manifested in the group of colleges that the board is given to govern is up to the board, as long as it achieves the outputs that we have asked it to achieve.

We said clearly that UHI is a much more complicated issue, not just because higher education and further education are mixed in the structure. My team did not really have time to get to the point at which we understood the geography of the area and how people interact—never mind anything else—which puts UHI almost in a unique situation. We had two good sessions—one with the principal from Inverness College UHI and one with a group of all UHI principals—but we did not feel competent to reach a solution on UHI.

Let me be clear. Our team’s view is that regional boards are essential; how people organise those boards is up to them, as long as they achieve the outputs that are given to them. On how boards do that, I am prepared to be as flexible as anyone in the world is, because I am not someone who thinks that there is one way of doing everything. I would not dream of suggesting that 12 people would not find different ways to produce the same output.

Your answer was helpful and I appreciate your candour about UHI. To some extent, UHI gives the lie to the suggestion that the sector has shown little desire to come together on a regional basis. Such an approach underpins what has happened across the Highlands and Islands, which is unique—in scale, if for no other reason.

In the executive summary of your report, you said that under the new structure

“there should only be one Regional Board with the power and control to both receive the funding from Government, via the SFC, and decide how to manage what it then controls.”

There is concern that you are driving forward a model of hub and spokes, whereas the rationale for UHI was for it to be—for want of a better image—a doughnut, which would not be driven by an agenda that was dictated in Inverness. I must say that my blood ran cold when I heard you say in response to Elizabeth Smith that things can be done much better if things are put together in one place. In the context of the UHI model, that is simply not the case. If certain functions are removed from Orkney—Shetland and the north Highlands would make the same case—things will not be done better and we will prevent people from accessing courses that they currently access.

The area offers a good example of how to deal with differences. Last year I did some work for Alex Neil on registered social landlords. We agreed that there should be a service level agreement for all people who live in social housing. However, that cannot be done, so we have to be flexible. We cannot say to someone who lives on a little island off Orkney that the slater will come to fix their roof within three hours of being called out; the approach has to be melded to the situation. That relates to the point that you made, which is a good one.

11:30

That is why each regional board has to look at the make-up of its distinct geography. For example, the colleges’ links with local councils in Orkney are different from those of colleges elsewhere. Without being flippant, my only comment about UHI is that if it is a doughnut, I do not think that anyone has decided yet whether it has jam or custard inside, so the discussions on it need to go on.

The clear picture that emerged is that UHI is a good construct, but that it still needs more work to get it to a place where everybody is content with it. A board that sat and thought about that a lot of the time and took into account all the different challenges that the geography and other aspects present in that part of the world would be useful. Liam McArthur is right to say that we would not want to take certain things away from Orkney or, indeed, Lewis, but we might want to look at how things might be done differently and in a more focused way in other areas.

I do not think that there is any dispute about UHI’s willingness in that regard. I think that you would get a similar message from colleges elsewhere in Scotland about looking more innovatively at the nature of collaboration and what they deliver. The concern is that either through the recommendations in your report or through the cabinet secretary’s agenda for the college sector—he is on record as saying that he wants to accelerate the process—the Inverness dimension to UHI will have been pretty much gifted all the trump cards. Principals in each of the colleges now feel that their capacity to draw down the funding that they need to deliver the services that they require will be that bit more difficult than it has been hitherto.

In that particular case only, there is a conversation to be had in that regard.

I want to follow up on the point that Professor Griggs made about student retention and drop-out rates. A number of young people drop out of college or have attendance issues. You said that the report’s recommendations could improve student involvement, increase student retention and remove duplication. If you remove duplication, how do you address retention and attendance issues? A young person might want to study a course at their local college, but would have motivational issues about attending if they had to go further to access the same course.

There is a very simple answer to that question. Evidence shows that when people move up the scale in learning—that is, not when they come into it initially, but at years 2 and 3—travelling is not an issue; people are prepared to travel reasonably long distances to access courses and accept that they must do so to access the best learning. For example, there is no evidence of retention levels going down for people who may have moved to Forth Valley College from Falkirk, Stirling or Fife. All the evidence, from here and elsewhere, suggests that as long as we allow people to go initially to their local colleges to do the courses that they want, retention is not an issue when they want to gain access to more knowledge higher up the ladder.

We will need to see what happens in that regard. I suggest that travelling from Greenock to Clydebank by public transport, for example, is not the easiest journey to make.

Neither is travelling from Methil to Glenrothes the easiest journey, but it seems to work.

We will see.

It is recommended that any reserves over 10 per cent be shared across the whole college sector. Are you concerned that that might reduce competition and the ability of colleges to act independently and operate efficiently at local level?

No—and I will tell you why we even discussed the issue of reserves. If we had thought that every competently managed college in Scotland had exactly the same opportunity to have reserves, we would not have had the discussion, but—I am sad to say—that is not the case. Their having reserves has nothing to do with management; in a lot of cases, it is about accidents of geography and industry. The fact is that certain colleges have more opportunity to set aside reserves.

Given that our starting point was to ensure that we spend the money in the best place and according to priorities for learners, we had to discuss how to access what is quite a lot of money. For example, if Aberdeen College—I stress that I use it only as an example—had put a lot of money in the bank for whatever purpose but we had decided that, nationally, the real challenge for learners was in Clydebank College, which did not have any money, the question was whether we should be able to access that excess capital for spending on priorities. It is all about using the available money best for learners in the highest-priority areas; it is not about telling colleges that they should not be competitive.

It is interesting that, in Northern Ireland, that is done in a kind of underground way—they do it, but not openly—and there is no evidence that it has stopped competition or stopped colleges growing reserves. Colleges understand that a college might say to another down the road, “Look, we know you’ve got some extra money in the bank. Would you like to give it to us so that we can do this or that?” and the other college will quite happily give the money.

The point that I want to make quite firmly—which is one of the reasons why I was happy to give evidence this morning—is that we would never have discussed reserves if we had thought that every college in Scotland had the same opportunity to set them aside. The fact is that they do not.

You have cited a number of hypothetical examples. How many colleges in Scotland have reserves of more than 10 per cent of their annual revenue?

I cannot remember the exact number off the top of my head, but the figure was quite significant. As we make clear in the report, the challenge is not reserves as such, but cash reserves. To get those, you have to unpick from the overall reserves the elements for pension funds, the capital reserves and the bits that are not real but are notional reserves. To be perfectly honest, although I cannot remember the figure, we would not have made the recommendation if we did not think that some colleges had quite a lot of money stashed away. It all comes back to the fact that in the past year, as people have tried to find money, some colleges have used reserves to do things that other colleges have not had the opportunity to do.

All this makes me think back to the time when local authorities had to rush to spend their cash before the end of the year. Might we get into a similar situation? A college that has an extra 10 per cent might say, “Let’s just buy A, B or C piece of equipment” rather than have the cash taken by another college a couple of hundred miles away.

I would be really disappointed if that happened.

Would you be surprised if it happened?

Yes, I would be surprised, because that would mean that we had picked the wrong people to be chairpersons of colleges. As we say in the report, we want people who want not only to be part of the benefits that further education can bring to their local areas, but to be part of a wider discussion about how further education works in Scotland. If a chairperson did not understand that part of that wider discussion includes finding the best way of using available money in the highest priority areas, I would have some challenges for the people who had picked the person for that role. We must always strike a balance between what is good for students across Scotland and what is good for students in our own areas.

I would be interested to see the same principle applied to local government.

I concur with you on that.

Is it the Government’s job to pick the chairpersons of colleges?

No it is not, and I have not said that it should. I have simply said that it should endorse the appointments. All that I am recommending is what already happens in the majority of public bodies. For example, when I sat on the boards of Scottish Enterprise and VisitScotland, the minister endorsed appointments. The Government would not pick candidates; there would be an appointments process with an independent chair and an appointments committee and, at the end of the process, a name would simply go to ministers for endorsement.

If we want the strategic forum to work properly and we want the Government and colleges to be bound together in driving a way forward for the further education sector, that odd little link between a chair and the minister is important.

What specific role would you envisage for the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council, given that money would no longer be allocated to individual colleges but would be allocated through the regional boards?

That is a really interesting discussion that we need to have. If the Government goes ahead with putting all my recommendations in place, the funding council’s role will be lessened. If we have an output-driven model that involves giving college boards a list of things that they must achieve and then examining whether they have achieved those things, there is a big debate to be had about whether the funding council, Audit Scotland or Education Scotland should be involved in that. That opens up a different discussion about the importance of the role that governance plays in the academic environment and about how much A is driven by B, although I do not want to get involved in that.

Throughout the review, we spoke to Audit Scotland, the funding council and Education Scotland about how their roles would change if we moved to the output-driven model and about who would do what in auditing and ensuring that the colleges do their job. We recommended that we need to go away and have a think in a room about who does what. If the proposals were to go ahead, I guess that the funding council would have not a lesser role but a different role.

What was the funding council’s response to the suggestion?

The funding council was fine about the suggestion and understands that if a different system were to be put in place, we would need to sit around the table to discuss it. We also spoke to Audit Scotland, because it does 41 primarily financial audits of colleges. If we were to move to an output-driven system, should the auditor be more involved—as it is in other parts of life—in looking at process issues and at how governors deliver? Should the external audit team rather than the funding council do such work? We need to discuss that.

Would such an audit look at educational outcomes or more at an administrative and financial organisation?

I think that the audit would look more at administrative and financial organisation. Through the inspectorate, Education Scotland would still have a big role in respect of educational outcomes; otherwise, we would wander into murky territory, although there is obviously a link. That is another reason why I would like Audit Scotland, Education Scotland and the SFC to sit in a room and discuss which would be the best organisation to do what.

I will follow up Liz Smith’s question about the ministerial role in appointing college chairs. You will be aware that focus in the recent budget process—in the committee and across Parliament—was on, among other things, the proposed cuts to the college funding settlement, which elicited a fairly robust response from a number of college principals and chairs, among others. We are aware that full and frank exchanges took place between the minister, officials and college principals and chairs over weeks and months. Would the role, which you described, of ministers in sanctioning the appointment of college chairs make such full and frank exchanges more or less imbalanced?

I hope that such a process would make the college side stronger. I see no evidence from other parts of public life, in which such a process applies, that board members or chairs of public bodies are frightened to have a robust discussion with ministers and cabinet secretaries about anything. From time to time, I fall out with ministers and cabinet secretaries on boards to which I have been appointed, because we are there to do that—we are there to challenge the Government as much as to challenge each other on the board.

I hope that, because we would have the strategic forum, we would engage in discussion a bit earlier and that people would understand where those discussions went. I do not see evidence in any part of public life that board members or chairs of bodies who go through the public appointments system are not very robust in discussions with the Government and ministerial departments when they need to be.

11:45

You highlighted the transitional costs that would be incurred during the process. Since the report was published, the cabinet secretary has committed £15 million to the transformation fund. Did you cost the transitional process?

No. My friend behind me in the public gallery will perhaps remind me, but if my memory is correct, we took the figure that the sector had worked out; we did not get our calculators out to do that. The cost was not the issue for us. We wanted to allow sufficient time to go through the process properly. I see that my friend is nodding, so my answer is correct.

Recommendation 34 says that a new national management information system should be established. Would the cost of that be part of the transitional costs or would it be an additional cost?

I suspect that that would be an additional cost. We suggested a national MI system because—as with local authorities—one of the challenges is that everybody uses different systems, which seems to be a bit silly. If we are to share best practice, it is useful for people to be able to look at that in an MI system. However, that would be an additional cost.

A management information system is dependent on the required outputs and inputs. Given that those are not defined at present, is it important that they come to the fore as quickly as possible if people are considering sharing resources? We are considering possible cost savings from sharing resources across regions, but for many of the functions the economies of scale at national level would be even better. Do you envisage regions coming together to provide back-office functions and savings?

The answer to the first question is yes. On the second question, that is a good discussion to have. However, I want things to be done because they are the right thing to do, which is why we have not recommended any back-office services being brought together among regions. That is for the regions to discuss, but that would be a healthy discussion to have. I agree entirely that we need to get some of the easy things out of the road early on. Strangely enough, a national MIS is one of those easy things. We should have that discussion.

You recommend that we move away from the system of local bargaining for pay and conditions towards a national pay bargaining system. What would be the likely effect of such a move on pay and conditions in the sector?

In terms of what?

What would be the likely effect on lecturers’ current pay and conditions?

I hope that we would get a much more even system across Scotland. There are challenges in that there are great variations in pay for the same job, and in local industrial relations, which are good in some colleges but not in others. In the discussions that the team had with the union, there was a recognition that, in moving from where we are now to where we want to be—national bargaining—we might have to do a lot of redefinition, if that is the right word, in getting a more regularised approach, although that is not to say that we would pay the same everywhere in Scotland for a job. I think that we all agreed that a banding system is probably the right way to go. I hope that it would be cost neutral, because it would not mean that everybody would move to the top of the ladder, rather than to somewhere else on the ladder. There was general agreement that we might have to redefine and do job evaluations to consider how salaries came together. That is why we recommend that we do it first at regional level, then at national level.

How long do you think that will take?

If I remember rightly, we suggested in the report that the process would run through to 2014, but that is for discussion, as are other things. The good thing is that in discussions with EIS we all agreed on where we want to get to. I do not think that anyone will be bothered if it takes six months longer to get to that place, if we get there properly. It will be about two or three years before we get there.

You have not been the only person who has been writing a review; there has been a parallel review of higher education governance. Do the two reviews complement each other? How do they interact in their visions of education?

I would not dream of commenting on Ferdinand von Prondzynski’s review. We talked to each other during the process—not to have done so would have been silly. I will not speak for Ferdinand and the aspects of his report that he regards as important, but there are bits of commonality and I am sure that if he was sitting here he would tell you that he hopes that we will move at the same pace.

Do you envisage the higher and further education systems working well together after they have been reformed along the lines that he and you recommended?

I very much envisage that. There is a need for the two sectors to talk to each other more formally than they currently do, which is why each sector wants to bring the other into its strategic forum. Ferdinand von Prondzynski and I talked about our reviews leading to a better-organised—if I can put it that way—tertiary education sector.

The two reviews have been going on in tandem. There have also been marked differences between the higher education and FE sectors in their experiences in the recent budget process. Is it fair to say that the notion of parity of esteem between the college and university sectors is alive and well, or are the sectors experiencing very different perception and treatment?

I am thinking about the right way to answer your question about parity of esteem. I think that each sector regards itself as being important, although we have some work to do to bring together what we do. For example, I think that my college, Dumfries and Galloway College, is the only college in Scotland that has a university library as part of its campus; as part of our new building on the Crichton campus there is a single library for our college, the University of Glasgow and the University of the West of Scotland. We also manage all the student resource for all three entities. The approach was not without its challenges, but we all learned a lot and we now work together much better. It is good to find practical areas in which HE and FE can work together. I think that there is the desire for mutual esteem. That is the fairest way to answer your question.

There is no doubt that both sectors recognise their importance and acknowledge that they deliver different things in different ways. The issue is more that as a result of your review and some of the messages from the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning about the pace at which he wants to carry forward reforms, and as a result of the budget settlement, the college sector is perhaps feeling a degree of bruising and is feeling that it is not necessarily regarded as being of equivalent importance.

I would not dream of commenting on that.

You said that you think that people often start by going to their local college and then have to travel further as they move up the system. The emphasis is currently on getting people into vocational courses that will help them to move into employment, and I think that the number of courses that are not employment based will reduce significantly, although such courses might suit students who have learning or physical disabilities and other vulnerable students. The reduction in courses might also mean that students have to travel further, which will give rise to a load of challenges and might ultimately exclude them from taking up opportunities in further education.

That is a good point, but I hope that it will not happen. Part of the challenge for college boards is to consider the diverse nature of the students that they have and will have in the future, and to figure out how students’ individual needs can be met, to secure the same outcome. That is a challenge for local and regional boards.

My college covers 120 miles from east to west and 60 miles from north to south, which presents challenges about how we look after the students that you are talking about and move them around. We have to figure that out. I think that we do that quite well and I hope that other colleges will come to do the same, as time goes on.

If there are no further questions, I thank Professor Griggs. Your evidence has been most helpful and we appreciate your giving up your time.

11:55 Meeting suspended.

11:58 On resuming—