The first item is consideration of the Auditor General for Scotland's report "Overview of further education colleges in Scotland 1999/2000", which all members should have. I invite the Auditor General to brief the committee on his report.
This is the first overview report that Audit Scotland has prepared on further education in Scotland. The report draws on the work of the local appointed auditors for the financial year that ended in July 2000, but we have attempted to take the analysis beyond that point. As a result, members will see references to figures for the financial year that ended in July 2001. It is always important to report in context and to make overview reports as up to date as possible, although I should stress that the figures in the report that refer to the period up to this summer have not yet been audited. The audit reports on those figures will flow out over the next few months.
Do members have any questions?
The report is very full. However, we must still decide which organisations or individuals should give evidence on this matter. I suggest that we invite Mr Eddie Frizzell and Professor John Sizer, the accountable officers for, respectively, the Scottish Executive enterprise and lifelong learning department and SFEFC. Are members all agreed?
Audit Scotland has provided members with a private briefing paper on the overview report. If they have a particular interest or wish to investigate any area covered by the briefing paper or the report, I encourage them to make direct contact with Audit Scotland officials in advance of the next meeting. Audit Scotland will be very happy to provide any further information or detailed briefing that members require to prepare for the evidence session.
I wish to make a suggestion. Although it is all very well to take evidence from the accountable officers, the report highlights difficulties at college level. Certainly the college in my constituency has made representations to me about how it is funded and how things can be moved around for certain colleges but not for others. Although Kilmarnock College is one of the Scottish colleges that attract significant European funding, it has experienced difficulties. For example, because of the checks and balances that the college faces to secure the release of such funding, it has had to ask the bank for overdraft facilities on several occasions. We should examine what is happening at a lower level to find out why it is happening. Although we will hear grand words and all the rest of it from others, I want to hear from the sharp end about the delivery of funding.
In the past four months, I have visited three of the seven FE colleges in my region. Like Margaret Jamieson, I am concerned by a number of specific issues that emerged, such as the reduction in staffing, changes in courses and the administrative uncertainty that arises when there is a change in principal. However, although I agree that we must go to the sharp end and take evidence on some of those issues, perhaps the best course of action is to take evidence first from the accountable officers. We can then reflect on that evidence to find out the particular lines of inquiry we should pursue with the sharp end and the colleges we should ask to give evidence.
Perhaps I can be of some help here. One of the difficulties is that we are dealing with an overview, but you are talking about specific colleges or a specific group of colleges. The Association of Scottish Colleges has asked to give evidence to the committee; indeed, it will be submitting written evidence. It may well be that once we have seen the written evidence, we can suggest that we take oral evidence from the association or from suitable colleges.
Would it be appropriate in an overview to take evidence from the unions involved, particularly the College Lecturers Association and the Educational Institute of Scotland?
That is a possibility. The organisations can submit written evidence, if they so wish.
Can you or the clerks help to define what we are supposed to be doing? If we are carrying out an overview, there is the danger that we will get bogged down with the problems of one or two individual colleges. We should deal with the financial difficulties that are highlighted in the appendices at the back of the report and perhaps take written evidence from the colleges that are named as examples.
We are certainly taking an overview.
First and foremost, we must concentrate on the fact that we are carrying out an overview. Two years ago, when we first took evidence on this matter and expressed our concerns about what was happening, colleges were not actually named. Although we knew that eight to 10 colleges were in severe financial difficulty, there was a big debate about whether we could get that information and whether it could be made public. However, this time, we have quite detailed information about every college in the FE sector. Although we are carrying out an overview, in which it is appropriate to examine only certain general issues, colleges have specific issues, which the report groups together in a relatively logical way. We could have one evidence session that takes an overview and examines the general funding issues and difficulties in the FE sector, and then, on the basis of the better information that we will have received, consider the specific issues that some colleges face. Perhaps that is a better way forward. Sitting here saying, "Maybe we should do this, maybe we should do that," almost prejudges what the accountable officers will tell us.
That is wise advice. We must find out the focus of the overview and then keep focused on it.
I have several colleges in my constituency and they have told me of their individual experiences. It may be helpful to hear from a representative of the Glasgow colleges group on the reasons why those colleges have developed deficits. It may be as a result of their individual experiences or principals, for example. That might be a more beneficial way of obtaining evidence.
The second item on the committee's agenda is the response from the Scottish Further Education Funding Council to the committee's report on managing costs. It is a live issue. All the issues in my report are live and are developing all the time. As members will see from the helpful statement produced by the chief executive of SFEFC, Professor Sizer, there is a lot of work in progress. Indeed, that presented us with some difficulty in deciding the cut-off point of the overview report.
We are not involved in a one-off process—there are on-going reviews that would allow us a second bite at the issue and an opportunity to focus if we so wish. This is a live issue. The suggestion is that we monitor the issue and revisit it in the spring if we want to consider specific examples.
I apologise if I have not been entirely clear. I am comfortable with the committee holding an evidence session on my report. However, I suggest that, at the moment, the committee should focus on a high level agenda, with a view to going further in the middle of next year, when we will be better placed to provide you with more detailed information.
Thank you. We will discuss the matter at a subsequent meeting and we can pursue issues on an individual-college basis if members so wish. Are members content to leave it as an on-going process?