Chamber and committees

I will first give a bit of context before I ask the question, because I want to make sure that the question is well understood. I entirely agree and accept the point about the soft power element and the generational impact that the exchanges that we have had over many years have had, and I think that we underestimate soft power at our peril.

I participated in an exchange scheme at university for a year—not in the EU. I do not know whether I deserve praise or blame for this, but I was the first one to go to Canada on the scheme, and I was followed a few years later by someone who is now a Conservative member of the Parliament, which shows that when you have established that link, it grows over time. As a result, we also had people coming from Canada to Dundee university.

I will not go down the fruitless avenue of trying to compare Turing with Erasmus. I agree with the UK Government—I do not often say that—when it says that doing so is comparing two different types of activities. However, is there a danger that the institutions and the students involved overestimate the complexity of what is now required to continue these exchange schemes? The scheme that I was on in the 1980s had no support from the British Council or anybody else—the university just did it with another university in Canada, and, of course, that involved visas and so on. They just had an agreement that no fees would exchange hands and that they would support accommodation and food and so on. Is there a danger that, because it was so easy and seamless before, we do not take the full opportunities because there will be complication and bureaucracy? We keep comparing the situation with what we had before.

For what it is worth, I think that we should never have left the EU. It has been a disaster in many ways, and every local authority area in Scotland voted to stay in. However, is it not the case that the memory of what was there before and how easy it was might prevent us from taking up the full raft of potential opportunities? I invite my namesake, Mr Brown, to respond first.

I will come to Ms Bevan shortly, because I know that that question was probably less relevant—

That was my next question. Professor Cardwell referred to challenges with attracting North American students, but those problems were overcome in a fairly straightforward way in the 1980s, when things were perhaps more complex, in some ways. I am not sure what has changed since then, although, there have certainly been changes to visas and so on in the US.

I have a question about what Peter Brown has just said. I do not need to be convinced about the value and benefits of programmes such as these. When I came back from Canada, a woman followed me and married me and gave birth to our three children, who are Canadian Scots, so a link was established with the Maritimes and Canada that had not been there before.

Peter Brown made a point about peace; I think that peace and understanding are key here, but they are very hard to quantify—although, of course, the EU was awarded the Nobel peace prize, because of its ability to diminish the prospect of war after the second world war. The way to try to convince Governments of whichever stripe to reinstate such programmes and, I hope, to reverse Brexit, is to be much more explicit about the benefits. I am not sure that we have done that; I think that we have taken them for granted. What metrics can we use to measure the value of soft power in order to make a more effective case for exchange schemes to continue in future?

That was not my personal view—the Government said that.

Thank you.

Professor Cardwell, I am conscious that everybody I have spoken to who did a year’s exchange described it as the best year that they had at university or of their academic career. How can we best demonstrate the benefits of that?

I have a minor question. Again, I am arguing against myself, but I am that kind of fair-minded person. It is on the point that Professor Cardwell made about the fact that people who have been on exchanges—I do not want to put words in your mouth—tend to achieve better grades or better outcomes in their degrees.

Is it not also the case—I genuinely do not know the answer to this—that, in order to qualify for many of the schemes, a person has to have passed all their exams that year? They cannot do a resit because they will be away at the new institution, or something like that. Does the person need to have achieved some other standard? Does a self-selecting group tend to do exchanges?

I presume that the idea is to move at pace. It seems to me that, for your self-interest, it is extremely important that the Funding Council, the Government, this committee and others have a clear idea of what is happening and what benefits are being produced. In my area, one college is steadily withdrawing from a council area that has one of the highest levels of deprivation—Andy Witty mentioned it earlier—so the benefit to that area is reducing over time.

When I had responsibility for colleges 15 years ago, the need for parity of esteem for the college sector was the big rallying cry, and that had some effect. However, parity of esteem is served when the benefits can be demonstrated, so there must be clear and accurate figures. The SFC says that it is not its business to talk about outcomes for individuals—I do not know why that is the case—but surely it is in your interest to make sure that clear information is gathered at pace.

On the Funding Council point that Willie Rennie has just raised, I say that nearly every comment that you have made—and, in fact, all the comments in the committee’s previous report—relate to funding. Most of us in this committee are on other committees, where we get a pretty constant parade of organisations that say that they want more funding and that are convinced that they are the ones that are treated the worst, but very few acknowledge the constraints that the Scottish Government is under—we have had 14 years of constraint on public sector budgets. However, that is just a thing of mine.

I come back to what the Scottish Government is responsible for and to the Funding Council. Earlier, you mentioned the disparity between the £4,000 that is spent on a college student and the £7,000 or so that is spent on an undergraduate student. In my experience, the year that I had at one of the Edinburgh colleges was the best with regard to educational attainment—it was better than university. Is it your view that the Funding Council has an institutional bias in favour of higher education as opposed to further education?

Audrey Cumberford talked about the nature of the courses that people are interested in having an impact. Has the sector made an assessment of the effectiveness of the SFC’s new outcomes framework and assurance model since its introduction? I was not on the committee when the report was put together, but I know that having data is very important. If people do not have a grip on the matter and the SFC is reluctant to provide particular matrices for people going through the system, that is an issue. Has the sector as a whole looked at the model? If so, what does it make of it?