Chamber and committees

Work is under way, and I certainly want to have it substantially advanced before the next academic year. It would be disingenuous to suggest that some of the wider pressures that we are seeing will go away any time soon. For example, the University of Glasgow told me that it has plans to increase the amount of its directly provided student accommodation. That is the type of response that I hope to see in the sector. I recognise that that will not be achieved readily and that it requires lead-in time for planning applications, construction and so on. However, that activity has to start sooner rather than later, as do our actions in the student accommodation strategy.

We need to be led by the evidence. I made the point that it needs to be done on the basis of the comparative overhead requirements.

I take your point, Mr Doris. You picked a specific course. With a few exceptions to do with protected subjects—primarily, the medicine courses that universities deliver—we tend not to distinguish between courses, not least because we rely largely on our institutions to determine what provision there should be. We would not want to create perverse incentives by offering differential contribution rates that depended on subject matter.

Notwithstanding that point, I understand the point that you are making about the comparative overheads of some courses not necessarily being that different.

The overall position needs to be evidence led. Beyond the general understanding that the sector is under financial pressure and is desirous of more resource, we need to consider the rationale for looking at things in terms of cost per head.

I have tried to answer that question already, Ms Gosal. To a large extent, that is driven by the experience of learning and teaching. A school pupil will come into contact with many more teachers than a college student comes into contact with lecturers or instructors. Inevitably, that leads to a higher unit cost per head if we look at it in that way. We are not really comparing like for like. The experience in each phase of a person’s journey through education is different—there are different drivers of the costs involved. That is largely what drives that differential.

That does not mean that we value one part of the system less than another but is a reflection of the reality of the overheads involved.

As I said in response to Mr Doris’s question, we can always keep such things under review and we will look to do that. However—and you might hear me say this quite a lot today, because it is the reality that we are grappling with—the current budget is worth £1.7 billion less than it was when we published it in December 2021. I am all for people making positive suggestions on the redistribution of resource, but they had better be prepared to come to me to say how we are going to do that.

That takes me back to the discussion that we had earlier and a response that I gave to Mr Dey. I made the point that, right now, we probably could be considering the degree of latitude that we give to colleges to be more creative in their responses to the needs of their local community.

I think that you have given a very clear example of that. You mentioned Bob Doris. I referred to the visit that I undertook with him to Glasgow Kelvin College, where we saw some really good examples of what I would broadly describe as community learning and development activity. Although that activity might be less focused on credit-based funded activity, it is of enormous value. I go back to the point that Mr Marra made about widening access. That could be the gateway to further study for the people who interact with that type of provision.

Therefore, I view such work as being very important, and I think that we could support it better. That takes us into the territory of some of the considerations that we need to undertake in relation to whether we should give colleges a bit more latitude in how they use the public resource that we provide for them, while at the same time—I always have to make this point—still accounting for the utilisation of public resource to demonstrate that it is being used for public benefit.

Can I respond to that point quickly, deputy convener?

We are looking at that aspect now, so it is not going to take for ever and a day. I was in dialogue with Colleges Scotland about it just last week.

I will respond to those points. Of course, I will listen to what the committee has to say; this is a very valuable inquiry, and it is for the committee to determine what it does at the end of the inquiry. I presume that some form of report with recommendations will be pulled together, and I will, of course, consider them.

Let me be very clear with Ms Gosal. She says that colleges come to her regularly for discussion. It might not be a surprise to her to learn that they do that with me, too. So, I maintain regular dialogue with them.

On Ms Gosal’s final point, it is incumbent on me, as the minister with responsibility for higher education and further education policy, among other policy areas, to consider how we deploy public resource, but we all have a leadership role and we are all elected representatives. If she or any other representative wants to come forward to say that there should be additional resource in any particular area of Government expenditure, I would respectfully say that we could take such a proposition a lot more seriously if where that resource should come from was identified. Yes, Government has a primary leadership role, but it is not an exclusive one—it is one for us all, as elected representatives, because, after all, the budget process is subject to parliamentary scrutiny.

First, I hope that we will all reflect on the position of higher education research and development right now. If you look at the percentage of expenditure across public and private resource on higher education research and development, you will see that we are ranked seventh among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and that our spend as a percentage of gross domestic product is above the OECD average, the EU27 average and the UK average. It is important that we reflect on that.

On what we are seeking to do, we increased the baseline grants for university research and innovation this year. At this point, I must refer back to the challenging budgetary context that we are in. However, we will leverage in additional resource where we can, and the increase in the baseline grants is a demonstration that we have done so.

Of course, I want to maintain the position whereby Scotland’s universities are doing comparatively better in drawing down existing funding, such as UK Research and Innovation funding. We are still outperforming the UK as a whole in terms of the population average—the most recent figures show that 13 per cent of UKRI spend was drawn down to Scotland, which is well ahead of our population position. I will engage with UKRI to understand how we can continue to maintain that position.

My personal reflection on the importance of the university sector is that it is of the utmost importance to our standing in the world because of the world-class research that we see across all our institutions. If we look at the results that Mr Marra referred to a few moments ago, we see first-class research right across every institution. We should celebrate that and shout about it. If I have any mild critique of the sector, it is that we could do a better job of shouting about the activity that is happening here, in Scotland. There is a role for us as well.

Clearly, the sector is also an important driver in ensuring that we are responsive to the various skills requirements that we have in Scotland, and universities are, of course, important as economic anchors in their own right and in their own communities. The university sector is of the utmost importance; I do not want there to be any sense that I do not recognise that.

In terms of the resource that we invest, we continue to put more than £1 billion into the university sector every year. That is a substantial investment by any reasonable estimation. Do we need to look again at the unit cost—the cost per head? I am afraid that I am bound to say that it will be difficult to do that in the context of where the budget is just now. There is no point in pretending otherwise.

On the latter point, we have seen progress in the participation rate for some of those groups. That is welcome and it is down to the fact that our regionalisation processes enables colleges to be more flexible and responsive. That is an important part of what we seek to do.

In effect, the answer is the same as the one that I just gave to Mr Marra. Getting people through the door is only one part of the equation. There is more to be done on thinking through how we can better support people to ensure that they can complete their journeys through college. That remains the subject of discussion with the sector.