Chamber and committees

That is right in two senses. First, comparisons with England must be viewed with caution, because the measurements are taken in a very different way and the sectors are very different in that Scotland’s colleges deliver far more higher education than English colleges do. Therefore, I would always be cautious about drawing conclusions from such comparisons.

However, there is a legitimate question that we need to consider about how we view completion rates. Derek Smeall has articulated that point clearly. Indeed, when we visited his college, he discussed the issue with us, and I am more than willing to continue to reflect on it.

We absolutely want more students to complete their course, but, in many instances, students are not completing their course because they are moving on to another positive destination. We need to be cautious about drawing the conclusion that non-completion equals failure, because that is not the case. Can we better reflect that in how we monitor and measure things? Yes, I think that we probably can. We need to reflect on that.

Undoubtedly, improvements can be made. None of us would pretend that there is not still a journey to be made in ensuring that our institutions are ever more responsive to the requirements and needs of our economy and society. The fundamental question is whether regionalisation creates a better platform for that to be enabled. For all the reasons that I have laid out, I believe that to be the case.

Looking across the country and the many visits that I have undertaken to Scotland’s colleges, I see that in action. For example, I visited West Lothian College, which has a good tie-up with the Scottish Ambulance Service to support people to transition from various sectors of the economy into the social care sector. Borders College uses its science, technology, engineering and mathematics centre to better support the upskilling of employers such as electricians to undertake important types of activity for the future response on the green skills agenda—for example, through the installation of ground-source heat pumps.

That is the type of activity that we have enabled to happen through regionalisation, but there is undoubtedly still more to be done. I am up for that challenge and I know that Scotland’s colleges are, too.

Some flexibilities are already being extended. There is some latitude for colleges on meeting their credit targets without the Scottish Funding Council implementing clawback.

In the environment that we have, we can operate with some latitude and flexibility. The question that has been posed to us, which is reasonable, is whether we can go further. I am committed to considering that question. It might be possible that we can do something this academic year, but I believe that we might be able to do more in the next academic year.

Colleges Scotland has asked whether we need such a level of credit-based provision and whether colleges should have increased latitude to be more responsive to, say, local employer demand. I am committed to looking at that, but can I earnestly and honestly say that we have landed where we are going to end up on that? No, I cannot, but we also have a good foundation of learning with regard to what that could look like.

The flexible workforce development fund, for example, enables employers to have a more direct relationship with colleges and to draw down funding that will be quite responsive to their specific requirements, and our national transition training fund enabled colleges to respond very flexibly. In response to the convener’s opening questions, I mentioned West Lothian College’s work with the Scottish Ambulance Service, and funding for that was drawn down from the national transition training fund.

There is therefore a basis on which we can be informed about the decisions that we might take, but I point out that we are actively engaged on the matter and are discussing it further with Colleges Scotland to see whether we can land somewhere that might enable them to exercise some more latitude with regard to the public resource that we provide.

—and we have put in a significant uplift this year. That is the type of action that we have seen from the Government.

I am sorry, but it is silly to suggest that what I said is just about meetings and engagement that we might have, although I hope that Mr Marra recognises that it is not unreasonable for me to speak with the people who are delivering on the ground to understand how we might go about improving things. Occasionally, that requires the odd meeting or two.

However, the fundamental point that you make, Mr Marra, should be one of the things that we consider. In terms of the widening access journey, a lot of this probably relates more to the activity. We have a discussion ahead about universities, and colleges are a critical conduit into universities. It is critical that, as a first step, we get people through the door, but that is not the end of the matter. Where people end up in their experience of education, the process to qualification and beyond qualification are all vital aspects of the widening access agenda.

Despite the robust nature of our exchanges, which I am always relaxed to have with you, Mr Marra, we are probably as one on that issue.

I am glad that I can hear you now, Mr Dey. I apologise for any confusion.

I perceive there to be a role for us in that, but it is not the leading role. We are not a direct provider of student accommodation and never have been—there has never been a role for Government in that regard, and I do not detect any sense that that should change. However, that is not to say that the issue is not of substantial concern to me in my ministerial role. I have engaged directly with specific universities on the issue, particularly the University of Glasgow, which had a situation that was widely reported. At that stage, I got a degree of reassurance that the university was taking every step possible to work through the remaining issues that it had.

We are committed to introducing a student accommodation strategy, which will be informed by the purpose-built student accommodation review that is under way. We recently commissioned evidence from the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence. That evidence is now with us and will be considered by the purpose-built student accommodation review steering group. We will then publish that evidence—at that juncture, I will be happy to write directly to the committee. That will inform the consideration of what we might be able to do to ensure better provision of housing for students.

Of course, the issue is part of a wider challenge of pressure on the availability of housing. We have done work on, for example, short-term lets to better enable local authorities to regulate that market and ensure a wider supply of housing for other groups who require it, including students.

There is action that we can take, although we cannot take it alone. We have to work with the sector to ensure that it lives up to its responsibility for ensuring that the students that universities recruit are adequately housed. We will continue to work through that with our student accommodation strategy.

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.