Chamber and committees

I am at a slight disadvantage, as I have not seen all of that evidence—I am not sure whether the committee is aware, but there is some considerable delay in the Official Reports of all committees being published.

There is a shock.

We will interrogate that issue through the committee process, presuming that the committee recommends the bill’s progression. Those are important issues to debate.

Greater self-awareness is needed out there. At a time when public finances are constrained, some degree of self-restraint must be exercised. For example, if staff receive a 3 per cent pay increase, which is still a substantial amount of money and makes for a very good salary if accepted, there needs to be a bit of awareness about what pay increases senior management might get. If the member intends to bring forward amendments for us to consider, assuming the bill progresses, that process will clearly unfold.

The convener is looking at me because of time.

I will clarify something. You started by talking about private training providers. However, we are talking about managing agents, not private training providers, and they do not deliver the training, but subcontract it. We should be clear about that, because there are many fine private training providers out there.

I have been clear today about my long-standing concerns about the role of managing agents. I need to be very careful and say that some managing agents carry out some really welcome and necessary activities. I commend the committee for getting out of them the information that it did when it took evidence last week, because we found it more challenging, over a period of time, to get that information out of all the relevant bodies.

I will take Glasgow as an example. It has three colleges that are specific to the city. Two of those might be described as doing the typical community work that you would expect of colleges. That is their strength. The other is quite unique. It is something between a university and a college, and it is unique in having substantial commercial income. It attracts international students in a way that the other two colleges do not.

Given the principals who are in place at the moment, I am confident that, through the appointment process for chairs, we will manage to ensure that we attract the kind of strong individual who I want to chair our colleges—the kind of individual who will hold principals to account but will also see the bigger picture. Having heard yesterday in Glasgow about the skills planning work that is going on, I think that there is a coherent vision not just for Glasgow, but for Lanarkshire and the area that is covered by West College Scotland.

On the specifics of your point—this might clarify things—some interesting things arise in relation to the Aberdeenshire model of foundation apprenticeships. You might think of there being a pathway from foundation apprenticeships directly into modern apprenticeships and a proportion of young people follow that path. Foundation apprenticeships can help employers to identify people who are the right fit for their business.

An interesting thing is that the Aberdeenshire model is driving up academic performance. Young people go into that work-experience setting and realise that a school subject that they do not particularly enjoy—usually maths—is going to be essential to enabling them to pursue the career that they have now decided that they want to pursue. Anecdotal evidence from headteachers suggests that that has led to an uptick in academic performance, and we are seeing a sizeable number of foundation apprentices going to university. So, although there is a degree of read-across, it is not necessarily the case that someone who does a foundation apprenticeship will go into a modern apprenticeship. The beauty of the Aberdeenshire system is that it is wide-ranging and offers many opportunities for young people across a range of career choices.

The other thing about the Aberdeenshire model is that the council part funds it—there is a large contribution from SDS, but that has been reducing over time. Funnily enough, I am quite drawn to that arrangement because this Parliament’s budget already funds local authorities to educate those young people, and there is some value in having some degree of co-funding if we are to maintain or expand the foundation apprenticeship model. However, as I said earlier, we have been closely examining the vocational offering that is also available in the later stages of school education, because we need to look at both of those aspects if we are going to get the system right.

I should also add that I had a really useful session with the school leaders forum. The innovative, forward-thinking leaders of our schools who sit on that forum have different views on what foundation apprenticeships, or whatever they are to be called, might look like going forward and how we could best introduce them. The situation around that is a work in progress. I am not going to sit here and say that we will do X, Y or Z, but I hope that it is a further illustration of the depth of thinking that has gone into getting the approach right.

As I said, to be blunt, the landscape is very fragmented, with every component part of the system pushing its significance, relevance and importance. That issue has come out in the evidence. I recognise that, in the current economic climate, it is inevitable that people will say that there are immediate problems that need to be confronted. I contend that we are confronting some of them, particularly in relation to the economy—we might come to that later in the session. What the bill delivers was deemed to be necessary by James Withers. That has not changed—we need to make fundamental structural changes to the offering, regardless of the immediate circumstances in which we find ourselves.

I stress that there are two separate things. There is the immediate work that we are doing in response to some of the challenges, but the bill is about creating a coherent post-16 landscape, which is widely recognised as being necessary.

Our ambition is certainly to give it to you as quickly as possible, but I anticipate that we would be able to do so before the stage 1 debate.

Let me explain what I mean. If you look at reform in the round, you will see that there is a huge amount of support for all of the measures, of which the bill is a component part. I understand the argument about whether this is our most pressing ask right now in the context of funding and how it is delivered. If you look at the evidence, you will see that all the organisations are looking for an immediate funding boost. During the 2024 consultation, 80 per cent of the people and organisations that responded were in favour of the proposal.

The bill is about delivering a coherent landscape that is sadly lacking at the moment, and I have no doubt that we will interrogate the detail of that in the next couple of hours. The legislation is absolutely necessary. It is not, by any means, the endgame, but it is important, because it would enable us to deliver many other aspects of reform that the whole sector and landscape will benefit from.