Chamber and committees

As the cabinet secretary has done, I take issue with the statistics that you are quoting. I have the numbers in front of me. Glasgow Kelvin College received a 3.15 per cent uplift. It was one of the main beneficiaries of the rebaselining. Of course, some of that was for lecturers’ pay and some was for pension funding, but there was a basic uplift of £170,000 on the college’s credit thresholds, so it received more money.

I recognise that there has been a decrease in staff over a period of time. Colleges have been evolving their offering because they need to respond to the needs of the economy.

There is an interesting element to that. Sometimes, staff numbers have gone down because the number of courses has been reduced. I can think of at least one college where the number of courses was reduced because of demand, but the number of students attending that college went up. That is about responding to need.

No one ever wants to see job losses at scale, but we are in a period of evolution in the college sector, as we are in other sectors, and I am optimistic about where colleges will end up in the future. As they evolve their offering, they are better aligning it with the needs of the local and national economy and the needs of learners.

The first thing to say is that the rebaselining exercise that was carried out with the SFC was requested by the sector. It was made very clear to colleges that, in doing that, there would be winners and losers.

I know that we have three and a half hours, but I could take up most of that time on this subject. I have said before that, in the long term, the careers element of the Withers report will be the most important part of the entire review that he carried out. There is absolutely no doubt that we are coming up short in our careers offering. There is a collective responsibility for that—it is not just the responsibility of careers advisers or teachers. One of the biggest influences—indeed, the biggest influence—on young people when it comes to making career choices is parents. It is a real problem if parents are not alive to all the opportunities that are out there—for example, if they are prejudiced against apprenticeships. We see the result of that in the apprenticeship attrition rates and in the college and university drop-out rates.

Funnily enough, quite a lot of work is being done on the issue, but it is the area of reform that I am most optimistic about delivering on quickly. We have a vehicle that was put together—the careers services collaborative—to bring every aspect of the careers service and everyone who should be influencing people’s decisions on their careers around the table. Over the next few weeks and months, I will announce the new co-chairs of that group and meet with them to pursue the very points that you made, Mr Mason.

There is no doubt that the gender point remains a huge issue. Prejudices exist in schools and in families—the idea that there are some careers that are for boys and some careers that are for girls. A useful piece of work was done by the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board’s gender group. I intend to weave that into all our reform as a matter of course, because it was really useful in relation to looking at and addressing these issues.

On the point about universities, we all know that the push for academic performance with a view to young people going to university remains the overarching approach in some institutions. However, that is not the case in many schools; there are many enlightened schools that are embracing different ways of coming at the issue. That works best where there are careers advisers sitting in the school, doing what they do with the knowledge of the landscape; where Developing the Young Workforce is operating in the school to complement that work; and where the school leadership is focused on the right outcome for every child and not simply on trying to get them to go to university.

There is lots of good practice. My job over the next few months is to try to pull that together and to get everyone to take responsibility for their part in this. It is not just about schools; it is about the careers advice that is available in colleges, universities and the home. We need to fundamentally address and meet the challenge of making sure that our young people have the best information available to them so that they can make the right choice for them.

You are right, convener; I will respond to the committee’s report in detail, but I will update the committee as far as I can today.

My officials have continued to explore the matter over the past two months. That work has included meetings with Universities Scotland, the SFC and the commissioner to understand the specifics of how using such a number would work in practice. My officials have also had a meeting with the Scottish Information Commissioner to garner his thoughts on that. It is fair to say that that would be extremely complex work. It would be cross cutting in nature and would involve sharing the personal, sensitive data of millions of individuals, so you will appreciate that it would need to be done properly.

I cannot go beyond that at this stage, but I hope that that gives the committee an understanding of how seriously we take the idea, as well as an assurance that we are exploring it actively.

It is not so much about a public-private partnership approach, but I can talk about facilitating additional income from the private sector. In the college sector, the commercial income that colleges have been able to secure has almost hit a ceiling—their income never rises above a certain point. Some of our colleges, such as Forth Valley College and the City of Glasgow College, have done very well to address that challenge, and we have been looking at what they are doing that has been so successful that other colleges struggle with. We have identified a lack of capacity and resource in some of our colleges to get out and engage with the private sector, which is willing to put additional money in, subject to there being the right kind of training for its workforce. We are actively looking at what we can do to facilitate that kind of engagement. Does that answer your question?

I hope that this will be helpful, convener. As I mentioned to the committee a couple of weeks ago, we have already had a direct conversation with the chairs of the universities in Scotland. At this stage, we are simply encouraging them to exercise restraint in the uprating of remunerative packages in view of the challenging financial circumstances and the cost of living crisis. There has already been a conversation of sorts about exercising self-restraint and self-awareness.

That topic has come up at committee previously. An extensive effort has been made to tackle that thorny issue, which has dogged the college sector for the best part of a decade.

As a positive, I think that everybody who is involved recognises that continuing as they have is not, in any way, to be welcomed, to put it mildly. There is a commitment to try to move things on. We have made considerable progress on what that might look like, and we have progressed things to the point at which trade unions have been working in conjunction with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, and there has been a session on behaviours across the national bargaining process. That work is on-going.

Work has also been undertaken with College Employers Scotland to review the national recognition and procedure agreement and to consider how that could be strengthened to support improvements in national bargaining. However, two trade unions have served notice that they intend to resign from the current NRPA, as they no longer feel that it is fit for purpose, which leaves two unions that are aligned with it and two that are moving away from it. Unfortunately, we have an internal issue with the trade unions’ commitment to the processes. I would be deeply disappointed if we could not get into a better space. I still see that as an imperative, and the recognition is there from all parties.

Touch wood, things have quietened down in the sector. We have a long-term agreement with the lecturers and the employers, and I know that negotiations between support staff and employers have been on-going for some time. I am afraid that that is not much of an update, Mr Kidd, but that is where we are at.

Is that better?

Apologies. The rebaselining exercise that was carried out was requested by the sector. The SFC was clear that, in doing that, there would be winners and losers. Despite that, it was probably predictable that the two colleges that were least well served by the exercise took issue with it.

Perhaps more of a surprise was NESCOL’s reaction, because it was one of the net winners in that exercise. There was a sectoral uplift of 2.6 per cent, and NESCOL received circa 3.1 per cent in totality, including an increase in the teaching funding.

That said, I have a degree of sympathy with its argument. This is a historic, long-standing issue with the Fraserburgh campus, and NESCOL is right to say that the element of rurality that it has to deal with has not been recognised. I hope that you and NESCOL would appreciate that all the anomalies that sit within quite a complex funding system were never going to be addressed in one giant leap.

The SFC, through the tripartite group, has shown a lot of flexibility and good responsiveness to asks from the sector, and I think that that will continue to be the case. We are trying to evolve the funding model to make it more flexible and agile, better reflect the outputs from the individual institutions and align with the needs of the local and national economies.

I said this in response to a question from Mr Rennie in the chamber a few weeks ago—if it is possible for us to do this, there is a need to add an element of alignment with the needs of the local and national economy into the funding model. That may well require additional funding, which will be difficult to find in the current economic circumstance, but if we could do that and NESCOL met the criteria, I would look to address that, because I understand the point about the Fraserburgh campus.