Chamber and committees

What I have said to you is that we are currently working on that. We do not know what our budget will be for that year.

We will deliver on that—we will fulfil that agreement.

Again, you are contradicting yourself. Earlier, you said that you welcomed the move, and now you are picking holes in the approach to it. We got a resolution through the provision of what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively small sum of money.

I happen to believe that it is more than worth our while investing to settle the dispute and end the impact on students, and also in creating the space for the long-term good of the sector to get us into a better place. That is a price well worth paying.

It is an interesting one, because the facts do not bear out some of the assertions that we hear about universities. Our universities are a massive success story: we have more Scottish young people going to university than ever before. We also have more young people from widening-access programmes attending university than ever before—that is another success story, credit for which belongs to the universities.

Yes, we have more international students—that is because the offer that we have in Scotland, thanks to our universities, is a very attractive one. We are not, by and large, in a situation where our young people are not able to access university because of the presence of international students.

What sometimes happens is that a university allocates a certain number of funded places, and it will make decisions about the size and scale of courses, which can, on occasion, mean that there is no place for an individual who wishes to go to that university. We have seen that in the past year. Over the piece, however, the opportunities for our young people to go to university are considerably better than they have been before.

That is an interesting point. We will take it away and think about it, and come back to the committee on that—if that is okay, convener.

If I may, convener, it is worth recognising, however, that there have been tuition fees in England for some time, and there are financial challenges there, too.

There has been a projection of the impact of the financial situation in both sectors. I have seen the figure of 20,000. Obviously, the SFC will be monitoring that closely. We do not want staff numbers to fall by that amount at all. The difficulty that we have is that, in the college sector, staff costs make up 70 per cent of colleges’ expenditure, which is extremely high.

Some of that has been addressed by voluntary redundancy schemes, although the problem with such schemes is that people leave from areas of the college that are quite important to the future of the institution. However, we want to avoid compulsory redundancies at all costs.

There is no doubt that there is an impact—that is unavoidable—but we are monitoring that through the SFC. I hope that, notwithstanding the point that Pam Duncan-Glancy made earlier, with the opportunities that arise around growth for the college sector, those levels of redundancies can be avoided. There is significant opportunity for the colleges to grow in relation to upskilling and reskilling. The demand and appetite from employers is there, and employers that I speak to understand the need for their sector to put funding in place to support that. There is an opportunity for growth that can help to address some of the financial challenges that the colleges have.

To be blunt, that is not for me to do. That is one of the issues that needs to be resolved in that setting. If we can get into a space where there is a better atmosphere and a better culture, all those things can be aired by the participants. It is not for the Government to take on that role. The point that you raise has been raised with me before, and it needs to be looked at, just as the employer side’s approach to negotiation and the mechanics of the process need to be looked at. The agenda that is taken forward, if there is an independent facilitator, can be agreed by both sides and explored in that context. What I have seen so far is that, without going into the specifics, both sides are prepared to look at such matters.

I accept that. I noticed that you were quiet on the issue of tuition fees, so you probably understand. However, in all seriousness, you are right to push me on this issue, because it is incredibly important.

The success of the pilot projects really encouraged me. I was blown away by what I saw. We are trying to learn from those. We are trying to encourage the colleges to get involved, which they did not do last time—to be fair, I think that that was just about the short notice that they got—and develop and build on those projects. Budget permitting, I would like to ramp this up pretty quickly. However, I stress that that is budget permitting.

The way in which questions are asked is quite interesting. The question that the SFC and Colleges Scotland put to the colleges was whether they had any assets that were not being utilised that they would like to dispose of. However, as a college chair said to me, importantly, colleges were not asked whether they had any assets that they were utilising that they might like to dispose of. We expect a reasonable uptake of the opportunity to dispose of assets, perhaps on a scale that is beyond what was originally envisaged.