Education and Skills Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Official Report 534KB pdf

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Commission on Widening Access

Item 2 is an evidence-taking session with the commission on widening access. I welcome to the meeting three of the commission members: Dame Ruth Silver, chair of the commission; Maureen McKenna, executive director of education services, Glasgow City Council; and Professor Petra Wend, principal and vice-chancellor, Queen Margaret University.

Dame Ruth, I understand that you have agreed to make an opening statement outlining the commission’s work.

Thank you very much. I am delighted to be here; indeed, I have been longing to come before the committee and open up this swiftly written, slightly dense but, I think, very crucial report. We had 10 months to do it, and my colleagues were incredibly industrious and supportive.

If it is okay, I want to start by telling you what we found at the end of our investigations that led us to make our recommendations. We literally scurried around the whole of Scotland; people were generous and hospitable on the visits that all or some of us made, and others came to see us from far-flung parts of Scotland to give us their thoughts about and experience of access. Our conclusion—and this is a headline conclusion, but I am happy to go into it in more detail if it suits—is that Scotland actually knows how to do this very well; however, things are at a difficult developmental stage.

The work that we came across was inspiring in some cases, innovative in many institutions and based on dedication. My own personal and professional standpoint is that access work is, like physics and other things, a specialism in its own right. Pedagogy and staff development are important, and the portability of the experience via credentials is crucial.

At the moment, the state of this work is exciting in some parts, very frail in some and stale in others. I can say that, because I went on every visit and saw everyone. It is all heavily dependent on inspired individuals who really believe in the cause of access; it is institutionally based, which means that practice in one institution, which might be terrific, is very different from practice down the road; practice is sometimes duplicated; and sometimes the portability between neighbouring institutions is not quite right. On the whole, the deficit is placed on the individual learner instead of on institutional behaviours, but the good news is that there is a decade of terrific professional practice in access work and there are layers of good professionals who just need to be pulled together into an overall framework.

That is the state of what we looked at. I should remind the committee that we decided to have an appreciative inquiry, and part of our remit was to see what worked and what good practice could be taken further.

I am sorry that we wrote you such a long report—we just did not have the time to write you a short one. It really is as simple as that. I am glad to be here today to open up the report a bit with the help of my colleagues, who have already been introduced. I think that the timing is terrific, given that we are ready to move forward with the report with the appointment of Professor Scott.

I want to trail back a bit to the origins of the commission, which can be found in a statement by the First Minister. She said that she wanted us to

“determine ... that a child born today”

in difficult circumstances will have equal access to university as a child born in better circumstances. The use of the verb “determine” was inspiring and very cohesive for the commission.

That gave us a good lifespan. We worked with an imagined horizon of 2030, and the time was chunked into three five-year plans. The development stages were different. The first stage was about gathering together good practice and shaking it about to see what was good enough, what was not good enough and what needed to be removed. We then moved forward according to the agenda that we set out in our 34 recommendations.

Twelve good people joined me around the table, and the first thing that we did was induct one another. It was very important to work with the civil servants to get the kind of commission that I thought was needed to give a 360-degree look at access—not just access to education but access onwards to economic life. We also wanted to reflect employer views and so on, and we were able to find 12 people who were there in their own independent, professional right but who also represented the subsystems of the work on access—schools, universities, skills development and so on, the care community, the students and the staff.

In our induction phase, we worked on the philosophy of the commission. I will say it, because it is really important. There were many accusations in the press about social engineering and so on, but our philosophy is simple: work on access to education is about fairness and a belief in academic excellence for all as a social and economic good for the nation. Our five working principles were that our work would be systemic, appreciative, analytic, evidence based and collaborative.

With the remit of the commission having been established, the commission members inducted and representing something systemic, and a philosophy and organising principles agreed, we launched a call for evidence over the summer and commissioned research from the universities on a pro bono basis to look at what was going on in access in Scotland. We established a working process and met monthly. There were themed meetings, we had many visitors come to talk to us from the different subsystems, such as students and care specialists, and we made many visits, including to some very cold parts of Scotland on wet evenings when we had to wait for trains at stations. All of us were also available to talk at events, and I was heartened by the number of invitations that we got from membership bodies and representative bodies including trade unions and the professional unions.

I asked one thing of the commission members: that each of them steward an interest on the agenda. We had people working on different parts of it—for example, we looked at the Scottish index of multiple deprivation with joint working parties, at admissions and so on—and there was always a steward available to talk to and to explain things to colleagues. Indeed, the induction was our own members telling us what was going on.

We set up a number of specialist groups, which I will say more about, for the sake of the commissioner. The idea was always that we would have specialist groups to advise us, whose members would not be commission members but be people in the field from a mix of sectors. We wanted to leave scaffolding for the future, so that, when the commissioner is appointed, there will be groups that have explored the themes and the working papers will exist, although they have not been published in hard copy. We wanted a dowry of something to pass on in a spirit of generativity. There would also be the interim and final reports and then the handover.

The stance that we took as we did the work was simple: inequality is damaging, unsustainable and unfair, and it is time that it stopped. The work process took 10 months, and our organising principles were that the commissioners would be independent, specialist and linked backwards from our table into their own areas of work and institutions. As I said, we tried to create the system around the table. We had arguments and were unable to resolve some of them—for some of them, that will take a while and the timescale was very short indeed—but, as the chair, I tried to prevent those arguments from becoming personal and to keep them as issues between the subsystems, staying curious the whole time.

As I have said, we were delighted that in Scotland you have terrific professionals and practice on some groundbreaking systems. The systems that are here, I have not seen the like of anywhere. However, they are within institutions and, modest as institutions are, they do not get talked about much elsewhere. That has to stop.

More than anything else, there is sincerity of intent. The problem is that the systems are not all the same and not all connected. Some of them need refreshing.

The conclusion was that, as innovative as things are in Scotland, they are idiosyncratic. That needs to change. There is a focus on the individual’s deficit and the territory of institutions. There were cities where I saw three summer schools. It could have been wonderful, and they could have had young people meeting people who were different from them. It is unsystemic. It is an easy move from institution to systemic in planning terms, although of course it takes time.

There is a lack of portability in the system. I also think that our data is poor to inadequate. It is very hard to use because of the way it is organised, and that is a big issue that needs to be picked up soon.

Scotland also has untapped gifts. I am thinking of the Open University, where deputy headteachers were able to find units on philosophy for students from very difficult areas. They would present those to universities and get the credit for them. There is some smashing defiance in your institutions.

The strategic shift that Scotland needs to make is clear to me. It is from individual passions to institutional change. It is from institutions to a system in which they work together, with place as the focus of that. People working together and institutions working together are better at getting lots of bang for bucks.

I know that our report has a lot of recommendations, and I have explained why. They can be put into three very helpful categories. We talked about the leadership of the system change, including political leadership. We said that access is about learning—not about funding or cutting deals but about how you manage teaching, learning and assessment in institutions, so that they actually show the people for the talents they have. It is also about finding the places of leverage.

There were 34 recommendations. Not all of them are equal, in my view, but there are eight foundation recommendations, and I will say what they are. Recommendation 1 is on a commissioner for fair access and the leadership for the change; that has been taken care of.

Recommendation 2 is about the framework for fair access. If this is not about learning—if it is not about what is being taught and assessed and is portable—it is not going to work. Learning needs to be looked at and pruned and supported. Recommendation 3 is about funding being congruent with the framework for fair access. In time, we should not support work that is not leading anywhere for the learners.

Recommendation 11 is that there should be access thresholds that are ambitious and separate, because learners present from very different routes and have had very different opportunities. We are clear about that. We are very aware of the disputes on the issue but, nevertheless, the view of the commission was that they should go forward. The thresholds and contextual admissions are important, and that is why they need to be known, published and acted on.

We were delighted with the instant response from Government on a few of the recommendations, but particularly on the one on people with a care experience. The non-refundable bursary for care-experienced learners is crucial as well.

The targets need to be worked out in line with the development sense of the five-year plan.

All the other 26 recommendations have three intentions: to strengthen the work that needs to be done, to support the work that needs to be done, and to stretch the findings into all the institutions that are involved in access.

I know that we are going to talk about priorities going forward; I will leave that for my colleagues to contribute on. I hope that what I have said opens up for you some of our thinking during the 10 months—some of our ways of working and the things that we believed in. I am very happy to open up and take questions, along with my colleagues.

10:15  

Thank you very much. I am always delighted to hear somebody saying that they were really looking forward to coming before the committee.

I have a question that is based on comments that you made previously. It appears obvious to me that you were right when you said that it simply cannot be the case that the large majority of Scotland’s best talent happens to reside in our most affluent areas. What evidence is there to show that the bright pupils from depressed areas can do just as well as or better than their more affluent peers, even if their qualifications are not as good?

I do not have the references to hand but, according to the report from the Sutton Trust, some of the work that was done in Scotland shows that, when young people who come from a disadvantaged background, including disadvantaged school backgrounds, are treated, taught and assessed in the company of others on the same course, they do very well indeed. There is evidence, although there is not enough, and we need more of it. The sense of the five-year plan is to start to establish the basis for that.

My colleagues have questions about data and so on, but I have one further question on this point. Is there any evidence to indicate how much money is lost to the economy because we are not getting those people into university who could be benefiting the country by going there?

There is evidence from other places, certainly England, about the cost to the economy of young people not doing as well as they could. That relates to support systems, to how hard jobs are to find and to some of the other issues that young people face. In the 10 months that we had, we did not have enough time or staff to get under the skin of that issue.

I am sure that that is true.

However, there is evidence from other places.

Good morning. I wish to explore the issue of data. You were clear in the written information that we received on some of the ambitions behind the issues that you have flagged up for the commission. That includes a shared understanding of the barriers, which I think is extremely important. We have a list of eight barriers that have been suggested as key to the issue.

I am interested in the data supporting your findings in that regard and, on a broader issue, in how that data supports the decision by the Scottish Government to insist that universities will accept people from disadvantaged communities as 20 per cent of their intakes by 2030.

Could you say a little more about your concerns over data, which you highlighted in your introductory remarks and in your answer to the convener just now? The committee has sat through a lot of education evidence recently, particularly on the curriculum for excellence. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and lots of experts in Scotland raised the point that the data is not all that great. Without the good data that we need, it is difficult for the committee to make decisions about scrutiny or about what the policy should be. I am asking about that data problem. What is it that we are missing that would help you better to inform the committee and the wider public about what we should be doing?

The data generally suffers from the same disease, which is that it is not systemic. There is very good data for particular sectors, but it is in strands. For example, we were surprised to find that there was no way for everything to work together when it came to the exchange of data between the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council and inspectors in some local authorities, central bodies or parts of the civil service. People did not know about a lot of the data that other people had heard. Once we got people together, they worked well, but they had never had common cause to do that before.

I wish to ask about that. In your introductory remarks you said that you thought that some of the collection of data was poor. Is it that we do not have the available data to hand, or is it a question of communicating that data?

I think that it is both. Scotland has been through a febrile time of policy change in education. The early years data is now strengthening, and it is being established, but it does not go back far enough. There is a difference in the timescale, and in the concepts that are used behind it.

We were surprised. When the team and I were trying to find some information, we found that teams inside the Scottish funding council had the data. They had some regional data, and some of it was national. It is a question of taking the chance to develop an overarching framework where different sets of data can talk to one another.

By the way, this is not just Scotland’s problem. I sit on a group at the Royal Society that is looking at how we can bring things together now that we have super data and so on. It is a problem generally, in England and in other places. Change has happened, some data has not been produced and other data has been developed in different ways. I suggest that we look at that seriously. Institutions have their data and local authorities have theirs, to inform the reports that they have to make to politicians and to Government.

I can see that Professor Wend wants to come in, but may I first ask one more question? We have the commission’s excellent recommendations on what is an important issue. I do not think that there is any disagreement whatever with the principle of widening access, but there are disagreements about how it should happen. It is important that the data that underpins the decisions about what should happen is comprehensive, coherent, consistent and as valuable as it can be. Otherwise, we will be in danger of pursuing policies without the factual basis that we need, particularly from the scrutiny angle. Do you accept that?

I accept that. We had a specialist group look at the matter—it was a joint working party, with Universities Scotland, civil servants and some of our commissioners, which was chaired by an independent commissioner from the Sutton Trust. There are working parties in lots of places, and I think that they have moved things forward; I know that work has gone on since the commission on widening access finished its work. Some parts of the system have taken the matter up.

What is the timescale for that work being available?

May I bring something to the committee’s attention? The University of Glasgow and west of Scotland local authority partners published a report in December 2016, having drilled right down into all the data that is available from 2009 to 2015, on impact on access. The report is with the SFC just now and I recommend it to the committee. It is a good report.

Will that be published—

Yes, it is published.

I know that it has been published, because I have read it, but will it be more widely disseminated? This strikes at the heart of what Dame Ruth Silver said about how good data is sometimes out there but not necessarily available to all the people who need it, particularly in the context of this committee’s remit.

Another aspect of the data is the definition and interpretation of “deprivation”. Our report makes recommendations in relation to the Scottish index of multiple deprivation, with targets for 2030—and before that. We realised that SIMD is not the right way to measure deprivation, given that two out of three deprived children live in non-SIMD 20 areas. One of our recommendations is that a unique learner number should be allocated to every child, whereby we could follow the child’s progression through life and measure the success of our interventions in the long term. We are not there yet; we have not even started, so in the absence of that approach our targets were about SIMD.

We had a special session on deprivation and data in that context. For a long time, Universities Scotland has worked on a definition of “deprivation”, looking at a basket of measures. This is something that we need to take on, in the absence of any measurable way of looking at the issue other than SIMD.

Thank you.

I accept that SIMD is not the only measure, but did the commission not find that the concentration of deprivation in a community impacts on a school’s ability to deliver services? A young person who is learning in such a school, even if they are well supported, perhaps in a family that has a reasonable income, will face different pressures from those that they would face in a school in a non-SIMD area. It is not just about the individual child; deprivation in the communities in which children are learning has a cumulative effect on services.

I completely agree, but SIMD cannot be the only measure. There is a lot of deprivation in rural areas, which we need to look at, but such areas are not in SIMD 20. We are talking about a basket of measures, which includes SIMD. We need to take SIMD into account.

Do you accept that there is an impact on a school’s ability to support the young people who attend it, if the community is deprived, because there will be pressures on the school that do not arise in other areas? I accept your point about rurality and I think that other measures can be used in that context, but there is a specific issue to do with the learner journey, which is about the pressures on classes in the community. Do you accept that?

Yes.

You have touched on what I was going to ask about. I come from a rural constituency in the north-east of Scotland. The University of Aberdeen and Robert Gordon University have made recommendations to you in relation to the issue that we are discussing.

We visited them.

Yes. What has come out of the discussion about students who could qualify but are being missed because they are not in SIMD 20 areas? What criteria have you added to the mix in order to identify students who might be living in a street or a town that, on the surface, looks affluent but whose household faces issues? What have your findings been in that regard?

We looked at a basket of, I think, four or five measures. One of the factors concerned low-performing schools, because it is not always the case that low-performing schools are in SIMD 20 areas. I think that we also took free school meals into account. What else did we look at?

We looked at family histories of participation in higher education and the number of pupils that a school sent into higher education.

However, we did not conclude that that was the right basket of indicators. As Dame Ruth has said, the commission did not have the time to be able to say for sure which indicators were the best to use. There is still a lot of work to be done on that area, and there is a view—which has come through in evidence that you have heard today—that the role of the admissions officer is critical with regard to the question of what a contextualised admission would be.

There is a tension around the institution-based approach, the systemic approach and the need to consider people’s individual circumstances. You are right to say that the rural dimension is important. Young people and families who live in a rural area might face deprivation and challenges. It is the school that would know that information, so we need to ask how the school can get that information to the admissions officer and how the admissions officer can have the time to sift through the plethora of information that comes in. That is where we need to get better at getting a systemic approach. However, at the same time, we must not forget that we need to ensure that notice is taken of each and every young person who has potential—that is the fairness element that has come out of the commission’s work.

With regard to the universities that I mentioned, it might be the case that the University of Aberdeen, for example, might look like it is not hitting the targets because it has individual students—hidden students, if you will—who are not identified as being from SIMD 20 areas.

I completely agree with you. One of our three workstreams is on admissions. We are particularly looking at contextualised admissions and the various criteria that we want to use in that regard. We want to agree on the framework for that across all universities, so we will do more work on that.

It is important to state that SIMD was not designed to help universities choose young people; it is a measure that was designed with another intention in mind. It is being used elsewhere. More than anything else, it is a monitoring measure. That is why we badly need to do work on contextualised admissions. The examples that we have given you are simply hypotheses. The work needs to start. The working groups that have been set up are self-authorising, in a way. I am delighted about that, because that is exactly the spirit that we need. Both groups have decided that they will crack on with work while other things are happening. There needs to be leadership and there needs to be a focus on learning, and SIMD is not about learning.

Tavish Scott, do you have a question?

My question has been asked.

The Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee discussed SIMD when we considered the Auditor General’s report. Following that, I had discussions with the University of Aberdeen and Robert Gordon University. It came through in those discussions that, if we are to increase demand and have more home-grown students going to university, there will be fiercer competition because of the current funding settlement for universities and the cap on places for Scottish students. Some concern was expressed to me that we could displace able students. How do we avoid doing that?

10:30  

That issue was discussed at the commission and we decided that it was not up to us to make recommendations about whether student numbers should be capped but that it was up to the Scottish Government to react to our recommendations.

It is arguable whether displacement is taking place but it is clear that, if we want to have 20 per cent of SIMD 20 students in university by 2030, that means that some students who would get in now might not get in. The question of whether that is fair is a different matter; somebody who would get in now with particular grades might show less potential than a student who would not get in now but would succeed.

It is not right to say that we need 20 per cent more places for that—that does not quite work. However, there is a danger that some students might be squeezed out and it might be the ones who are just about getting into university—the squeezed middle, so to speak—so we need to consider that carefully in all three of our workstreams in Universities Scotland. We have already addressed it. The three leaders of the workstreams meet regularly to consider it but all that we can do is work in the environment within which we are working and do our best.

I am independent now because I stood down the day after we launched the report, so I can say that there is displacement now of bright young people who do not have the right badges through no fault of their own. In the four nations, Scotland has the highest percentage of advantaged young people going to university.

To stick to the conversation that we are having about SIMD, there is an area of high deprivation in the area that I represent. For me, the issue is still an attitudinal one—I do not know whether you detected that when you were considering the matter. I was lucky enough to go to university when I finished school and, like a few of the friends who I went with, I was the first in my family to go. However, going around schools in the area, I still feel that there is a consensus among a lot of young people that university is not for them and they would not be able to go to university, so there is a societal and attitudinal issue.

When you were investigating the circumstances, what exactly did you find that prevented people in SIMD areas or other areas from going to university? For example, how is welfare reform impacting?

You are spot on with that. The attitude is a big problem. Robert Gordon University has a fabulous set up in which it has a pre-freshers scheme. All of the problems are cracked in some place or another in Scotland.

The attitude that you describe is about not only getting into university but staying there and the jobs for which people apply when they leave. It goes on and can be a lifelong burden if we are not careful. It definitely exists. The young people who have broken through and tackled it have done so with support—support for learners as well as support for learning—but we are very aware of the issue.

I did a couple of the summer schools—I went along as a summer school learner and sat in on some of the teaching. People said that those learners would not go to summer schools because they need to work and do not have money. However, they went to summer schools and worked hard at weekends. They mentored one another on how to have more confidence—“how not to be put down by the posh ones” is how one of the young women described it.

The attitudinal issue is a big problem and is really palpable. I have always worked in areas of deprivation and access is my speciality and I noted instantly how hard it was for the young people to see themselves in the positions that we are talking about. However, work is going on in early years, for example, to address it. You can walk into an early years classroom and the teddy bear on the desk is sitting there in a gown and mortar board. Work to take on some of the issues is reaching back down the system, because the problem is a big one even when somebody has the qualifications.

To go back to what Professor Wend said, we have not mentioned the role of colleges. I do not particularly agree with the displacement idea, because there is always a place. What is the role of colleges in higher education? Colleges provide that, of course, and a route to university for people.

One of the workstreams that we are leading on in Universities Scotland is on articulation. Obviously, colleges play a big role in that, and universities and colleges in Scotland can improve on that. We need to be mindful that the courses that are taught in colleges are not only feeder programmes for universities, and we need to find the right framework for that. Those who are able to go to university should do so, and they should be encouraged to do so, but we need closer working relationships between colleges in Scotland to look at curriculums so that they fit, as we do not want the articulation students to fail once they get into university because the curriculums are not matched. We are looking at that very closely in one of our three workstreams.

Colleges play a huge role in higher education, but we must not forget that they also offer skills and prepare people for work. They do not just provide feeder courses for universities.

My background is in further education—I have been a college principal—and I greatly admire the concept of articulation. Some of the work that I have seen is splendid.

Scotland is on the cusp of a risk in how it sees articulation. Members will know that access has been widened in Scotland through its college system much more than through its university system. Let us be clear about that. That is wonderful, and I brag about it in England, but there is something really wrong at the engagement end. We found young and older people doing the same level twice. They moved from college to university, but crossed over to the same level; there was no progression. That was for very good reasons—the modules did not fit, or they needed a specialism—and that is why we have the framework for access.

On the whole, articulation is not portable. What a person does to get into one university is not nationally portable; there will be an agreement or compact between institutions. Nevertheless, it is a fabulous way of working, and it has worked for Scotland. However, the approach is on the cusp of the risk that it will be seen as second class, not portable, costing more money and involving people wasting money doing things on the same level. That should not happen; it is not right.

You mentioned variation in the country. Are there examples of very good practice in which colleges and universities have arrangements that absolutely gel?

Yes. There are examples of university lecturers working with college lecturers on the same programme with the same students, so people cannot tell the difference. In other cases, they do not see one another.

This is a bit broad brush and general, but did you find that there was any difference at all between young people who had intended to go to university or college for a long time—possibly all their life or for a good few years before university or college—and young people who got to the age of 15, 16 or 17 and realised that they needed to do something but had maybe not thought about going to college or university because their life until then had been taken up with dealing with parental, mental health, alcohol or drug abuse issues, being a young carer or living in dire poverty? Did you detect a difference between those two broad groups of people?

I will ask Maureen McKenna to comment on that, as she runs Glasgow’s schools.

The commission did not look at that level of detail, but I will draw on my experience in Glasgow. We work incredibly hard with our partner universities and colleges to pull experiences further down the school, so that young people do not get to the age of 15 and suddenly think, “Gee, I don’t really know about college or university.” We have an incredibly wide range of initiatives on the go. One issue for me is that there are too many initiatives—there is overlap—and we are battling over the same group of young people.

In order to get best value, we need to streamline, which goes back to Dame Ruth’s point about access being institutionally based. The University of Glasgow runs its summer school for young people going there and the University of Strathclyde does the same, so why is there not one summer school that gives young people access to any university in Scotland?

There are little things like that, but access work is also about the importance of having young people, and children—going right back, from the early years on—exposed to that broader range of experiences, with their parents too. For example, we work with Glasgow Caledonian University, which runs its Caledonian club in learning communities, working with children aged three to 18—so all the way through—with a wide variety of experiences to make going to university normal. Actually, its work is about learning—it does not have to be about that particular university; it is about showing that education makes a difference to people’s lives and how important that is.

Family learning, which is being pushed just now in a whole range of places, is very important, but the families need to get qualifications. It is not just about saying, “Come and learn how to read together with your child”; that has a place, but if we really want to make a systemic difference, we need to encourage our families.

There is research evidence to show that a young person’s potential correlates strongly with the mother’s qualifications. Using that as a baseline, we can say that we need to have families who are qualified, and that means that we need to be more flexible about entry. A lot of the talk is about schools—and rightly, because that is the bulk of what we are talking about—but we also have young parents who, for a whole range of reasons, have had to move out of education. Do we provide enough pathways to bring them back in? Does the way that we fund our college sector and our universities enable fair access for people whose pathways might take them a little bit longer? We have taken steps around the care experience, but this is tricky territory; it is about individual people and the experiences that they bring, so it is not easy.

You will have to forgive me for asking this, but are we obsessed with universities? Are they the be-all and end-all of life in Scotland?

Petra is. [Laughter.]

I find myself in the position of bragging about Scotland in England, but I really have to say different things up here. Absolutely. I grew up in Lanarkshire and stayed there a bit when I was here. I used to love going into Glasgow on the train in the mornings, because I would hear young people having a debate about the current issues: “Shall I go to this university, because I get an extra year and I get work experience, or shall I go there?” I do not hear those conversations on the tube in London.

The debate is there, and it is to our credit that people value education so highly—and less here because it is a route to work. That will change but, certainly in my experience, education is valued here as being a good thing in its own right. The evidence is, of course, that more people here go on to university than in the other three United Kingdom nations.

Is that a good thing?

Yes—I will nail my colours to the mast. Yes, I think that it is.

Of course it is—but, actually, what is offered in Scotland is different from what is offered in England. There are other things going on there as well. I could talk a lot about this, but one of the strengths in your system is the college system. Higher education and higher-level skills in Scotland are stronger than they are in other parts of the country. That is because people in Scotland want to have jobs, and that approach has always been there.

To be honest, I was not so worried about England; I was more worried about being part of a parliamentary committee 15 years ago that wrote reports about parity of esteem between vocational routes into economic life and university education. You have rather confirmed that we have not made any progress on that in 15 years—or have we?

Me too, but I wonder whether we were chasing the right thing. I have become much more addicted to the concept of parity of outcome than to parity of esteem. We cannot dictate esteem, but we can actually measure, monitor and target outcomes, so I think that parity of outcome is the test of access.

For me, access has to be seen very much from the child’s or person’s perspective. They need to have options available to them, so barriers to whatever the right outcome for them is need to be removed.

As an example, we could look at the academies programme that Queen Margaret University is running, which is a two-year programme that is taught jointly with schools, colleges, universities and employers. After one year, children can decide whether they want to stay in school, go to college or do two more years and then go to university. Coming back to the previous question about aspirations, I think that widening access is not about saying that university is the be-all and end-all but about removing barriers in order to make it a possibility and ensuring that children know that it is a possibility. In the same vein, the aim of the children’s university that we are running in Scotland is to get children and their parents and carers into the university to show them that going there might be one of the options, not what they should be doing.

10:45  

I lead on the bridging programmes for Scotland; I note that the commission’s report talks mainly about summer schools, but I want to widen that to consider all kinds of bridging programmes. What they all have in common is that university is an option and that children and parents are well informed on what the possibilities are for them. The children’s university might well be part of that, as it goes back to the young five to 14 age group and seeks to raise aspirations.

In response to the original question, I note that the four universities in Edinburgh have already got together to look at the raising aspirations programme, so that we do not overburden schools with programmes from all sides that say, “Come to us and we’ll help you get into university.” We want a coherent programme that gives schools an easier choice.

I seek confirmation of Professor Wend’s interesting comment that two out of three young people live in areas that we would not consider to be deprived. That seems a high proportion.

Two out of three are deprived but do not live in a deprived area.

So two out of three are deprived but do not live in a deprived area. Where did that figure come from?

I do not know—it is part of research that we have done as part of research that Universities Scotland undertook to work out the basket of measures for deprivation.

I have not seen that figure before, so I am quite interested in it.

I will dig it out and send it to you.

That would be perfect. Do you know what proportion is rural?

No. I am sure that we do, but I do not have that information here. I can send it to the convener.

Excellent.

Obviously targeting is quite important. As has been discussed around the table this morning, the suggestion is that SIMD data is not as accurate as it should be. It has also been suggested that we complement that data with information from other sources. One example that has been given is data on parental occupation, but that seems to me to be very dodgy, as it smacks a bit of elitism. There are not many stockbrokers in my constituency, but there are lots of very well-off plumbers, joiners and electricians. How would you take that sort of approach?

We have looked at that in our admissions group, but we are still very uncertain about it. We need to come up with a framework that is understood by not only us but—and this is most important—the potential students, the teachers and the parents and carers. That is part of the problem; although we already work with contextualised admissions, even universities do not quite understand what other universities are doing. If we do not understand that, how can potential students understand it? That is our aim.

That comes back to our recommendation that contextual admissions be published and known to parents and schools. That sort of thing does not happen at the moment.

I could see you picking out parents who are unemployed, for example, but there is a huge chunk of working poor out there, who are just making ends meet and are bumping along at the very bottom. How do you pick them up?

It will not be easy.

But is it possible?

I think so, but it is a mistake to look for one factor in that way. We need a system of factors to give us the texture of the young or older person who is applying to university. The issue is the combination of those factors.

But each factor has to be robust, or you will not get the desired result.

Absolutely, and it will be part of the phase of exploration in all of this. In the end, however, the issue is compound disadvantage.

Moreover, you cannot be completely mechanistic, because every person is different. You cannot say, “This person is a plumber, so they can take this.” That would be impossible. Instead, we need to have interviews, get to know the person and so on. The process will be very time consuming, but we need a more individualised approach.

However, if we are looking for something that can be put in place across the country, an individualised approach becomes quite difficult.

Yes.

I suppose that you are talking about a situation in which the person fills in the application form and that is the first time that the universities get to see them. We are talking about a range of programmes with the universities, such as the work that Queen Margaret University does with its schools, so that the universities get to know the young people from a younger age and the young people get to know the universities. In that way, contextualisation begins to come from points of knowledge. That approach improves the knowledge of the young person and their family, but it also improves the university’s knowledge of the young person and enables the contextualisation to be more robust.

It will never be a case of saying, “If you’re in that category, it will get you in and if you’re not, you will not get in.” I return to the point about the need to consider the difference, or the tension, between the systemic approach that is needed in order to get better value from what we deliver and the individual. That requires people in schools to have better connections with and knowledge of universities and, equally, people in universities.

In Glasgow, we phone up admissions officers and engage in conversations on individual cases. Sometimes that results in the young person getting in and sometimes it does not but, on each side, we have learned more so that, next time, we know more about how we can contextualise and get the right qualifications and experiences for the young person to enable them to succeed.

One of the phrases that we used a lot in the commission was “building ladders down” into communities, schools and so on. We saw an example at the University of Glasgow, where students who had been contacted earlier through the schools and had participated in pre-university programmes were on a management information system that identified them, so that, when they came into the university, they could be targeted, particularly for deficits in their background, but it looked ordinary. For example, the university would send flyers to young people from a school where there had been a problem with maths teaching to offer them extra maths stuff, but it looked to the students as if everybody was getting the leaflet. That is a delicate and sensitive way of handling young people both before and when they come in.

As I said, access is not just about getting in; it is also about staying in and moving on from that—it is about access, success and then progress. Students need to have success in the middle, and that means people working together.

Another suggestion that has been made in terms of complementing SIMD data is level of education, but surely that is already picked up through contextualised admissions. How would that feed in when it is already there?

Could you rephrase your question? That is not part of the basket of measures.

There is a suggestion that SIMD data should be complemented by a number of other sources. For example, parental occupation was thrown out as one thing, and level of education is another. However, I look at contextualised admissions and think, “Isn’t that already being taken into account by the universities?”

We wonder whether that is the parents’ level of education and not the individual’s.

I am talking about the youngster’s level of education. Somebody who comes from school with a deprived background who is achieving less than someone from a better background could nevertheless be deemed to have done better simply because of the background that they come from.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Universities are already taking all of that into account, but we do not do it in a systemic way across Scotland and it is not very clear which university does what and how. At Queen Margaret University, we have Universities and Colleges Admissions Service entry points, but we admit students who do not fulfil those because we are looking at the overall person. Every university is already engaged in that, but it is not very clear or obvious to the children, parents, teachers and so on how we are all doing it. We need to become clearer about that and there needs to be a clearer framework across Scotland.

I have a final question. How do colleges fit into this? There is articulation and so on, but how do colleges fit into the SIMD work, the identification of teachers and so on?

In Scotland, you have the advantage of having regionalised your colleges in governance terms. You now have regional boards that know what is going on in the area that they lead to, and that is an enormous help. They are key in the ladder of access because they are focused on place—I think that I mentioned that as one of the key components—in relation to both learners and opportunities for work and study.

My favourite description of colleges is that we are the mezzanine floor in the education system. We are not protected by the law, because we are not compulsory; and we are not protected by the Queen, because we do not have royal charter status. The changes that go on in colleges are therefore absolutely in the moment.

Before going on to Johann Lamont, I remind members that supplementary questions should be supplementary to a question that has been asked and that members should make sure that their supplementary is relevant to the question that has just been asked or the answer that has just been given. We still have a lot to get through and we have another panel after this, so I ask for questions and answers to be as short as possible.

I will not take it personally that you have said that just before I come in.

I assure you that it is pure coincidence.

I am interested in what has been said about the evidence for the benefits of college regionalisation, because I have not seen that on the ground. If the issue is not parity of esteem but parity of outcome, do you have a view on parity of resources? We have seen funding for the college sector cut and disproportionate cuts to the number of part-time places in colleges, which mean that young parents with caring responsibilities, for example, cannot do college courses. I do not know whether you have looked at that in your work.

Not only did I look at it, but I lived my life in similar circumstances. I do have views; this is what happens when an area is not protected by the law or the Queen. It is the place that, on the whole, politicians turn to first to bring about change. The budget is not protected, and not having protection makes great big holes in the stepped approach to widening access.

I will say a bit about regionalisation. I think that I first met you when I did the curriculum review for the Glasgow colleges, when we looked at every course in every college and looked at—this is my favourite phrase—curriculum intention and found overlap and so on. The gain is in that; it is not just in governance but in working together to ensure that resources are being employed and deployed usefully. That is not about colleges doing the same courses as each other but about ensuring that there is progression within institutions. It is early days, because regionalisation is a revolution.

With respect, my observation is that in the community where I taught, the outreach work that colleges did no longer happens. Young people in some areas will not travel, so having a quality institution that is near them encourages them and draws them in. I have grave reservations about the college sector’s capacity to provide second-chance learning when we in the school system fail learners. There is a big question about that, but perhaps that is an issue for a different inquiry.

I completely share your concern; it is a disaster waiting to happen. However, that is policy led and funding led.

It is not my policy and not my Government. Given that we are looking at access and fairness and given that your report says that colleges are important, we have to look at how the college sector has suffered.

I am interested to know what you looked at in terms of our schools. Did you look at the disproportionate disadvantage, even within disadvantage, whereby boys are less likely to do well than girls are? That is not just about income. There is also an issue about ethnicity and opportunity. Did you look at drop-out rates at school level? Many young people do not get even to compete—they do not get the opportunity even to be denied a place at university, because they are no longer in school.

Absolutely. We did not have much time to look at that, but we know that it is a really big issue. We looked at solutions, so we looked at some of the programmes in the Glasgow schools and at what is being done to compensate for the disadvantage. There is a squeezed middle in terms of not just individuals but institutions. The college sector has found clever ways of still working with young people, which is to the credit of its creativity and its good links with education authorities and employers, but that is not systematic.

If there are cuts to school budgets, they often come to the bits of the system that support young people to stay in school—there are such programmes all over the place. That in itself is, in effect, a barrier to a young person learning.

It is, and it is a growing barrier.

In your recommendations, have you addressed the importance of the soft supports to draw young people into school?

We talked a lot about the importance of learning support. The heart of the matter that you raise is not for the commission to discuss; it concerns Government policies on funding and resources, which we decided not to talk about.

Is there a contradiction in being asked by the Government to address fair access and not commenting on some of the issues that may be creating the concerns?

11:00  

We certainly commented on those issues, but we did not make recommendations on them.

We made recommendations that talk about a holistic approach, because we cannot talk about admissions without talking about schools and colleges. That is why we recommended a commissioner for fair access, who might have the oversight to make recommendations to the Scottish Government on schools, colleges and universities. We had not only schools, employers and colleges represented, but early years providers; we could see that access is a question from the cradle to the grave. That is why we made the concrete recommendation that there must be a holistic approach. The commission was about widening access to universities, and the practical recommendations had to concern universities—that was our remit.

Dame Ruth Silver mentioned compound disadvantage. Will you lay out the findings in the report in relation to young people with additional support needs? Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are proportionately far more likely to have additional support needs. If those needs go unsupported, they act as a multiplier to the existing disadvantage. I have heard plenty of anecdotal evidence of young people with ASN not being directed towards even making an application in the first place. What did you find in relation to ASN?

The situation is exactly as you describe. One of the successes that we found—I will talk about that because we were an appreciative inquiry—occurred when the receiving end of the progression did the learning support. Support from a pre-fresher summer programme made matters become more real and boosted motivation. Young people and mentors from the university—people who had graduated—who worked with the young people saw the next stage of what the young people could become.

There is no way that we can achieve access without learning support. There is such a lot of catch-up; this is compensatory education in its truest sense. That has to be in the hands of the right people. What I saw in Scotland was compensatory education in terms of learning support all the way—it was not done by institutions working alone; there were volunteers in the community, all sorts of employer projects, and school and university staff working differently. That is crucial, because we must not widen participation to further failure.

In the interests of time, I will ask just one question. Convener, will you allow me to explain it?

I will, if it is one question.

We have talked a lot about articulation, which is important. However, in my discussions with the people who run the engineering academy at the University of Strathclyde, I have been told that a lot of wraparound work is done before students join and once they have done so.

I bear in mind what Dame Ruth Silver said about making sure that college qualifications and other routes to university are not just routes to university. Making articulation work requires a lot more than just routes to university; support is required for students before and after they articulate. Do you agree with that sentiment? What investment and support need to be put in place to make articulation work properly—from colleges and from other potential routes, such as apprenticeships and the wider skills sector?

The origins of articulation are in vocational and technical scientific training. Lots of the students we spoke to had no wish to go any further than getting the college part of the qualifications, but others did, and others came back later. The notion of portability is not just about location; it is also about time. Running a curriculum such as that is really complicated. I like the wide base and the vocational focus. A famous Scottish report from years ago—the Brunswick report from way back in time—talked about the importance of a vocational focus in widening access.

We looked at why articulation is great in some places and not so good in others. There was one attempt at articulation in an arts subject area, but that did not work quite so well. Like the access work, that has grown and grown, but there has not been the chance to reflect on and refine it. There are different streams to that, as some people go on to do higher education qualifications later.

There is a lovely mezzanine floor; it is a lovely pausing point to revisit the intention of learners. Some of them change their mind and try work. We met some young people who had started a two-plus-two course in a college and gone on to university. However, they did not like university, so they went back to college. The college found a way of working with the university and with the Open University so that those students could qualify. Modular qualifications are a great answer, but they are complicated to get to.

I mentioned underused assets in Scotland. I remember saying to the Open University, “You should be ashamed—you are so modest, yet you are doing fabulous things for young people.” I have seen degrees being done in Glasgow with the qualification system of the Scottish credit and qualifications framework. That is what I meant by it all being there in Scotland—it just has to be harvested, pruned and farmed in a wide way.

The committee has done a lot of work in looking at the Scottish Qualifications Authority and Education Scotland. As part of that, we looked at the interaction between ministers and the agencies. Johann Lamont has previously asked questions about whether, when policy has not achieved the right outcome, that has been challenged. Today, Liz Smith asked questions about ensuring that data is there for decision making and asked about how we got to the 20 per cent figure and how we will achieve that. There was discussion about SIMD not really being the right measure, so perhaps we need something that is more sophisticated. Dame Ruth Silver, as the commissioner, are you able to challenge the Government and will you do so?

I am not the commissioner.

Apologies.

I was stood down. The commissioner is sitting behind me in the public gallery waiting to come on.

On the leadership of the system, the system involves the Government as well—it is not outside the system and it has an important role. If I were the commissioner, I would absolutely challenge the Government, but you can ask him in a minute.

I will.

I am interested in contextualised entry and access thresholds, and you have indicated that that is pretty complex and that such decisions are difficult. You said that there was lots of evidence that Scotland is already doing many good things but that the work is not joined up and not universal across the system. Do you believe that decisions about contextualised entry—particularly when that comes to access thresholds, which are a specialised part of that—are a matter for individual university departments or that there should be intervention from the Government?

In universities, we are trying to lead on making the right recommendations. We are in regular contact with Sir Peter Scott about that to ensure that we work not only in parallel but constructively together. Universities Scotland has started a workstream on that. I am sure that we will not come up with one access threshold for each subject; the approach needs to be more sophisticated than that, because universities are different. We will come up with a framework that will be easy to understand and far more accessible.

You are all supporters of the autonomy of the system and I know that the commissioner has a long record of that. In that context, should the decisions, which appear to work well in some universities, rest with the individual institutions and their departments, which have different demand and supply levels and different conditions?

Universities are autonomous and we continue to defend that. As lead persons on the three workstreams, we have made it clear that we do not want to come up with a narrative that pleases just the commissioner, the Scottish Government or others; instead, we want to come up with something that universities really want to embrace and do. We believe in that fiercely, and it is something that we as the three chairs of the programmes have already agreed.

The report talks about trusting the professionals and letting them deliver in the first five-year phase. I have already claimed that Scotland knows how to do this; let us see what the professionals come up with and what it looks like in five years’ time.

My clear view is that this is doable. Of course it will all need to be looked at in order to make things ready for the next five years, but we need to give those people—after all, they are the professionals—the space to do the work. Given that any two courses will have different entry requirements depending on subjects and levels, we need some professional intricacy to be present as well as being observable, published and scrutinised.

Does Tavish Scott have a supplementary?

My question is on a different issue.

In that case, I will let Gillian Martin in first with a question on carers.

You have referred to recommendations on people who are care experienced, but I note that young carers have issues, too. Did you have any dialogue with young carers and their families?

Yes—we had dialogue with young carers, too. To go back to Universities Scotland’s three workstreams, I should point out that we are looking at every aspect and do not want to limit ourselves to the groups that are described in the commission’s report. We want to look at part-timers, adult learners and carers—that is all part of our work.

Recommendation 17 refers to Skills Development Scotland and schools working together. It says:

“SDS and schools should”

assist

“learners at key transition phases throughout their education.”

I guess that you made that recommendation because you had concerns about what is happening between SDS and schools. Would it be possible for you to elaborate on your concerns?

I am happy to take that question. We took some of our evidence from work that was done by the commission on developing Scotland’s young workforce, which, as you know, made recommendations on careers advice and guidance and on SDS working further down the school. Evidence that we received endorsed that recommendation, but it also suggested that such advice should not remain just within the school but stretch into the college or university.

To go back to the discussion that we just had about different entries, I think that data is needed on skills shortages and employment areas, which then needs to be fed into the university system through SDS and the various organisations, to ensure that we have the pipelines coming through. That might mean having to alter entry thresholds at various times.

Our recommendation was really about saying that SDS and its careers advice and guidance have to go much further down the school, in recognition of the fact that learners from disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular, need such interventions much earlier. In that respect, I point out that we talked not about SIMD but about learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. To throw in my own comment, I think that SIMD is a reasonable metric and should not be discounted. It is a basket of indicators, but the fact is that no statistic is perfect. Looking for one particular measure that has the answer for everything will be a lost cause.

That is not the issue for me. I am interested in whether Skills Development Scotland is flexible enough to meet your recommendation as I read it. Do you think that it is?

From a Glasgow perspective, my answer is no, although it tries its best.

Do you suggest that we keep an eye on that recommendation, given that the area is important?

I certainly do.

That is helpful—thank you.

We have come to the end of the evidence-taking session. I thank the witnesses for their time and the very useful information that they have given. It was nice to meet you all.

I suspend the meeting for a couple of minutes to allow the panels to change over.

11:14 Meeting suspended.  

11:20 On resuming—