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I will perhaps bring in Nora Senior, as well, off the back of this question. The success rates, as I have qualified them, of large colleges range from 52.7 to 73.6 per cent, and those of small colleges range from 59.7 to 70.4 per cent. There is a lower floor in larger colleges. I recognised one statistic; there will be a wealth of other things that we could look at, but the statistics seem to indicate that the direction of travel in recent years, in respect of the outcomes, is that there is a pretty significant gap of 7 per cent in young people getting qualifications to help them to advance in their lives, and the floor is a lot lower in the larger colleges. There seems to be a greater propensity for people not to achieve. Do you recognise that?

Does Nora Senior have any comments on that?

Nora, do you have anything to add?

It is FE, from which 61.3 per cent of people left with the qualifications that they started out to achieve and a further 11 per cent did not achieve the qualifications that they desired when they started their courses. It is about who is being recruited and who is completing courses.

In the light of the written evidence that has been submitted, I worry about the fact that although we talk a lot about coherence and about how different parts of the tertiary sector work together, we have an Audit Scotland report that discusses the issues that Nora Senior has mentioned and which is utterly damning of the Government’s approach and the complete lack of leadership on skills alignment. As well as the Cumberford-Little report and “The Scottish College of the Future” report, we have the Scottish Funding Council review of coherent provision and sustainability. In addition, we have a team in the Scottish Government, which has swollen to more than 20 civil servants, that is desperately seeking an idea about what to do.

I am looking for an insight, convener. People have said to me that there is real frustration. They see those developments going on in different places and they wonder whether the policy making is coherent.

My questions follow some of Mr Dey’s. I am trying to evaluate the idea of regionalisation and what the next steps are, and I am keen to focus on outcomes for young people. A lot of the evidence that we have had is about inputs, such as the number of young people attending universities. In 2020-21, the successful completion rate in Scotland was 61.3 per cent, whereas the roughly comparable figure in England was 89 per cent. Why does that gap exist?

I take on board your point that it is difficult to find an exactly comparable figure, because the systems in England and Scotland are different, but it still seems to me to be a pretty stark gap in outcomes. The most equivalent figure that I could find in England was that 89 per cent of young people come out the other side with a qualification. You talked about the Scottish situation, but is there more that we can learn from models elsewhere? We are in a process of reform, so is there more that we could do to try to achieve better outcomes?

I think that the horse has bolted on multiyear funding. The assumption was that we would see something about it in the spending review yesterday, but that only goes down to level 2, which means that colleges do not know how much funding they will have in the coming years. Are you renewing those calls today?

Yes, I will, convener. We also have a team at the SFC that appears to be working up an alternative piece. Does anybody have any idea whether the SFC and the Scottish Government are working together on the same blueprint for the future or whether they are developing completely different plans? There seem to be a lot of plans. Do you have any idea whether the people involved are talking to one another?