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Professor Cardwell, I am conscious that everybody I have spoken to who did a year’s exchange described it as the best year that they had at university or of their academic career. How can we best demonstrate the benefits of that?

I have a minor question. Again, I am arguing against myself, but I am that kind of fair-minded person. It is on the point that Professor Cardwell made about the fact that people who have been on exchanges—I do not want to put words in your mouth—tend to achieve better grades or better outcomes in their degrees.

Is it not also the case—I genuinely do not know the answer to this—that, in order to qualify for many of the schemes, a person has to have passed all their exams that year? They cannot do a resit because they will be away at the new institution, or something like that. Does the person need to have achieved some other standard? Does a self-selecting group tend to do exchanges?

I presume that the idea is to move at pace. It seems to me that, for your self-interest, it is extremely important that the Funding Council, the Government, this committee and others have a clear idea of what is happening and what benefits are being produced. In my area, one college is steadily withdrawing from a council area that has one of the highest levels of deprivation—Andy Witty mentioned it earlier—so the benefit to that area is reducing over time.

When I had responsibility for colleges 15 years ago, the need for parity of esteem for the college sector was the big rallying cry, and that had some effect. However, parity of esteem is served when the benefits can be demonstrated, so there must be clear and accurate figures. The SFC says that it is not its business to talk about outcomes for individuals—I do not know why that is the case—but surely it is in your interest to make sure that clear information is gathered at pace.

On the Funding Council point that Willie Rennie has just raised, I say that nearly every comment that you have made—and, in fact, all the comments in the committee’s previous report—relate to funding. Most of us in this committee are on other committees, where we get a pretty constant parade of organisations that say that they want more funding and that are convinced that they are the ones that are treated the worst, but very few acknowledge the constraints that the Scottish Government is under—we have had 14 years of constraint on public sector budgets. However, that is just a thing of mine.

I come back to what the Scottish Government is responsible for and to the Funding Council. Earlier, you mentioned the disparity between the £4,000 that is spent on a college student and the £7,000 or so that is spent on an undergraduate student. In my experience, the year that I had at one of the Edinburgh colleges was the best with regard to educational attainment—it was better than university. Is it your view that the Funding Council has an institutional bias in favour of higher education as opposed to further education?

Audrey Cumberford talked about the nature of the courses that people are interested in having an impact. Has the sector made an assessment of the effectiveness of the SFC’s new outcomes framework and assurance model since its introduction? I was not on the committee when the report was put together, but I know that having data is very important. If people do not have a grip on the matter and the SFC is reluctant to provide particular matrices for people going through the system, that is an issue. Has the sector as a whole looked at the model? If so, what does it make of it?

Does anyone else want to go further with regard to the Funding Council? Any additional money will have to come from somewhere. Is there an institutional bias in favour of higher education at the expense of further education?

Having consulted the standards clerks, I have no interests to declare, but I advise the committee that my daughter is a full-time primary school teacher, working for Aberdeen City Council.

We all feel like that from time to time.

I know that we are stuck for time, so I will ask two quick questions.

There has been a lot of discussion about engagement. The vast bulk of education is delivered through local authorities. I am aware of one local authority that appointed a pupil from each of its secondary schools to its statutory education committee. It tried to give them full voting rights, but it was not allowed to do so by law. Have you heard of any other councils doing that? Would it be a good idea?

My other question relates to the social media situation. I have not, unlike Willie Rennie, had lots of complaints about violence in schools in my constituency. I have had a lot to do with additional support needs and individual parents. However, I had two secondary 3 classes from Dunblane in Parliament recently, on the same day that the convener was asking questions about behaviour in schools.

I asked the two teachers about their experience, and they said that one of the most alarming things was the increase in misogyny. I was interested to hear somebody talk about misogyny becoming a hate crime, which I think is the Government’s intention. In particular, those teachers mentioned young men seeing Andrew Tate and repeating the stuff that he says.

Is that your experience, Beinn? I ask you first of all because you are a young man. Have the others had the same experience? Those teachers were just stunned by some of the stuff that was being said. It is like we are going backwards rather than forwards.