Seòmar agus comataidhean

I do not necessarily accept the premise of some of what you have said, but I respect the convener’s point about time. The universities have asked us to look at whether the SFC can provide a similar degree of flexibility. I do not think that that is an entirely unreasonable ask. A conversation has already started with the universities, which was brought about by a helpful suggestion from an individual principal. I urge caution, though. If a university has a substantial potential sum to be recovered and we do not bring some of that money back into the system, it limits the ability of the SFC to act flexibly and respond to individual asks. There is a balance to be struck. Given our relationship with the university sector and the open discussions that we have, I am not going to sit here today and rule that out, but there are limitations to what the SFC can do.

The additional support that was provided to the institutions was for a fixed three-year period. However, we recognised that there was a period, as they moved into the implementation of the student mental health action plan, when they would have to evolve their offering. We provided a further year of funding, but that has now ended. I have had conversations with individual colleges and universities and they recognise that that was going to happen and have prepared for it. However, that is not to say that they do not face significant challenges in supporting students. Of course, that is a problem across society with mental health. Universities Scotland or Colleges Scotland have not said to the Government or the SFC that there is a real crisis and that they need more money, for example. They have coped with that. I pay tribute to them, because the challenges on the ground, at the coalface, in individual institutions can be quite significant for the staff who are dealing with the situation. However, that is where we are.

Colleges are provided with additional discretionary funds for student support, which they can utilise in ways that they see fit. You make a very good point. I should have said that a large proportion of the original funding for mental health counsellors came from the health budget, if memory serves.

I hold my hands up, because I delayed the student mental health action plan. I was not happy that the right balance had been struck, in the original proposal, on whether the NHS, local boards and health and social care partnerships would take equal responsibility in that space. What we think that we have arrived at, working with both sectors, is an approach that requires the health boards and health and social care partnerships to take co-ownership of addressing the needs of those students.

We will obviously monitor how that works in practice; I am hopeful that it will work. We are all over this area—we have a stakeholder board that is monitoring it, and I look forward to its first report on how it sees that the area is being progressed. I accept that student mental health is not an easy subject, and we need to recognise the pressures that all our institutions, and our schools, face in dealing with it.

In Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, there is an existing data-sharing protocol that does not exist in other localities. We are exploring what we could do in the short term to get around that in order to assist our universities—but there is also the longer-term piece to consider.

I am looking forward to the meeting next week. It was partly instigated by conversation with a member of the Opposition in Parliament who represents an island community—one of your colleagues, Mr Rennie—who brought to me an issue that has helped to inform our thinking.

I go back, if I may, to Mr Adam’s earlier conversation with the cabinet secretary. Beyond primary and secondary school education, it is about not just university but our offer to young people who come from deprived backgrounds and how it can capture them all.

In my space, we have been doing a couple of things in that respect. We have been looking closely at the provision that is in place to try to support young people who have not prospered in traditional education settings. We run a number of programmes in that area, and I am trying to satisfy myself that nobody is falling through the cracks in that regard.

We are also currently doing a piece of work that is looking at foundation apprenticeships and vocational offerings in schools. You are right, Mr Adam, to say that a number of schools do fantastic work in that space, but in some instances, foundation apprenticeships are being used to take disruptive pupils out of classes, and those pupils are not getting the maximum benefit from that. We have been looking closely at what we can do to enhance the offer for the cohort of pupils who would prosper through a proper foundation apprenticeship or a good vocational qualification. We are working across portfolios to try to bring all that together.

I do not entirely disagree, Mr Rennie, but I say with respect that we are well into this evidence-taking session with the committee and I have not heard any member say to the cabinet secretary or me, “Actually, you’re spending too much money on other parts of education.” There is no such thing coming forward, and it is important to highlight that.

I am simply making the point that we all want more money to be spent on every aspect of education. Of course we do—absolutely. However, there is a finite amount of money. I absolutely agree with you that a discussion needs to be had about what future financing would look like.

That is a reasonable point; I will take it away and talk to the SFC about it. There is no doubt that such things damage the attractiveness of institutions. However, let us remember that Dundee university has been a highly successful university with a great international reputation. Its reputation will recover from this. I will incorporate your point in our discussions with the SFC.

I would like to think that, if representatives of Universities Scotland were sitting here today, they would concur with what I am about to say. The relationship between the Government, the SFC and the university sector is far better than it has been in the past, and that manifests itself in an open and on-going dialogue around future funding and a variety of other things.

Our premise, which I think is accepted by the university sector, is that free tuition is a central tenet of the offering. You will probably be aware, Mr Briggs, of a report that was published two years ago by the University and College Union. It suggested that, had we not had that offering in Scotland, up to two thirds of our students would, at the very least, have had to think hard about whether they could go to university.

Morally, it is important to us that those young people who want to go to university are able to do so. Fundamentally, it would undermine our universities if many of our indigenous students were not able to go to university. We accept that free tuition is here to stay, and I think that most parties do. It is perfectly reasonable for the university sector to want to start a conversation about what future funding looks like. We are open to those conversations.

On the point about the instability of universities, I do not think that any of us can sit here and say that some of the challenges that our universities are facing are entirely down to the funding model. There are other things at play. We cannot lose sight of the impact that the migration policies and the articulation of previous UK Governments on the subject of migration have had an enormous detrimental effect on our universities and their ability to recruit. I am not just talking about Scottish universities; that is also the case in England. We can talk about whether there is an overreliance on international students as part of the funding model, but the simple fact is that our universities have been side-swiped by migration policy. It is not simply about what is implemented—even a conversation can have an effect. There was a further schism towards the end of the last Westminster parliamentary session when the then Prime Minister asked the Migration Advisory Committee simply to look at whether there had been abuses of the postgraduate study visa, and that had a detrimental impact.

We are working very closely with our universities on a variety of fronts. We are open to discussions about future funding models and what that would look like, accepting that free tuition is here to stay. We are also doing quite a significant piece of work with our universities on promoting Scotland as a “come to study” destination and, at the same time, trying to de-risk the international aspect. Some of our institutions are overly reliant on certain markets, such as Nigeria. A few weeks ago, I met representatives from a number of south-east Asian countries and we discussed the barriers to more students from that region coming to Scotland, so that we can broaden the international presence. Some of the issues that were raised included a perception about whether they would be welcome in the UK, because of the rhetoric on migration. Another aspect was the cost that is associated with visas and how long it takes to get them resolved. We are doing a great deal of work with universities to try to address some of those challenges and we have are working jointly on international promotion. There is no complacency on our part, if that is what you are referring to, on this issue. There is considerable on-going dialogue with the sector.

I do not think that we have a target in mind, but I note that the income that the college sector has garnered from commercial sources has pretty much flatlined at £192 million for a number of years now. Given that some colleges are doing quite well in that space, that raises some questions.

A number of colleges have spoken to us about this, saying that, although they want to expand their commercial offering, they simply do not have the capacity to do so. Therefore, we are actively working with a number of colleges on the matter and there is a dialogue going on about how we can assist them in growing the opportunities that exist.

As for your point about engagement with NHS boards, the example that you gave is a very good one. Indeed, I could point to West Lothian College and NHS Lothian, where some really good work is going on. It is not so much that the Government has been pushing colleges to do that sort of thing; it is more about the sharing of best practice and understanding what works well in localities and what can be taken elsewhere.

Through the tripartite group, we have been taking a direct look at the good practice that exists in developing commercial opportunities, in upskilling and reskilling and in providing specific courses for the public or private sectors, and how we go about putting that in place. Out of that has come an understanding on our part that colleges will need a little bit of support in that regard. Something that is being discussed at the moment—I make it clear that this is in its very initial stage and might not come to anything—is whether we can support the creation of a national colleges hub that would bring in all of that best practice and that colleges could tap into to grow their commercial income in order, as a result, to become less dependent on public sources.

Given the state of public finances over recent years, it would be wise to develop that without in any way diminishing the existing offering. There is a lot of work going on, and I would be happy to write to the committee in due course as we put some more meat on the bones of that.

In terms of how you have presented it, no. However, I said earlier that we are working very closely in partnership with the university sector on our international promotion. In fact, in answer to an earlier question, I said that I had engaged with south-east Asian countries to try to bring more of their students here in order to de-risk the current model. I do recognise the point that Mr Greer makes. We are not, as I think he has tried to suggest, saying to individual universities, “You need to reduce your reliance on particular markets in the next five to 10 years.” We are working closely with the sector in the international student space, and one of our objectives is to de-risk a situation that the committee—particularly Willie Rennie—has discussed on previous occasions.