Seòmar agus comataidhean

As I said to Ruth Maguire, my intention is to accept the recommendation in the Withers report. I also hope that I was clear that that is with a view to expanding quite markedly the employers’ voice in the development of apprenticeships.

I make it clear that this is not about privatisation in any way, shape or form. I have found that, without much prompting from me, and sometimes with no prompting, employers recognise that they are asking for something more and that they are willing to contribute if they can get that support for their businesses. We should recognise that many employers contribute to the system quite markedly in a variety of ways, and not just financially. In the space where we may be looking for more short, sharp training courses and qualifications that allow employers to upskill their existing workforce, a large number of employers are saying, “We’re up for playing our part in that.” That will be useful, because the public purse is under great pressure, as we all know. It will be incredibly important to be able to tap into those additional funding streams, because everyone will benefit.

We are still in the foothills of some of this, but we need to strike a balance between sectoral skills planning and geographical skills planning. There is a difference between the two. The principal conduit that we envisage will be the SDS staff who are currently working on skills planning. To be fair, more preparatory work has been done on that than I thought had been done when we started to look at the matter. The issue has been more about the implementation. What do we do with that planning and the data that lies behind it?

We will have to engage more closely with individual sectors to ascertain their needs and then develop a model from that that works in each locality. One of the challenges in all of this is smaller businesses and what they need compared with, say, a major employer that wants to train 100 staff members in a particular direction. I am not going to say today that we are well progressed on all of that—we are still working through it—but we are alive to your point.

I have to confess that we have not considered that. I have enough on my plate without taking on more. However, I think that our universities will always be thinking about those things. They are pretty creative places and they realise that the challenges that they face will require them to develop new offerings. For example, graduate apprenticeships will come to the fore more and more. However, there will always be an emphasis on the arts and various other things in our universities. If they choose to offer combined degrees in those areas because they believe that there is a need for them, I am sure that they will do that.

I have come across a number of very rounded young people who have been developed under the modern apprenticeship scheme, not just in terms of the skills that they have learned, but in a wider sense. I visited an aerospace company in Ayrshire, and every single person who showed me round that day had come through the apprenticeship programme. They were amazing young people. The young women who were going into schools to try to entice girls into engineering were incredibly impressive. Those young people were developing skill sets as engineers, but also developing as individuals. I think that we should look to the apprenticeship programme to do a bit more of that.

However, it is important that the implementation of all of that is done in partnership. That is why we have tried—for example, with the establishment of the tripartite group with the colleges—to have a platform where we can discuss all that in detail. We can have overarching principles and a direction of travel, but delivering it will require the buy-in of the colleges and universities. We need their input because they will understand best how that can be put into practice.

We are trying to take a much better partnership approach so that we have the ability to say, “Wait a minute—if we did it this way, it would be more productive.” We are in the early days of that, but that is how we are going to take this forward.

There is a conversation to be had with employers about what form that takes: whether they might put money into the system or whether we need to do something to assist in that. I absolutely recognise that. I am being as open as I can, convener. The situation that we are in is not ideal, but I believe that there will be discussions on the offering that we talked about earlier, including on how it is delivered. It might be that we need to find a mechanism to provide that opening for some employers.

If you will bear with me, I have some detail on that, which I am trying to find in my papers.

They were all from the university sector, unfortunately; none came from elsewhere. Obviously, we are looking into that. That may have been because of the timescales.

One institution withdrew its application. I think that, ultimately, in total—I stand to be corrected—only one project or possibly two projects did not progress. All the funded projects are international in scope, and 13 involve European partnerships. The funding ranges from enabling involvement in the European Union strategic network to creating opportunities for disadvantaged groups through short-term projects.

I fully accept that the programme is in its infancy, but we would expect that with something that is being piloted.

At the risk of passing the buck, I guess that you might want to ask them whether it has been beneficial. I think that they would say that it has been. I should say that the universities have seen the benefit as well. They have asked whether we would set up a similar group to engage with them directly.

The tripartite group has proved to be a helpful platform. It has probably taken longer than I expected to start to pay the dividends that I had hoped for, but it has provided an opportunity to have full and frank discussions about key topics on which the colleges feel that they would benefit from our taking a different approach. Having the SFC there to discuss the nuts and bolts of that has been helpful. There have been a number of meetings so far, some of which I have attended and some of which I have not been able to get to. There have been a number of areas on which we have made progress, but, more than anything, establishing the group was about developing a better collective understanding of the perspectives around the table.

I will give an example of that. Prior to our setting up the tripartite group, the colleges asked for flexibilities on their credit targets. They wanted the same money but a bit of flexibility as to how they used it. That flexibility was granted in part, but it was not as fully utilised as one might have expected or hoped. That was largely down to a lack of understanding—on both sides—of what that meant in reality and a lack of explanation. In essence, the colleges had asked for a one-size-fits-all approach that did not entirely suit all the individual colleges. There has been a bit of a shift so that, if there is an ask from the sector, it is fully understood, can be fully deployed and suits the interests of the majority. That is the way in which the matter has been taken forward.

We have been considering a number of areas, such as increased credit flexibilities and the timescales for, and timing of, decision making. Some of the decisions that the SFC made did not align with the timetable that the colleges worked to. That seems like a simple thing to fix. It has not been entirely simple, but we are getting there.

We have also been looking closely at the disposal of assets. Treasury rules and other things mean that there has been no driver for colleges to dispose of assets that they do not need in order to invest in the fabric of their buildings or whatever. We are still working through an option to facilitate that and allow colleges to move forward. They are enthusiastic to get to an end point on that, which we are working towards.

The colleges are driving a lot of what is being discussed, as they have a number of asks and suggestions. When there is a tangible return, I would like us to write jointly to the committee to explain what has been delivered. That would be useful, but I will need the other parties’ agreement to do that.

Do you mean what I talked in my statement about introducing?