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I would not necessarily use the phrase “single passporting”, but I accept that there is a need to simplify the support landscape. There is no doubt that it can be difficult for young people and their parents and carers, where appropriate, to identify what is available when they are in some of those groups. You mentioned young carers, who sometimes face really significant challenges. I am particularly interested in that group, and I am sympathetic to the idea that we could look into doing something more there.

Widening access has been a major success—we should not lose sight of that—and I give credit again to the universities for that. We have done fantastic work. We are now in the territory of learning the lessons of the past nine or 10 years. What has worked well and what has not? What do we need to do to complete that journey and to embed that approach in our education system? It is about refining that.

There are a number of issues to overcome. We are certainly open to listening to the universities—we have quite an open forum with them—on their practical thoughts from the coalface on what could be done better. If you have had those conversations with young people, I would be fascinated to look at that feedback as well.

Clearly, that will form part of the consultation and we need to look at it as a starting point.

It is interesting that you touched on the Open University. There is a strange anomaly in all this. The Open University rightly receives funding under the WARF scheme, because of the work that it does. However, we do not count those students in the overall target and I am not entirely sure why, as the performance in that area is higher than what is shown in the bare statistics that we have in front of us. I am not trying to suggest that we should go back and change the statistics, but the situation is strange. The Open University and part-time education are important in all this.

Let us deal with universities first. In the context of trying to increase the widening access pool, universities have done things proactively. You talked about UWS. The new programme that it has established with New College Lanarkshire, which I hope to see shortly, is a good example. Let us acknowledge that universities are doing lots of other things behind the scenes for which they are not given credit—pretty much every university is doing that. Universities also enter into more formal arrangements.

In the context of the colleges, there are examples of good practice, too. However, I was quite struck by a comment that, I think, Lydia Rohmer made to the committee last week about school-college partnerships—she did not refer to them by that name, but that is effectively what they are. She talked about the Government being reluctant about those partnerships and viewing them as double funding. I would like the chance to clarify that. The SFC identified an issue with a number of colleges using up to 22 per cent of their credits on school-college partnerships, which were not directed at widening access programmes, as they were not trying to stimulate that cohort and to support them. They were much wider than that and they also strayed into primary schools. The SFC took a view that that was not necessarily what credits were for and that they should primarily be focused on the college offering. It would have been more sympathetic if a clear line could have been drawn between all that activity and widening access but it was not possible to do that.

There is a role, although it is primarily for local authority structures, with good financial support from the Government, to deal with the attainment gap in the context of younger people.

That is a difficult question to answer, because Corseford College was a pilot. That is why it was funded as it was. It was intended to determine over a two-year period what worked well and what did not.

I do not want to prejudge what future models will look like until we have the outcome of the pilot. We are getting into the territory of mainstreaming or non-mainstreaming and whether the SFC should fund specific provision. I suspect that that will be for a successor minister. I am simply committed to exploring the matter and to gathering the evidence to allow the Government and the Parliament to make the right decisions.

On Corseford?

As I said at the outset, there is no doubt that meeting the 2026 target will be challenging using the measures that we can currently access. However, as the commissioner said last week, we should not be entirely hung up on the 2026 target and do things that are predicated purely on that. We ought to be looking to the longer term and things that can be embedded in the approach that will enable us to hit the 2030 target and ensure that it is part of the landscape.

It depends on what we can do on the data-sharing issues and how quickly we can launch some of the measures but, realistically, 2026 is challenging. However, I believe—in fact, I am certain—that the mindset of everyone who is involved is to be absolutely focused on attempting to meet that target and that, beyond that, they are 100 per cent focused on delivering the 2030 target.

As I said at the outset, our job is to assist the institutions and to give them the tools that they need to achieve that target. I cannot stress enough the constructive way in which everyone is working to that end.

We are about to move on that once we get a formal letter. I will write to you and advise on that. It could be done pretty quickly. I do not think that it will become onerous and require structures to be put in place.

Of late, I have been doing a lot of work to engage with other Governments and countries in relation to international students as we look to derisk the situation and attract students from other countries, which is not easy, given the circumstances. We have been exploring what the perceived impediments are with them. Housing and accommodation come up quite a lot.

I met a group of students last week at Edinburgh Napier University who were talking about the difficulty in finding accommodation. Having said all the positive stuff that I have said about universities today, I think that there is something there. Universities are looking to attract students, whether they are international or indigenous, but in doing so they are perhaps blind, to an extent, to the ask that then falls on the student around accommodation. The other day, I heard about international students who face particular challenges with regard to deposits on properties, with landlords looking for additional deposits.

There is quite a lot in that space. Universities deal with that. The purpose-built student accommodation review steering group made a number of recommendations. I am not directly involved in that group, but I am very alive to the issue.

I am guessing that the student from Angus is not a constituent of mine, or I would have heard of that case by now. That is a pretty extreme example, but the problem exists, particularly for some of our smaller institutions that do not have a lot of student accommodation, if they have any at all. There is therefore an expectation that the students find somewhere to live in areas where it is really difficult to get accommodation.

I am not going to sit here today and say that we have a magic wand with which to address the issue, but I am very much alive to it, because universities have a bit of responsibility in that space. You are right about widening access. The challenges that widening access students might face are more acute. We have been encouraging universities and colleges to work more closely with local authorities on the options

If it is okay, I will add the issue to the agenda for the next widening access forum so that we can have a discussion with the universities about that particular challenge.

There is, I believe, a university court meeting next week, and we anticipate that engagement internal to the university—and very initial—on the shape of the recovery will begin next week. You will appreciate that, as I said last week in the chamber, the SFC will, alongside that, have sight of the draft proposal and will be feeding into that and any future iterations of it. That will give the SFC a fuller understanding of the issue as well as the ability to influence and encourage the university in the direction of ensuring that, whatever the direction of travel might be, it returns the university to a sustainable footing.

The challenge here is that this is an individual and autonomous institution, and it is not for ministers to comment directly on its activities. What I think requires to happen is an open and frank dialogue with the staff and the MSPs who represent the area that the University of Dundee is in. There has been dialogue with both up until now, but it has not been as open and detailed as all those parties would have looked for, perhaps for understandable reasons. From next week onwards, we need to see a much more open dialogue. The convener, who has asked some questions today, has alluded to this, but if there are questions for the Government on this, we are here to answer them.