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To be absolutely open with you, I was a little thrown by that information. The mental health funding for the colleges exists because the Government made a commitment for three years, which it honoured. It extended it for a year—only for a year—for a transition period, then the funding came to an end. I am therefore a little unclear about what is meant. I do not want to duck the question, because you are right to ask it. We will write back to the committee quickly—perhaps separately—on that, once I have a bit of clarity on it. We continue to fund the NUS’s Think Positive programme, but I am not clear about what is alluded to in the letter, and I want to have a look at it.

My understanding is that the think positive scheme continues, but I will confirm that in writing.

I have engaged directly with the UHI about its future as an entity. I have also met the individual college principals. The concept of the UHI is absolutely committed to, but, collectively, we all recognise that it will have to evolve to meet some of the challenges. The UHI is doing a substantial piece of work internally to consider what that would look like. That piece of work recognises that, even within the UHI, the cost base of delivering in some localities—for example, in island settings—will be higher than in others.

I visited the college in Shetland to which you referred and met its principal. Specific to Shetland and to other elements of the UHI, additional support has been provided by the SFC over a period of time, in recognition of some of the challenges.

I know that the SFC is very much alive to the situation at UHI Shetland, but that does not mean that any college can continue in an unsustainable way in the long term. Colleges have to become more sustainable for their own good, although there is a recognition of the additional costs. We are very much alive to that. The SFC is directly engaged with UHI Shetland, and it worked very closely on the merger for the other college that you referred to. It is right and proper that, in the interests of the public purse, we expect the colleges to become as sustainable as possible, and I absolutely stand by that. However, there is, of course, a recognition of the additional costs.

We need to see more of what is already happening in the UHI. For example, there is considerable collaboration between individual colleges in recognition of the fact that they might not be able to deliver every discipline in every specific locality. It may be that some apprentices will travel—as they currently do from Shetland to Inverness—for some of their training and that UHI Shetland perhaps becomes more of an aquaculture centre, for example. There is already work between the colleges to do all of that.

We must also grow and develop the university offer in the Highlands. We need these centres to move more towards the delivery of higher education courses than is currently the case. We have a commitment to the future of the UHI, but we must see elements of it becoming more sustainable in the long term.

That question has come up a few times. We will follow through on that recommendation, not because SAAB has not done good work, because it has—I touched on its fantastic work on gender, which we will take forward. However, as James Withers recognised, we need to broaden out the employer’s voice in that area. I have had direct conversations with the Federation of Small Businesses because I want to see how we can expand the offering to its members. There is a bit of a contradiction. Figures from SDS show that a very large number of apprenticeships are offered within small and medium-sized enterprises, but the FSB tells me that very few of its members have ever had an apprentice. We are not planning to completely rebalance that, but there is something that we need to look at there.

The issue is relevant to rural areas and to shared apprenticeship models. Unfortunately, the previous pilots did not work out. I spoke earlier about ideas that we heard from the staff of some of the agencies, and they have come forward with an idea that might allow us to look at that again. Rightly or wrongly, some quite significant employers have sometimes felt excluded from all of that. We are trying to ensure that we have the full range of employer voices helping to inform this.

Although we will follow that recommendation from the review, I envisage that quite a lot of the people who currently participate in SAAB will continue having some say, at both a local and a national level, in our thinking on skills delivery.

That opportunity is the thing that probably excites me most. Grahame Smith has led some really good work, and I am delighted that he has agreed to continue in that role to help us to develop that further.

The careers collaborative was seen as something that just pulled things together, talked things through and produced a report, but I think that there is scope to markedly develop that approach. My thinking at the moment about the careers offer for our young people is that there could be an overarching umbrella, so that everyone can do their thing but no one falls through the cracks.

At the moment, we have the SDS-delivered careers service, with fantastic staff doing wonderful work, but they probably need a slightly different MO. I recognise that that is also resource intensive. We also have Developing the Young Workforce doing really good things, along with Career Ready and Enable. Various strands are delivering for young people. However, the offering may have been a bit narrow because we have focused on people who have been identified as needing support. We have assumed that other young people will be good to make up their own minds, but, having talked to young people who have gone through the system, I have heard that that is not necessarily the case.

I have seen fantastic stuff going on from Edinburgh to Shetland, and there is some really good stuff happening in Dundee, which has informed my thinking about what we need to deliver. Grahame Smith is currently talking to Jane Duffy and her team, and we are trying to mesh what his report called for with our vision—because it largely aligns with it, but not entirely—and how we take that forward.

At the moment, our careers offering is not what I want it to be. We need to have conversations with young people about their interests and skills and then tell them what their options are. We have not done that well enough—for young women, in particular. A lot of young women have followed traditional career paths and have perhaps missed out on doing things that they have the skill set for and that they would really enjoy, although it is not about being prescriptive and directing young people to particular career paths.

I keep repeating to people a story about a conversation that I had with a young apprentice who said to me that his experience had not helped him. He had parental pressure to go to university, but he really wanted to be an apprentice. He said that young people need to be told what the options are and what they lead to. They should be told that, if they take an apprenticeship, it will mean doing it for X number of years, and they should be told the salary that they can expect to earn. They should, equally, be told what their qualifications will enable them to do if they go to college or university. He added that they would want to know how much money they were going to make. We should listen to that.

There is also the parental element. Perhaps we need to do more with parents, if they are a major influence on young people’s career choices, to help them to understand. That goes back to the point about parity of esteem. We can help them to understand that an apprenticeship can lead to a very fulfilling and successful career. All of that feeds into the mix.

As I said, Grahame Smith and his team are talking about what that will look like in the future. It may be that we can do that without the structural change that needs to come. We have a decision to make about whether the substantial careers team—which currently sits within SDS—should stay there or whether it should be rebranded or go back to being Careers Scotland, or whatever. I am not setting hares running, but those are the thought processes. In the meantime, we can get on and start to do what I have mentioned in our schools, which will require the support of local authorities and schools. We need to have that culture in our schools.

I have seen phenomenal stuff going on in Harris academy, in Dundee, which has a fantastic headteacher who has embraced that culture. He has invested his pupil equity fund money in additional guidance teachers to facilitate it, and the school has a positive destination figure of nearly 98 per cent.

It is a big ask, but we can get on and do a lot of what is needed while we are doing all the background stuff to put the systems in place. That is one of the reasons why I am so keen to support DYW and all its third sector partners in the work that they are doing on the ground, particularly with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

I mentioned the unsung work that employers are doing. If members have seen Career Ready in action, they will know what a testament that is to our employers and their staff. Some amazing stuff is going on there—I saw that in Glasgow, in particular. We need to support that, but we need to map it as well, to see where the gaps are and what we are doing to support young people into work, and then try to make sure we get it right.

I give you that assurance and I apologise if I gave the wrong impression. That aspect will absolutely not be lost. As I said at the start of my response, for some people, community learning and development is just about developing life skills, which will help them to tackle social isolation. On one of my visits, I met a group of older learners who had found that simply becoming computer literate had made a huge difference to their lives. They felt much more engaged with society. It is quite thought provoking when you hear that, because we take for granted the ability to go online to do this and that, but, if someone cannot do that, they become incredibly isolated in life.

I touched on third sector organisations, and a piece of work that ties in with the CLD work is what Enable is doing in schools with young people who have learning difficulties. That work is hugely important, and I want to see what more we can do on that. In some instances, those young people have access to work experience that is significant and meaningful, but I have seen other examples where that access is pretty limited. We need to support and encourage employers to offer better opportunities for young people in that cohort.

I would not use the language of a “burning platform” or a “chaotic reorganisation”, as you have articulated it, but I recognise that there are challenges for some colleges, and that some have bigger challenges than others. Willie Rennie asked earlier about the support that is being provided for certain colleges. We need to support some colleges to move into that stronger space.

The situation is not without its challenges, and I would not pretend otherwise at the moment, but there is an opportunity to move quite quickly, and I will give an example of that. One active conversation that we are having with the college sector is about how we might move to more of a colleges-first model around apprenticeship delivery. That is a presumption that we would do more on a direct basis with colleges, but it does not mean that we would do it all directly through colleges. There are instances where managing agents are incredibly helpful and useful and play a worthwhile part. Colleges believe that that provides greater opportunity for them to stabilise.

I stress that, before I would make or sanction such a move, I would need to be satisfied that the offering that was going to be made to those apprentices would holistically, not just in terms of the training, be on a par with what they currently get. However, we are having very open dialogue directly with colleges about what we could do differently to give them the stability that they are rightly looking for.

Is that question in the context of the industrial relations in the sector?

You will recognise that it has taken some time to secure responses from all the interested parties in order to allow us to come to a view. All of us around the table would recognise that industrial relations in the college sector are not good and have not been good for a very long time. I cannot impose anything when it comes to the bargaining structures, but I absolutely recognise that we cannot go on as we have been for years.

We have an industrial dispute going on, and we need to get over that. I think that there is an appetite and a recognition that this cannot continue in the way that it has. Sitting alongside all the reform work that we are doing, if the sector can find a way through the current industrial action, we can draw breath and then consider how we can do this differently. I have views on that but, as I say, I cannot impose them on the relevant parties.

As I said, I do not want to mislead you. I think that we have had all the responses quite recently—that is my recollection. If I am wrong, I will write to you and correct the record. That being the case, and as I have just alluded to, we need the various parties to get over their current difficulty, and then we can take a look at what we could do differently, but delivering that will require buy-in from all the parties.