Chamber and committees

We are engaging through the Scottish Funding Council, Colleges Scotland and directly with colleges to see—and this kind of goes back to the point—

It might be better to allow me to answer the questions that you ask me, Mr Marra.

Simply put, that can be done through regular dialogue. I am happy to provide detail of the frequency with which I speak with Colleges Scotland and all the different unions in the college environment. That is an opportunity for representatives in the college sector to raise any issue that they want to raise with me, but also for me to reflect things back to them. So, if you—or any other members of the Scottish Parliament—want to make me aware of things that should be highlighted, I am more than willing to hear them. I am also willing to hear directly from individual colleges and to urge others to reflect on those examples.

We need to be led by the evidence. I made the point that it needs to be done on the basis of the comparative overhead requirements.

I take your point, Mr Doris. You picked a specific course. With a few exceptions to do with protected subjects—primarily, the medicine courses that universities deliver—we tend not to distinguish between courses, not least because we rely largely on our institutions to determine what provision there should be. We would not want to create perverse incentives by offering differential contribution rates that depended on subject matter.

Notwithstanding that point, I understand the point that you are making about the comparative overheads of some courses not necessarily being that different.

The overall position needs to be evidence led. Beyond the general understanding that the sector is under financial pressure and is desirous of more resource, we need to consider the rationale for looking at things in terms of cost per head.

I have tried to answer that question already, Ms Gosal. To a large extent, that is driven by the experience of learning and teaching. A school pupil will come into contact with many more teachers than a college student comes into contact with lecturers or instructors. Inevitably, that leads to a higher unit cost per head if we look at it in that way. We are not really comparing like for like. The experience in each phase of a person’s journey through education is different—there are different drivers of the costs involved. That is largely what drives that differential.

That does not mean that we value one part of the system less than another but is a reflection of the reality of the overheads involved.

As I said in response to Mr Doris’s question, we can always keep such things under review and we will look to do that. However—and you might hear me say this quite a lot today, because it is the reality that we are grappling with—the current budget is worth £1.7 billion less than it was when we published it in December 2021. I am all for people making positive suggestions on the redistribution of resource, but they had better be prepared to come to me to say how we are going to do that.

That is the point that I was trying to make in response to Mr Kerr, although I was clear that I could not do it in a month. I do not think that that would be a reasonable timescale in which to do the issue justice. However, what Ms Gosal raises is a perfectly legitimate thing for us to consider, and I am absolutely committed to doing so.

I take the point and will come on to it. However, in the first instance, it is important for us to reflect—collectively, I hope—on the fact that international students are very welcome in Scotland. They play an important part in our university communities and, indeed, in our wider society.

I am alert to some of the challenges that Mr Marra refers to. I take those challenges seriously, and we have to be cognisant of them. We are committed to developing our international education strategy, and a core part of that has to be how we make it clear that the sector can be resilient in the face of any particular type of shock that you may refer to. We are alert to and conscious of that, and we want to work with the sector to ensure that that resilience is embedded within our institutions.

That reflects the scale of the challenge that we are trying to respond to. We have to respond to it on the basis of all of the constraints on public finance that I have referred to. That is a challenge in terms of not just revenue budgets but capital allocation. What I have asked for, and what I have discharged SFC to come back to me and lay out, is a plan to respond to some of those challenges. What are the priorities for the coming period? I know that the committee spoke to the SFC about that. The SFC will take that forward and will make a series of recommendations to me, and it will be incumbent on the Government to consider them.

I recognise the scale of the challenge. It is not something that I am pretending is not there. There are various reasons why it exists. The primary one, by my estimation, is that we have a series of buildings that were built around the same time and, as a result of that, are maturing at the same time. I go back to the point that I made in response to Mr Marra. We have a track record of investing in the college estate. I have already laid out our commitment to what Mr Marra rightly referred to as one project. I was not shying away from its being one project, but it is one very important project, and it is a serious financial commitment from the Scottish Government to continue to invest in and improve the college estate in Scotland. However, I am looking forward to the SFC informing us how we should respond to the significant challenges ahead of us, and we will then need to consider how to respond to its recommendations.

That is something that colleges themselves would have to speak to and justify. We do not direct or dictate. We are not involved in the process of pay settlements in the college sector. I think that it is right, though—you will see this reflected in our own public sector pay policy—that, particularly where we are dealing with constraint in public finances, the people who are at the bottom of the salary scale should be prioritised ahead of those at the top of the scale, if I can put it in that way.

There is a role for us to play in encouraging constructive engagement by both management and unions. I do that, and I am committed to continuing to do that. From my own position, I certainly perceive positive engagement with both. I hope that it is felt to be trying to demonstrate some form of leadership that I engage with both parties on a positive basis to urge them to come together to negotiate in a similar vein.

I cannot drive or determine what the relationships between those parties might be. All I can do is engage with them on that basis, to urge them to have dialogue on a basis of respect and of trying to come together to resolve some of the undoubted challenges that exist, and, where there are differences of opinion, to try to bridge them.