Chamber and committees

That is twice that a figure has been put on the record in two weeks, but we do not know whether it is remotely robust.

My substantive question is for Mr Brown. I found your submission really helpful. I was particularly interested in how colleges coped through Covid. I know that time is short, but we should put on record our thanks for the amazing work that is done in colleges. Some of that is reflected in the EIS-FELA evidence, which says that colleges coped incredibly well. There must be some strength in regionalisation that enabled colleges to cope well.

However, of more interest to me is that the picture is inconsistent, and getting that consistency across the regions is key for the committee. There is then a concern about that not happening nationally. How do we get that consistency across the regions and colleges and make sure that it happens nationally?

I ask the question because I absolutely get that you want to defend your members’ interests, but we want you to be a proactive part of improving the sector. To be proactive in improving the sector, you have to identify the positives and work collegiately to push those positives. Is Unison is up for doing that?

Audrey Cumberford, would you like to comment on that?

I will be incredibly brief, because Audrey Cumberford may just have addressed this.

You said that there was a missed opportunity at the point of regionalisation, and there is undoubtedly a tough financial and budgetary outlook for the years ahead, but has regionalisation provided greater resilience and stability in the sector than there would have been had we not undergone it? You mentioned strong foundations. Is there a stability in those that would otherwise not have existed? We are evaluating the success or otherwise of the regionalisation process. Because of regionalisation, is there a foundation that provides greater resilience?

I think you addressed that in your previous reply.

That is always the way.

Thanks, convener. I have been struck by that conversation on the student pathway, irrespective of a student’s age, but I am more interested, for the purpose of this question, in the pathway from school through the college process and into, potentially, higher education. We have heard that four in 10 young people from SIMD20 areas who are at university went there from college. That is a huge achievement for the college process. Is that figure up on previous years? Is it about right? What should that figure be?

More importantly, can you say a little bit more about the experience of young people from the most deprived backgrounds, however we define that, as they journey from school through the college process and, potentially, into higher education? I am conscious that a lot of community outreach programmes were disrupted during the Covid pandemic. Could we be storing up issues in the next couple of years in relation to those young people going through the college system?

Can I push you a little bit further on that? The consultation stated that one aim of regionalisation was to enable colleges to offer

“a range of courses to the communities that they serve”,

which is what colleges were hoping to provide. In my experience, in Glasgow, they provide that, but local colleges tell me that a lot of the work that they do involves short taster courses in communities, which is labour intensive, with staffing on the ground being needed to build up relationships. Those types of activities, which can be quite expensive ones, were among the first to fall. You could not recreate that digitally. In the next couple of years, will some of the positive statistics that we have heard today start to decline? With challenging budgets, will we need more of a focus on that?

How can we track progress? I get that it was disrupted for two years because of Covid, but what data exists to monitor the success of the intensive community work to get young people and others on to the education pathway through the college system and with partners? Can you point to data that says that, for example, one in 10 or one in 50 of the young people who are engaged with such work eventually find themselves in a full-time college course and go on to achieve a certain outcome? I am certain that that work is positive, but how do we track the data to prove that it is successful? It feels successful and the colleges in my area appear to be successful, but how do we monitor that?