I apologise for Professor Paul Hagan’s late arrival. He has been on a train from Glasgow since before 7 o’clock this morning, so that is a bit of a challenge.
We very much welcome the opportunity to meet the committee this morning. Members will be relieved to know that I will not repeat the content of our submission, but I do want to make a few brief comments.
I draw the committee’s attention to my introductory remarks on the first two pages of our submission, where we provide some examples of how, working with our partners, we have added value in different ways, whether in widening access, skills development, the development of innovation centres or growing research excellence in Scotland.
I want to step back for a moment and look at the establishment of the funding council. When I became chair of the council, I was told that there was a book in the cupboard that provided a history of university funding. As you can imagine, it was not exactly a bestseller or a riveting read, but it points out that the funding council and its counterparts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland can trace their roots right back to 1914, when the objective of the state was to provide sustainable funding for universities in recognition of the fact that they needed to be supported given the consequences of the first world war.
In more recent times, members will be aware that the current Scottish funding council is a result of a merger of the former Scottish Further Education Funding Council and the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council in 2005. Our function is to secure the coherent provision of high-quality further and higher education and research, and we have a duty to ensure that provision is made for assessing and enhancing the quality of funded post-16 education.
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The funding council’s decisions support the delivery of the Scottish Government’s national performance framework and its economic strategy. The Scottish Government sets national priorities and issues guidance to the funding council based on its priorities and policies. It is for the funding council to implement such guidance and we do so following discussion with our key stakeholders.
It is worth saying a couple of words about who our stakeholders are, because they are quite extensive. In the sectors that we cover—specifically, colleges and universities—our key stakeholders include staff, trade unions, students, through the National Union of Students and Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland, or SPARQS, and representative bodies such as Colleges Scotland and Universities Scotland, as well as the broader education system as a whole. The Scottish Government and Parliament are also stakeholders, as is local government, and indeed the United Kingdom Government, particularly the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. There are also other non-departmental public bodies and public agencies, such as Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Skills Development Scotland, Creative Scotland and so on with whom we also work extensively.
Funding bodies in other parts of the UK, which are observers at our board meetings, are also key stakeholders, because we have to be aware of developments elsewhere, and there are also other relevant organisations such as learned academies, research councils, research charities, the European Commission and professional bodies. There is a whole range of stakeholders, and we try to work with them all to ensure the delivery of high-quality education and world-leading research. Examples of extreme collaboration are evident in our submission to the committee.
Change has not ended there. As members will be aware, our role developed with the introduction in 2012 of outcome agreements, with college regionalisation and Office for National Statistics classification. With more focus on outcomes such as widening access or having internationally competitive research, much more engagement and negotiation with individual institutions are involved. The significant enhancement of activity to promote the exploitation of research for economic and societal benefits, for example through our innovation centres, has been another change.
As a result, outcome agreements provide an explicit link between public investment and delivery on Scottish Government priority areas, but they also facilitate a relationship of engagement between us and our stakeholders that promotes dialogue and enhanced mutual understanding of the issues, so that when we engage with individual universities or colleges we have the opportunity to learn at first hand about the pressures that they face and about their ambitions and aspirations.
All of that has meant significant organisational change for the funding council itself and a change in the role of staff within the organisation, and that reform is on-going. We have a new strategic plan for 2015-18. Our previous strategic plan outlined the changes to be made, and the new one focuses on embedding those changes and realising their full potential. We are also implementing the Scottish Government’s three-step improvement framework for Scotland’s public services, all of which means on-going organisational change for us.
Our vision in that plan is to make Scotland the best place in the world to learn, to educate, to research and to innovate, and we see our task as being to care for and develop the whole system of colleges and universities and their connections and contribution to Scotland’s educational, social, cultural and economic life. We cannot do that alone, and that is why partnership working is central to our efforts and why there needs to be much greater collaboration from all parties concerned. The theme of our strategic plan is ambition, and we will be building on the strong foundations that currently exist.
I shall now pass over to my colleagues, Laurence Howells, Paul Hagan—who, thankfully, has now arrived—and John Kemp. We would be delighted to answer your questions.