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With respect, it is way above my pay grade to comment on the Government’s view of GDPR. To correct one thing, the issue is not the gathering of data. The data is gathered and held: it is sharing of data that is problematic.

I will give an example. If you share a certain data set, the attached risk is that you can share information about the individual, which is, by default, beyond what it is intended that the data be used for. I will not give specific examples. If a data set has been gathered using multiple sets of information and you are sharing that data for a particular purpose, are you, essentially, giving away more detail about an individual than they might want to be shared, or more than it is appropriate to share? That is one of the challenges in the issue.

We can do only what we are able to do. My enthusiasm for the measure is the same as that of other people’s, and that is the case for some of the other measures. I am frustrated at some of the barriers that we encounter, and we are actively looking at how we overcome them, because all the measures that are being talked about would be of huge benefit to us as we look to hit the target—and, more than that, just do the right thing. If we can implement it, we will do so. That is basically what I am saying to you.

In my near two years as a minister, I can think of only one occasion when someone told me that they had enough money and they walked that back a few weeks later. It is a fact of life that both Opposition politicians and stakeholders will constantly tell ministers that more money is required. I am sympathetic in the space of student support, notwithstanding the financial and budgetary restrictions that we are working with. What is expected and asked of our universities is increasing and is more wide-ranging than before, and not just in the context of widening-access students. I am sympathetic to that. I have a budget in this portfolio that we must work to, but this is an area in which, if there were something on which we could do a bit more, I would like us to do it, because it is, at times, challenging for the universities.

That said, the approach that the University of the West of Scotland has taken is showing real promise; we are waiting to see the first round of statistics on that. Its approach is that it does not wait until a student comes forward and says, “I have issues.” In universities, the challenges that students face often do not manifest themselves until just before exam time when, for example, they will say, “I’ve got a problem here; I have dyslexia,” or whatever. However, UWS has a proactive approach, whereby it issues a survey before a student joins the university. You might be aware of that. Up to 67 per cent of the students are filling that in, which allows UWS to identify challenges that those students might face, whether that is caring responsibilities, needing a job, the hours of their job or whatever. UWS has been trying to tailor its offering without disrupting the university’s approach to supporting those students. I am told that the first tranche of data is encouraging, and I have been encouraging other universities to look at it. The commissioner for fair access visited UWS to have a look at it for himself.

There are things that you can do, but I accept that there are financial challenges. It is an area that I would like to be able to do more on.

Targeted or increased? There is a difference.

We have the best student support package that we have ever offered in Scotland—indeed, the support that is available has increased markedly over the past few years in recognition of the challenges. However, we all know that there is a limit to what we can provide. If you are suggesting that we could better target that support, I am certainly open to considering what that might look like.

It is, of course, challenging for students. I have met students who have moved from other parts of Scotland to study in Edinburgh, for example, and the cost of accommodation in Edinburgh is extremely prohibitive. I absolutely understand all that. However, sitting here today, we have to be realistic and recognise that there is a limit to what we can provide.

At the outset, the parameters were set that measurement is done by using recruitment numbers. I will come back to recruitment in a moment, because an issue is emerging around that.

On retention, I agree that there is an argument for moving to use that as a measurement, because I think that it is more accurate. You are right to point out that there has been a retention issue, but that applies to students in general, and we can trace that back to factors such as the pandemic and the cost of living crisis.

At the most recent widening access forum meeting, the topic of retention and whether we should look at retention numbers rather than recruitment numbers came up. To be fair, a number of universities could articulate the scale of the issue that they are facing.

The other point that we have heard about—anecdotally, perhaps like your conversations on Monday night—is that some of the universities are now finding that they are identifying students who would qualify under widening access but who, due to the cost of living crisis, are declining offers because their family or financial circumstances mean that they must find a job. We want to bottom that out to see the scale of the issue. The information is anecdotal, but an issue is emerging that is related to external factors.

We are very much alive to all that, and it is forming part of the discussion. I do not disagree with your point about whether there should be a formal measurement process.

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?