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Since 2012-13, the college sector budget has increased by £168 million.

The latest figures for 2021-22 have running costs of £675,000 for the Glasgow Colleges Regional Board. Mr Doris and the committee members who were here previously will be aware that the Government is considering options for the future governance of the Glasgow college region following the appraisals exercise that was done. I am aware of Mr Doris’s views on that and of the views of others.

Any decision that I take will be subject to a 12-week public consultation, and I hope that we will be in a position to take the decision and begin the process relatively soon.

I can do that once the figures are available.

A number of flexibilities were delivered for this year. I can go into some detail on those if you wish, convener. They included changes to guidance that will enable colleges to deliver an optimal balance of full-time and part-time provision. The minimum credit target has been reduced by at least 10 per cent. Colleges that underdeliver on credit targets will still be allowed to keep 20 per cent of the funding for those credits. Backlog maintenance and lifecycle maintenance have been rolled into one funding allocation as opposed to our providing separate allocations for each, which will allow colleges to determine the most appropriate split between the two uses. That is what has been done thus far. I am keen to explore what we can do with colleges quickly and for us then to consider what we might be able to do beyond that.

To be clear, last week when we met the colleges, they did not come with a list of asks. However, late last year they produced a list of suggestions, some of which were acted upon at the time while others were not. We have asked them to come back to us with an updated list of suggestions.

Sitting alongside that, I have tasked officials with looking into ideas that I have that might be useful to colleges. I should be clear that those cover the resource area of the budget and also capital. I am very much alive to the fact that the colleges have net zero targets to meet. We are all aware of the ageing nature of some of the college estate. We are looking at what it might be possible to do in that space.

Convener, you will appreciate that I do not want to break confidences here. We have to work through those matters with the colleges, but once we have reached agreement I will be more than happy to write to the committee about what we are doing.

I recognise the issue and am aware of one course that has closed because of lack of demand. There will always be issues. My conversations with colleges show that they recognise the importance of that sort of delivery, as do I.

Colleges are stand-alone institutions, Ms Duncan-Glancy. They are answerable to their boards for the decisions that they make in that regard—that is where the responsibility lies. In a broader sense, when principals make difficult decisions of that nature, I hope that they are mindful of the responsibilities that Ruth Maguire indicated and of the need to preserve key courses. It is entirely up to the college principals what they do, but those are our expectations. Whatever decisions they take must also be in line with the fair work agenda and must be taken in conjunction with trade unions.

I think that is a fair assessment and that it is, unfortunately, the reality. The colleges have been very clear about what the implications might be if they were to meet the EIS-FELA request for a pay settlement in full and about what that might mean for job losses. That is regrettable, but it is where we are.

When I met EIS-FELA representatives last week, I encouraged them to try to find common ground with the employers and I did the same when I met the employers. I hope and believe that they will shortly resume discussions. I hope that that will lead to an agreement, but that remains to be seen. There must be some realism about the situation and I urge both sides to get together to find a way through.

I want to go back to the central premise of your point. You spoke about a figure representing the decline in funding for university students. The universities arrive at that figure by using a methodology that is at odds with the one that is used not only by the Scottish Government but by your colleagues down south. I therefore challenge the figure that is being quoted. Do I recognise the general point that you made about decline? Yes, I do. However, if you use the same methodology as is used by the UK Government and ourselves, it is not on the scale that has been portrayed.

I cannot sit here and tell you that the financial picture will suddenly become rosier. As I said earlier, we will work closely with universities and colleges to do all that we can to improve sustainability in both areas.

They were actually informed as soon as it was practical to do that. The Scottish Funding Council process means that the final allocations are normally advised at the end of May. We wanted to do that as soon as we possibly could, and they were announced at the beginning of May. None of this is easy. We recognise the problems that it caused, but we did try to make them aware of the situation as quickly as we could.

No, I am not concerned about that. I recognise that the timing is not good, and neither is the loss of the £46 million—although I should say, for context, that the loss of £20 million from the universities budget is a very small proportion of it. I am not downplaying that—I just wanted to provide some context, and I will come back to Sally Mapstone’s comments in a moment. I will just say that, from the discussions that I have had with the colleges, in particular, I think that we can do enough in the short term to stabilise the situation, which will allow us to kick on with what we—and they—need and want to do.

As for the universities, I have a great deal of respect for Sally Mapstone, but the facts do not bear out her comments about managed decline. If you look at the performance of the universities—and I can go through that information if you wish—you will see that this is a sector that, despite the challenges, is vibrant, with a fantastic enthusiasm about it. The loss of the additional funding was a blow, but I think that, for the universities, the concern was more about the message behind that than the hard cash. They felt that we had somehow deprioritised them, when nothing could be further from the truth. However, I have taken the message on board, and we have been having a lot of discussions with universities about how we deal with this.