Meeting of the Parliament 26 March 2024
I recognise that, and I very much welcome the approach to the portfolio that the minister is taking. For far too long, there has been a very restrictive approach and an absence of whole-systems thinking. That is demonstrated by what is being done to the college sector. Professor McKendrick, the commissioner for fair access, highlighted just yesterday how important colleges are to the fair access agenda, describing them as offering people a gateway to university. He went on to describe the impact of what Neil Cowie of North East Scotland College told Parliament only a few weeks ago was a £32.7 million reduction in revenue funding as cuts being made to the number of places that will be available in the next academic year and courses being withdrawn. That is on top of the more than 120,000 places that have been lost since the Scottish National Party came to power.
When the principal of Dumfries and Galloway College describes the upcoming cuts as “devastating” to students from deprived areas and says that
“For those students who wish to progress on to ... higher education ... we cannot provide the same volume of opportunities”,
we should be very concerned indeed.
A similar lack of foresight is manifest in the decision to axe the flexible workforce development fund and failure to agree a budget that would allow for new funded modern apprenticeship places from 1 April 2024. I hope that the minister will pick up on that point in his closing remarks and tell us when that will be agreed.
That leads me to the fundamental issue. We do not widen access by blundering on with a cut of at least 1,200 places at universities. We do not widen access by having what amounts to an arbitrary cap on Scottish students. We do not widen access by failing to talk about part-time students, and the commissioner’s proposal to keep a primary focus on full-time undergraduates is set in a context in which 30 per cent of all Scotland-domiciled taught university enrolments in 2021 were part time.