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As I have said, I am not going to be dragged into a disagreement between two trade unions—that is not the role of ministers. My job is to try to facilitate that overarching piece of work to get the industrial relations within the sector—not between trade unions, but within the sector—to a better place.

On the topic of recovery—which is the word that is used rather than “clawback”, Mr Briggs—the SFC has done a lot of work on that with the college sector, particularly through the tripartite alignment group. That work has been extremely successful.

However, there is a point at which leaving public money that recirculates in the education system in institutions that have underperformed—I will come back to that point—cannot be justified without evidence that they are seeking not to underperform. There have been some instances in which that has been the case and some flexibility has been provided.

I am sure that the topic will be explored in greater detail in the tripartite group. There are limitations to what can be done, given the financial pressures that we are all aware of. Nevertheless, where universities are doing innovative things in the areas that you have referred to, and in others, there is an argument for a bit of understanding. I am sure that that will be explored further through the tripartite group.

I will reiterate what I said earlier about ministers and their distance from this matter, in terms of legislation and issues such as ONS classification. My understanding is that there have been, and continue to be, conversations between the institution and commercial lenders.

We do not want to see job losses on any scale, but one issue that we have in our universities—and which I alluded to when I was last before the committee—is that a number of them have adopted the approach of taking on several hundred staff on the back of an emerging market, and then shedding several hundred staff if circumstances change. Frankly, the universities need to get out of that situation, because it is not healthy at all.

The difference between Edinburgh and Dundee is that substantial job losses were required at the University of Dundee, but the situation was so serious that there was a question mark over the institution’s future. We were talking about saving a critical university in Scotland, so the two examples are not comparable, but I take your point about the scale of the job losses that are being talked about at Edinburgh.

There is no doubt that there has been a long-standing mistrust and distrust between the trade unions and senior management, which has not been helped by the events that we are discussing. The nature of some of the engagement with the trade unions has been quite concerning and it has not necessarily matched what we would have hoped for or expected. More recently, there have been some hopeful signs that it is improving.

With regard to the timescale, I should say, by the way, that I was not hinting that the meeting this afternoon would be to decide on that ask. All I will say is that we have been well aware of the urgency of the matter and the need to provide a bit of confidence and certainty. The Government will move as quickly as it can to deal with the ask. As I have said, there are two elements to it, and one might take a bit longer to deal with than the other.

As the cabinet secretary has done, I take issue with the statistics that you are quoting. I have the numbers in front of me. Glasgow Kelvin College received a 3.15 per cent uplift. It was one of the main beneficiaries of the rebaselining. Of course, some of that was for lecturers’ pay and some was for pension funding, but there was a basic uplift of £170,000 on the college’s credit thresholds, so it received more money.

I recognise that there has been a decrease in staff over a period of time. Colleges have been evolving their offering because they need to respond to the needs of the economy.

There is an interesting element to that. Sometimes, staff numbers have gone down because the number of courses has been reduced. I can think of at least one college where the number of courses was reduced because of demand, but the number of students attending that college went up. That is about responding to need.

No one ever wants to see job losses at scale, but we are in a period of evolution in the college sector, as we are in other sectors, and I am optimistic about where colleges will end up in the future. As they evolve their offering, they are better aligning it with the needs of the local and national economy and the needs of learners.

The first thing to say is that the rebaselining exercise that was carried out with the SFC was requested by the sector. It was made very clear to colleges that, in doing that, there would be winners and losers.

I know that we have three and a half hours, but I could take up most of that time on this subject. I have said before that, in the long term, the careers element of the Withers report will be the most important part of the entire review that he carried out. There is absolutely no doubt that we are coming up short in our careers offering. There is a collective responsibility for that—it is not just the responsibility of careers advisers or teachers. One of the biggest influences—indeed, the biggest influence—on young people when it comes to making career choices is parents. It is a real problem if parents are not alive to all the opportunities that are out there—for example, if they are prejudiced against apprenticeships. We see the result of that in the apprenticeship attrition rates and in the college and university drop-out rates.

Funnily enough, quite a lot of work is being done on the issue, but it is the area of reform that I am most optimistic about delivering on quickly. We have a vehicle that was put together—the careers services collaborative—to bring every aspect of the careers service and everyone who should be influencing people’s decisions on their careers around the table. Over the next few weeks and months, I will announce the new co-chairs of that group and meet with them to pursue the very points that you made, Mr Mason.

There is no doubt that the gender point remains a huge issue. Prejudices exist in schools and in families—the idea that there are some careers that are for boys and some careers that are for girls. A useful piece of work was done by the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board’s gender group. I intend to weave that into all our reform as a matter of course, because it was really useful in relation to looking at and addressing these issues.

On the point about universities, we all know that the push for academic performance with a view to young people going to university remains the overarching approach in some institutions. However, that is not the case in many schools; there are many enlightened schools that are embracing different ways of coming at the issue. That works best where there are careers advisers sitting in the school, doing what they do with the knowledge of the landscape; where Developing the Young Workforce is operating in the school to complement that work; and where the school leadership is focused on the right outcome for every child and not simply on trying to get them to go to university.

There is lots of good practice. My job over the next few months is to try to pull that together and to get everyone to take responsibility for their part in this. It is not just about schools; it is about the careers advice that is available in colleges, universities and the home. We need to fundamentally address and meet the challenge of making sure that our young people have the best information available to them so that they can make the right choice for them.

You are right, convener; I will respond to the committee’s report in detail, but I will update the committee as far as I can today.

My officials have continued to explore the matter over the past two months. That work has included meetings with Universities Scotland, the SFC and the commissioner to understand the specifics of how using such a number would work in practice. My officials have also had a meeting with the Scottish Information Commissioner to garner his thoughts on that. It is fair to say that that would be extremely complex work. It would be cross cutting in nature and would involve sharing the personal, sensitive data of millions of individuals, so you will appreciate that it would need to be done properly.

I cannot go beyond that at this stage, but I hope that that gives the committee an understanding of how seriously we take the idea, as well as an assurance that we are exploring it actively.