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I do not—

But it was never designed to do that. I want to be clear: the bill is quite a narrow bill that will enable us to kick off the process of tackling those issues. That is what it will do.

Not at all.

I do not think that that is a fair description of the situation.

I agree with them about the need for agility, and I do not think that the current system is nearly agile enough. The member must have missed what I said in my opening remarks, because I am aware that James Withers called for a colleges-first approach, but that is not our starting point.

We believe that the best interests of the learner and the employer would be better served by a mixed economy of private and public training providers. I made it clear that I had reached that conclusion when I spoke at the annual conference of the Scottish Training Federation last year.

I was a little surprised to hear that some private training providers are still of the view that we will take a colleges-first approach, but I reinforced our position with the chief executive officer and chair of the training federation just last week, and I am meeting a group of its members shortly to tease out some of their concerns about the delivery of apprenticeships.

I have spent a lot of time looking at that point, because the Withers review recommended that we go with a colleges-first model, but the fact is that, in some instances, private training providers have a better offering, better kit and are able to bring everything together.

If you go to the Construction Industry Training Board’s national construction college at Inchinnan, you will see its offering. The Arnold Clark motor trade training facility’s offering is stronger than that of many of our colleges. There is a balance to be struck between the colleges’ strengths in delivery and those of the private training providers. That is the road that we are going down.

The role of colleges remains important. There are opportunities—I do not want to go into too much detail, because conversations are taking place—for colleges to come together to create centres of excellence in particular disciplines, and there is an appetite for that. They could come together to take on the role of managing agents, perhaps. That is another opportunity that arises from this move, so that the moneys that the committee has heard about remain much more within the public sector. All those conversations are well under way, and—as I keep going back to—we are open to making that change. The bill allows us to deal with the issues that have been brought to us by James Withers and others.

Over the next few months, we will be able to move forward in ascertaining greater detail.

We think that SDS has taken a figure from the highest end of the range that we provided and added on a bit to arrive at the figure of £30 million that has been quoted. However, we do not believe that the bill’s implementation will cost anything like that.

We have a responsibility to interrogate the figures to the nth degree to get all the detail that is required. We are talking about one-off costs. Let us say that the figure that we end up with is £15 million, which would be midway between the lowest and highest points that are cited. That figure would be taken into account over an extended time period. If you judge that in context, the cost of £15 million, or whatever it might be, would cover a five-year or 10-year period and would not be set against one year’s budget; it would be a one-off item of expenditure.

I want to make it clear that, whatever the amount of money is, we will look to fund the cost internally within the Government, and it will not be to the detriment of apprenticeship funding. We will come back to the committee with a very accurate figure.

I absolutely take on board that point, if it has that concern. One of the good pieces of work that was done by SAAB, which was led by Natalie Buxton, was a review of gender issues across the landscape, and I am pleased that Natalie has agreed to continue to work with us, because we want to weave that into all the reform work—not to have it as a separate workstream, but to weave it in. I will absolutely take away that concern about women in business organisations, and I commit to meeting Women in Enterprise to hear directly the specific concerns that it has raised.

Forgive me if I am being presumptuous, but I do not think that anyone in this room thinks that Withers was just an opinion—a point of view. It was an extensive piece of work that was carried out by a highly credible and respected individual. I do not know about other members but, at the end of my reading of the Withers report, I realised that I had sat nodding in agreement with pretty much everything. The work that I have done in the period since then, engaging with business and various stakeholders, has reinforced that.

To come back to your point, Mr Adam, about some of the evidence from SDS, the chief executive was, clearly, proud of the fact that 76 per cent of apprentices complete their apprenticeships, and I recognise that that is a better performance than elsewhere on these islands. However, I am not proud of the fact that almost one in four apprentices does not complete. I do not think that that is success. Some of the retention rates in a number of our colleges are not good enough. We have to aspire to do better.

There are lots of factors with regard to young people not completing college or apprenticeships. Often, those are outwith the control of those who are charged with delivering the programmes. Members of the committee know that the way in which we measure college retention is a bit unfair on the colleges. Nevertheless, we need to improve completion rates.

That is where the read-across to other areas of reform comes in. Getting that careers offering right is important because, at the moment, we have too many square pegs in round holes. That is what is happening in reality. It is one of the major contributory factors to the rate of lack of completion.

I do not want to focus entirely on SDS and apprenticeship delivery, because Withers set a challenge for everyone—and we have all been challenged, particularly Government. I have held up my hands and said that I think that his criticism is justified and that we can do better. We need to see that level of self-awareness across the landscape.

I was struck by something that the committee might be interested in. Construction is a remarkably important sector for the country and its economy. The Construction Industry Training Board tells me that around 18,000 young people go to college in Scotland every year to study construction but that only 15 per cent of those go on to work in construction. That is an example of some of the ideas that have arisen from the reform work and it challenges us to ask ourselves why that is the case and what lies behind it. If people are going to do courses, they should surely be ones that they are interested in and that will deliver to meet their needs and those of the economy. We must ensure that we have the workforce that we need, not for tomorrow but for now.

We must be honest with ourselves, because the numbers show that we are not getting it right and we must all ask what we should do to tackle that. I absolutely agree with Mr Rennie’s point about immediate challenges, but if we do not take the opportunity that Withers has presented to us and that the bill presents, and if we do not recognise the concerns that have been articulated, what will we do then? Are we saying that we are not going to respond to the places where we are coming up short? Are we going to let this slide because we are in challenging times and it is too difficult? That is not where I am. We must address some of the immediate challenges, but we absolutely must take a strategic view of the post-16 landscape and get to the point where the young people who are best suited to go to university are doing that—perhaps by doing graduate apprenticeships—and the young people who should be going into apprenticeships if that is the right thing for them are in the right apprenticeships. That is what the overarching reform is about.

I will bring in Andrew Mott.