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I will clarify something. You started by talking about private training providers. However, we are talking about managing agents, not private training providers, and they do not deliver the training, but subcontract it. We should be clear about that, because there are many fine private training providers out there.

I have been clear today about my long-standing concerns about the role of managing agents. I need to be very careful and say that some managing agents carry out some really welcome and necessary activities. I commend the committee for getting out of them the information that it did when it took evidence last week, because we found it more challenging, over a period of time, to get that information out of all the relevant bodies.

As I said, to be blunt, the landscape is very fragmented, with every component part of the system pushing its significance, relevance and importance. That issue has come out in the evidence. I recognise that, in the current economic climate, it is inevitable that people will say that there are immediate problems that need to be confronted. I contend that we are confronting some of them, particularly in relation to the economy—we might come to that later in the session. What the bill delivers was deemed to be necessary by James Withers. That has not changed—we need to make fundamental structural changes to the offering, regardless of the immediate circumstances in which we find ourselves.

I stress that there are two separate things. There is the immediate work that we are doing in response to some of the challenges, but the bill is about creating a coherent post-16 landscape, which is widely recognised as being necessary.

Our ambition is certainly to give it to you as quickly as possible, but I anticipate that we would be able to do so before the stage 1 debate.

I will take Glasgow as an example. It has three colleges that are specific to the city. Two of those might be described as doing the typical community work that you would expect of colleges. That is their strength. The other is quite unique. It is something between a university and a college, and it is unique in having substantial commercial income. It attracts international students in a way that the other two colleges do not.

Given the principals who are in place at the moment, I am confident that, through the appointment process for chairs, we will manage to ensure that we attract the kind of strong individual who I want to chair our colleges—the kind of individual who will hold principals to account but will also see the bigger picture. Having heard yesterday in Glasgow about the skills planning work that is going on, I think that there is a coherent vision not just for Glasgow, but for Lanarkshire and the area that is covered by West College Scotland.

It was sent after last week’s evidence session. To be honest and absolutely candid with you, I was not aware that there had been any drop-off in engagement. I was quite surprised to hear that. I have provided an explanation for it, but it came off the back of the evidence, which we reacted to.

I absolutely share the concern that you are telling me that the committee has about it. I totally share it.

The reality here, from my perspective, is quite concerning. I will give the committee a couple of examples, because the evidence that you received certainly caught the interest of the college sector. I talked to a couple of colleges about this, and the numbers are really quite stark.

One college, for example, gets 48 per cent of the £8,700 that was referred to to the committee. However, it then draws down, over a three-year period, £16,000 of credits in order to deliver the training. Plumbing is a particularly intensive course; it can sometimes be one to three or even one to one, as it goes through.

Another college that I know of gets 46 per cent of the £9,500 that it is pulling down. In this instance, circa £5,000 of the money is retained, and college credits are utilised to deliver the training. I am really uncomfortable about that as a use of public money.

The managing agents will tell you that they do lots of good stuff, and CITB is doing some really good collaborative work with us. I do not have a black-and-white view of it. The English system is quite black and white—for example, it caps the amount of money that managing agents can retain.

We have covered the point about what the bill does and does not do. At all times in my engagement with all the affected agencies’ staff, I have made the point that I want to hear their thoughts. I have heard directly from them on how engagement works currently and what could be done differently.

There has been a mixed bag of responses, and I accept that some people have expressed concern. Overwhelmingly, the feedback has been constructive and their point of view has been to say, “Well, you know what? We could have done this, or you might want to look at that.”

I will give an example of that, if I may. One of the things that exercises me is that I am not sure that the current apprenticeship offering entirely captures the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises, which are the lifeblood of this country. There are two conflicting statistics—forgive me if I get them the wrong way round—but SDS says that 92 per cent of its apprenticeships are with SMEs, but the Federation of Small Businesses says that 83 per cent of its members have never had an apprentice. That statistic troubles me. There is a disconnect there.

One of the issues for small businesses that was brought home in a series of pilots in 2015, I think, is the hassle for small businesses and the grief that they say they would face around human resources and training and so on. It all becomes too much for them to take on apprentices even when their business needs it for succession planning. It was actually a staff member who came to us and suggested a possible solution, and we are looking at that.

I absolutely accept that there will be concerns, as has been expressed to the committee. I have been open with the convener about what we will do in response to that. I have been as open as I possibly can be. I have met staff members at a session who then met me at something else and said, “I did not feel that I could raise the issue on the day, but I just wanted to say.” That has all been taken on board.

No, but he did say what I have just said, and I would echo it. The SFC has a new chief executive, and we are about to have a new chair. We will transfer across the expertise of the senior staff in SDS who deal with apprentices, and we have an opportunity this year to enhance the board. There are a number of board appointments to be made and that, self-evidently, will involve people with expertise in employer engagement. We will start with some of the evidence that the committee has received, but there are other possibilities, too.

The organisation will be bolstered numbers-wise and expertise-wise, and I have absolutely no doubt that it is capable of dealing with these matters. Indeed, it is committed to doing so. It has been working with the Government over a period and is already looking at what that might look like in practice. Hopefully, the Parliament will pass the bill at stage 1, and we will have time between now and implementation to ramp things up at pace.

I understand the point that you are making, Mr Rennie, about some of the challenges in the college and university sectors and so on, and I am not going to pretend that this is not a challenging time all round, but I go back to what I said before. The bill was a good idea at the time—it was well supported, and the principles in the consultation were supported, too—and it remains a good idea. In fact, it is, in some regards, even more important now that we progress the bill.

I do not accept that it is a distraction. It is a necessary piece of work that needs to be carried out to knock the post-16 landscape into the kind of shape that we need it to be in for the future of the country, both for the benefit of our learners and for the needs of the economy. It is an essential piece of work that needs to take place, and we can and will do that while dealing with the day job.

I do not entirely accept that description. A number of things were done on the back of the review. For example, there is currently a pilot online application service for students to apply for disabled students allowance, which is on track to be rolled out this year. Some work has been done on updating the student portal. However, I accept that there have been issues. I hope that those who might be viewing that element of the consultation with a degree of cynicism recognise that I would not commit to it if I were not serious about delivering on it. I am keen that we engage properly on this.

There are a number of areas. We have done well with care-experienced students, but we can perhaps do better. You and I have previously discussed apprenticeships, Ms Duncan-Glancy. I am not convinced that we are doing enough in that space. It is my commitment, in the year that I have remaining in the Parliament, to do as much as I can to identify what more might be required. That should be informed by the lived experience of those who have gone through the system or are attempting to navigate the system.

We are always looking at what works elsewhere. I know that my officials have been talking to their counterparts in the UK, Wales and Northern Ireland Governments, but the set-ups are not comparable. A fundamental change would be required, perhaps through primary legislation, in order to enable us to do that, which is the frustration here.