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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.

It is not so much about a public-private partnership approach, but I can talk about facilitating additional income from the private sector. In the college sector, the commercial income that colleges have been able to secure has almost hit a ceiling—their income never rises above a certain point. Some of our colleges, such as Forth Valley College and the City of Glasgow College, have done very well to address that challenge, and we have been looking at what they are doing that has been so successful that other colleges struggle with. We have identified a lack of capacity and resource in some of our colleges to get out and engage with the private sector, which is willing to put additional money in, subject to there being the right kind of training for its workforce. We are actively looking at what we can do to facilitate that kind of engagement. Does that answer your question?

That topic has come up at committee previously. An extensive effort has been made to tackle that thorny issue, which has dogged the college sector for the best part of a decade.

As a positive, I think that everybody who is involved recognises that continuing as they have is not, in any way, to be welcomed, to put it mildly. There is a commitment to try to move things on. We have made considerable progress on what that might look like, and we have progressed things to the point at which trade unions have been working in conjunction with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, and there has been a session on behaviours across the national bargaining process. That work is on-going.

Work has also been undertaken with College Employers Scotland to review the national recognition and procedure agreement and to consider how that could be strengthened to support improvements in national bargaining. However, two trade unions have served notice that they intend to resign from the current NRPA, as they no longer feel that it is fit for purpose, which leaves two unions that are aligned with it and two that are moving away from it. Unfortunately, we have an internal issue with the trade unions’ commitment to the processes. I would be deeply disappointed if we could not get into a better space. I still see that as an imperative, and the recognition is there from all parties.

Touch wood, things have quietened down in the sector. We have a long-term agreement with the lecturers and the employers, and I know that negotiations between support staff and employers have been on-going for some time. I am afraid that that is not much of an update, Mr Kidd, but that is where we are at.

So am I. On Monday, I met Baroness Smith from the UK Government, whose engagement with me I appreciated. I said two things to her about the issue: that I understood that difficult decisions had to be made in government in challenging financial circumstances, but that the decision was deeply disappointing and concerning. As Mr Adam has alluded to, the Turing scheme has been welcome. It has not been a replacement for Erasmus+, and it was never going to be, but it has been incredibly important and it has also been oversubscribed. I expected that the reduction in funding would be announced today, but I was not sure that it would be this early in the day. It will be the cause of significant concern, particularly for our universities and colleges.

Scotland’s share of the Turing funding has reduced over the three years that the scheme has been in operation, while the demand from Scottish institutions and organisations has increased. You will forgive me—I need to digest the announcement in its totality and have conversations with those who will be impacted by it, which I am sure will happen over the next few days—but there is no doubt that it is a significant setback.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.