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I have to confess that we have not considered that. I have enough on my plate without taking on more. However, I think that our universities will always be thinking about those things. They are pretty creative places and they realise that the challenges that they face will require them to develop new offerings. For example, graduate apprenticeships will come to the fore more and more. However, there will always be an emphasis on the arts and various other things in our universities. If they choose to offer combined degrees in those areas because they believe that there is a need for them, I am sure that they will do that.

I have come across a number of very rounded young people who have been developed under the modern apprenticeship scheme, not just in terms of the skills that they have learned, but in a wider sense. I visited an aerospace company in Ayrshire, and every single person who showed me round that day had come through the apprenticeship programme. They were amazing young people. The young women who were going into schools to try to entice girls into engineering were incredibly impressive. Those young people were developing skill sets as engineers, but also developing as individuals. I think that we should look to the apprenticeship programme to do a bit more of that.

However, it is important that the implementation of all of that is done in partnership. That is why we have tried—for example, with the establishment of the tripartite group with the colleges—to have a platform where we can discuss all that in detail. We can have overarching principles and a direction of travel, but delivering it will require the buy-in of the colleges and universities. We need their input because they will understand best how that can be put into practice.

We are trying to take a much better partnership approach so that we have the ability to say, “Wait a minute—if we did it this way, it would be more productive.” We are in the early days of that, but that is how we are going to take this forward.

There is a conversation to be had with employers about what form that takes: whether they might put money into the system or whether we need to do something to assist in that. I absolutely recognise that. I am being as open as I can, convener. The situation that we are in is not ideal, but I believe that there will be discussions on the offering that we talked about earlier, including on how it is delivered. It might be that we need to find a mechanism to provide that opening for some employers.

If you will bear with me, I have some detail on that, which I am trying to find in my papers.

They were all from the university sector, unfortunately; none came from elsewhere. Obviously, we are looking into that. That may have been because of the timescales.

One institution withdrew its application. I think that, ultimately, in total—I stand to be corrected—only one project or possibly two projects did not progress. All the funded projects are international in scope, and 13 involve European partnerships. The funding ranges from enabling involvement in the European Union strategic network to creating opportunities for disadvantaged groups through short-term projects.

I fully accept that the programme is in its infancy, but we would expect that with something that is being piloted.

At the risk of passing the buck, I guess that you might want to ask them whether it has been beneficial. I think that they would say that it has been. I should say that the universities have seen the benefit as well. They have asked whether we would set up a similar group to engage with them directly.

The tripartite group has proved to be a helpful platform. It has probably taken longer than I expected to start to pay the dividends that I had hoped for, but it has provided an opportunity to have full and frank discussions about key topics on which the colleges feel that they would benefit from our taking a different approach. Having the SFC there to discuss the nuts and bolts of that has been helpful. There have been a number of meetings so far, some of which I have attended and some of which I have not been able to get to. There have been a number of areas on which we have made progress, but, more than anything, establishing the group was about developing a better collective understanding of the perspectives around the table.

I will give an example of that. Prior to our setting up the tripartite group, the colleges asked for flexibilities on their credit targets. They wanted the same money but a bit of flexibility as to how they used it. That flexibility was granted in part, but it was not as fully utilised as one might have expected or hoped. That was largely down to a lack of understanding—on both sides—of what that meant in reality and a lack of explanation. In essence, the colleges had asked for a one-size-fits-all approach that did not entirely suit all the individual colleges. There has been a bit of a shift so that, if there is an ask from the sector, it is fully understood, can be fully deployed and suits the interests of the majority. That is the way in which the matter has been taken forward.

We have been considering a number of areas, such as increased credit flexibilities and the timescales for, and timing of, decision making. Some of the decisions that the SFC made did not align with the timetable that the colleges worked to. That seems like a simple thing to fix. It has not been entirely simple, but we are getting there.

We have also been looking closely at the disposal of assets. Treasury rules and other things mean that there has been no driver for colleges to dispose of assets that they do not need in order to invest in the fabric of their buildings or whatever. We are still working through an option to facilitate that and allow colleges to move forward. They are enthusiastic to get to an end point on that, which we are working towards.

The colleges are driving a lot of what is being discussed, as they have a number of asks and suggestions. When there is a tangible return, I would like us to write jointly to the committee to explain what has been delivered. That would be useful, but I will need the other parties’ agreement to do that.

Do you mean what I talked in my statement about introducing?

That has not been considered, but it is a fair ask. A couple of months ago, I had a useful conversation with the Scottish Trades Union Congress. In the public sector bodies, we are quite well engaged with trade unions. I have met them and there is engagement with the staff cohort, so the unions have the opportunity to feed in ideas and concerns.

In relation to employer engagement, which we discussed earlier, I have been asked about ensuring that the voice of staff is heard. That is a fair point, and I am mulling over how to do that. The employers that were in the room at the time heard that point, too. Often, the best ideas come from people who work at the coalface and not just from the management of companies. We need to develop that. We have not taken forward direct involvement for unions, but I will take that away to consider.

I have engaged directly with the UHI about its future as an entity. I have also met the individual college principals. The concept of the UHI is absolutely committed to, but, collectively, we all recognise that it will have to evolve to meet some of the challenges. The UHI is doing a substantial piece of work internally to consider what that would look like. That piece of work recognises that, even within the UHI, the cost base of delivering in some localities—for example, in island settings—will be higher than in others.

I visited the college in Shetland to which you referred and met its principal. Specific to Shetland and to other elements of the UHI, additional support has been provided by the SFC over a period of time, in recognition of some of the challenges.

I know that the SFC is very much alive to the situation at UHI Shetland, but that does not mean that any college can continue in an unsustainable way in the long term. Colleges have to become more sustainable for their own good, although there is a recognition of the additional costs. We are very much alive to that. The SFC is directly engaged with UHI Shetland, and it worked very closely on the merger for the other college that you referred to. It is right and proper that, in the interests of the public purse, we expect the colleges to become as sustainable as possible, and I absolutely stand by that. However, there is, of course, a recognition of the additional costs.

We need to see more of what is already happening in the UHI. For example, there is considerable collaboration between individual colleges in recognition of the fact that they might not be able to deliver every discipline in every specific locality. It may be that some apprentices will travel—as they currently do from Shetland to Inverness—for some of their training and that UHI Shetland perhaps becomes more of an aquaculture centre, for example. There is already work between the colleges to do all of that.

We must also grow and develop the university offer in the Highlands. We need these centres to move more towards the delivery of higher education courses than is currently the case. We have a commitment to the future of the UHI, but we must see elements of it becoming more sustainable in the long term.

That question has come up a few times. We will follow through on that recommendation, not because SAAB has not done good work, because it has—I touched on its fantastic work on gender, which we will take forward. However, as James Withers recognised, we need to broaden out the employer’s voice in that area. I have had direct conversations with the Federation of Small Businesses because I want to see how we can expand the offering to its members. There is a bit of a contradiction. Figures from SDS show that a very large number of apprenticeships are offered within small and medium-sized enterprises, but the FSB tells me that very few of its members have ever had an apprentice. We are not planning to completely rebalance that, but there is something that we need to look at there.

The issue is relevant to rural areas and to shared apprenticeship models. Unfortunately, the previous pilots did not work out. I spoke earlier about ideas that we heard from the staff of some of the agencies, and they have come forward with an idea that might allow us to look at that again. Rightly or wrongly, some quite significant employers have sometimes felt excluded from all of that. We are trying to ensure that we have the full range of employer voices helping to inform this.

Although we will follow that recommendation from the review, I envisage that quite a lot of the people who currently participate in SAAB will continue having some say, at both a local and a national level, in our thinking on skills delivery.