I think we've got to bear in mind when the students come to us—certainly when they're level 1, level 2 learners—that a number of them have come from school and probably not done as well as they'd hoped at their GCSEs. Okay, they've come to us, they're trying to build themselves back up, build their skills back up, and adding another qualification on top, adding the Welsh bac on top, whether that's foundation or national, on top of what they have to do, which is a programme they've come and decided to do—think of the pressure that increases upon them. Plus the fact is that they are resitting; they're probably having to resit GCSE English and maths as well. That's a huge volume of work for a learner who's probably come from a low base to begin with and who hasn't achieved what they wanted to. The whole idea when we bring them in at that level is that we want to build their confidence, build them up and, hopefully, eventually they will go to the stage where maybe the Welsh bac will be beneficial to them, when they've potentially hopefully progressed to level 3. But I think it's questionable, certainly at national and foundation. And the important point that Dafydd raised was that there's a lot of repetition there in school, pre 16 to post 16 at those levels as well. So, learners don't come in banging at the door saying, 'We want to do the Welsh bac because it's exactly the same or very similar to what we did when we were in school.' They want to see some difference, they want to see some progress, and that's not necessarily the case in the foundation and national levels.
And we know that delivery in schools is of variable quality, so obviously that impacts on how learners have experienced it and perhaps how they view it when they get to FE college.
Okay. A question, then, just to ColegauCymru: to what extent do you believe that universities in the main understand the value of the Welsh bac?
Well, we don't think they do, really, especially the experience we have with some of our learners to go to Russell Group universities. They do allow sometimes that you can drop a grade. I talked earlier about my own daughter who was allowed to drop a grade in order to get into a Russell Group university because she had the Welsh bac as well, but it was a very paper-based exercise. But I think it is mixed, and it does depend on the admissions tutors and the areas that they're going into in universities. In some areas, and certainly the local universities around here—University of South Wales, Cardiff Metropolitan University—value it in a great number of subjects, particularly in sport, when our students go to Cardiff Met, and business studies, when our learners go to USW. It is valued by them and they accept it, but when people go further afield—and we're always trying to push our learners beyond. Where they can afford to go away to university, we encourage that. But some of the universities are not valuing the Welsh baccalaureate.