We publish our funding allocations, and we published the 2019-20 allocations on 4 June. For 2019-20, we're allocating £149 million, and, as David said, this is the first year that we've been able to start putting funding, additional funding, in from the Diamond recommendations for investment in the sector. So, that means we've been able to increase our recurrent teaching funding by £7 million—not a significant amount, but it's a start. And we have maintained QR, which is our funding for research, quality research, and postgraduate research, at least at the same levels of £76 million, as it's been that in previous years. We've increased part-time funding by £1 million to £26 million, and we've started to increase support for expensive subjects—that's medicine, dentistry and conservatoire provision—and higher cost subjects—those are the sciences and the STEM. So, we made a start on that and increased that support by about £6 million to £20 million in total. And, in addition to that, we have strategic funding that we're maintaining for Reaching Wider projects and the Sêr Cymru project. And then, in addition to our recurrent funding, we have had strategic funding in our remit letters for the last two years. So, we're developing programmes for civic mission, community engagement, collaborations between higher education and further education, and, more recently, we had funding at the end of March to start to implement the recommendations of Graeme Reid's report for research investment, and also for developing mental health and well-being. That strategic funding is very welcome, but to be able to build those activities into our core funding, which we hope Diamond will bring, would be more sustainable for institutions.
Thank you. Now, the Minister talks of one skills system. How do your allocations to the 2019-20 academic year support and incentivise collaboration between HE and FE?
So, there are probably two dimensions to this. First of all, we have provided £3.5 million of separate funding specifically targeted to improve and increase collaboration between HE and FE. So, we put out a circular inviting proposals for that, and it was competitive, so we funded what was the best of the proposals, and we constrained it to be available only to pump-prime new activity or to add value to existing activity, but not just to keep things ticking over. We had seven bids submitted from across the three Welsh regions on a whole range of activities, which we probably haven't got time to go into now. I've got a long list here, but, for example, in south-east Wales, the University of South Wales is leading on a bid partnering with Cardiff University, Cardiff Met, with the Open University and all the FE players in the region. So, we were really pleased, actually. We tried to get it within regions, because that's how you get the biggest impact for learners in the area and also for smaller enterprises in terms of innovation work. So, that is a specific bit of funding designed to incentivise HE-FE collaboration. And then we direct fund a couple of FE institutions for delivery of higher education for historical reasons, and we also have our funding going through to support franchise activity between HE and FE. There are about 5,000 students who are studying HE programmes under franchise in FE colleges in Wales, and our funding method has, historically for some time now, protected that money. So, we try to prevent universities from taking the money out of franchise and onto campus, because we think it's important to try to encourage local provision within particular localities. And, certainly in areas where public transport infrastructure is perhaps not what it might be, for people to move to universities can be quite a disincentive, so—. But we encourage it that way as well.
Thank you. Then, finally from me, the council's remit letter for the 2019-20 academic year from the Minister does ask you to consider how you'd increase openness and transparency around the use of fee income. So, what are the issues here, and how will you take this forward?