Okay, thank you very much. Our next questions are from Michelle Brown.
Good morning, Cabinet Secretary; good morning, Minister. Your paper to the committee says that there's a need for more analysis and research into the outcomes for learners from different backgrounds. At the same time, Welsh universities have declared £104 million towards equality and opportunity activity for 2018. If you don't have the analysis, how can you be sure that the investment that's being made by the Welsh universities is actually going to have a positive outcome in the right places and lead to better outcomes for underrepresented groups?
Okay. Well, of course, that would be one of the duties of the new commission set up as a result of our post-compulsory education and training reforms that I would anticipate. The universities are required, under the Higher Education (Wales) Act 2015, to produce fee and access statements, and the £104 million that they have to take off their fees to be able to promote this work—those fee and access plans have to be signed off by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales as being robust and truly promoting equality of opportunity. They're also there to promote access and the opportunities for people to aspire to higher education. We are looking at—. It's quite early days, still, for that new regulatory regime to come through, so we ask HEFCW, when I meet with HEFCW, about the adequacy of those plans. Equity is an important part of my approach to higher education. That's why we're introducing the Diamond reforms—so that those from the poorest backgrounds can be adequately financially supported and are not put off from going to a university. And we're also looking—. I would envisage under PCET a better mechanism of tracking destinations for learners. So, for instance, in the FE sector, we're introducing new joint monitoring for outcomes for sixth-form learners and FE learners, because we've never tracked them in the same way. So, we're introducing that now so that we can see the destinations for those two sectors, but the PCET reforms give us an opportunity to do that right across the board. Huw, is there anything else I need to add?
Well, I'd just reinforce the point the Cabinet Secretary made about the fee and access plans being the vehicle through which we get universities to specify what they're going to do, and the funding council tracks that. To make sure that we're doing that in a full and appropriate manner, periodically, we ask for that system to be reviewed. I think it was in 2017 that the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods—the research arm of Cardiff University—reviewed the system and looked at how widening access was being promoted by different institutions and whether that was working in all parts of Wales. The report from that group was considered by one of the sub-committees in HEFCW and they are revising the process as a consequence. So, I think we can be confident that there are ambitious targets that are monitored, and, periodically, the system as a whole is reviewed.