Bore da, Lynne, and thank you for the invitation to join you. Eluned and I are joined this morning by Huw Morris, who's the group director at SHELL—skills, higher education and lifelong learning—and Marie Knox, who is deputy director, overseeing European transition.
Okay, thank you very much, and thank you for coming. We'll go straight into questions, then, and the first questions are from Suzy Davies.
Thank you. I'd like to ask you both, if that's okay, a little bit about preparedness. But if I could start with higher education, I understand that—I don't know, it must be about 18 months ago now—Ken Skates told another committee in this place that there had been nine sector analyses done. Presumably, one of those was HE, because of the—well, Welsh Government had a presence, and still does, in Brussels, related to higher education. Apparently, those have now been superseded by work that's been done by Cardiff University. I don't know if you've got any comments on that research, or whether it's been brought to your attention yet.
Well, Suzy, following the vote, I was very keen that we work very closely with colleagues in higher education and further education, to get an understanding from on the ground about the potential impact. So, in terms of preparedness, we started that group in the September, and that work from that group, which includes both HE and FE, has been instrumental in helping the Government form its views, which were articulated in the Government's White Paper, 'Securing Wales' Future'. There has been ongoing work being done—as the debate in London and Europe becomes a little bit more clear, then it becomes a little less clear, and then a little bit more clear, but, bearing in mind the difficulties of working in an ever-changing field, we have been refining those approaches. Each institution has been looking at their own institution, because, as you can imagine, although we have an overview of the sector, the challenges are very different for individual institutions—so their exposure, for instance, to the number of European Union students that they have at their college, or the work that they might be doing with Horizon 2020, or their success—and there has been considerable success in the HE field in securing structural funds for various projects—the exposure and the potential impact of leaving the EU, in a 'no deal' or in a 'deal' scenario, is very, very different. But I don't know if, Huw, you want to talk any further.