Well, that's straight into what I was going to ask, really, about what you think the factors are that led to this 8 per cent or 9 per cent drop in EU students applying to study in Wales, where we see a 2 per cent increase in England. Is that it, or are there other things that you've taken into account? What's your assessment of the reasons behind this?
It's very difficult to be definitive about the reasons, but I think there are probably two. The one that Bethan has already indicated, which is the change in student support arrangements for EU students, will have an effect of perturbation. That's probably relatively temporary—let's hope it is—as that settles down because, actually, the deal for EU students coming into Wales is no worse than that coming into England. Ours would be better because the fee level is slightly lower, but we do struggle in Wales in terms of the Anglocentric nature of the media and so on. So, getting the messages out is a challenge. The other dimension is that when you're in a highly competitive recruitment market, you have to do what you can to look attractive. Part of that is about being able to invest in facilities, and particularly buildings and kit, and the relative levels of investment between Wales and England over quite a long period of time now probably have an impact on that. Certainly, anecdotally I know, from my own family, that a lot of the choices have been made in terms of the state of repair of campuses and so on. There's something rational about that, isn't there? If you've got a system that is relatively better invested, then you're likely to have a better student experience because the resources are likely to be better. So, that's not irrational. We saw a sort of similar but opposite effect when the £9,000 fee maximum limit came in, and some institutions, mostly in England—there was one in Wales—chose to pitch their fee levels really quite low, relative to that £9,000, and caught a cold in the student recruitment market because fee levels denote quality in the student mind. So, the price sensitivities work quite differently. So, again, if you've got a relatively better invested part of the system, then that might well be one of the reasons why it looks more attractive.
That latter factor would affect the whole of the cohort, not just the international recruitment, of course.
Indeed. Yes, indeed. The implementation of the Diamond recommendations is crucial to that because that's re-balancing where the policy of investment goes.