With regard to the ongoing challenge of recruiting international students, of course, this is not helped by the determination of the UK Government to include students as part of the immigration figures. Nobody sees international students as immigrants, only Theresa May and the Home Office. Poll after poll after poll show that the public do not view international students in this way, and international students come here, they study here, they learn their skills here and the vast, vast majority of them then take those skills back to their home country. So this idea that, somehow, they should be included in these figures is highly damaging—highly damaging—to the HE sector, not just here in Wales, but across the United Kingdom. 

I have had meetings with Sam Gyimah and my Scottish counterparts in this regard to talk about international student recruitment as well as ongoing opportunities for British students to study abroad, particularly as part of the Erasmus+ programme. I am due to meet with them again shortly. I've invited them all here to Cardiff, and I'm very glad that they have taken the opportunity to agree to that invitation, where, once again, we will sit as a group of education Ministers to try and form a common understanding of the challenges that face us all and to try and put those messages across to the UK Government. 

With regard to European student recruitment into Wales, it should not be unexpected that we have seen a drop in those students as our student support package has changed. It was an inevitable consequence of a very generous offer that EU students were able to avail themselves of under the previous regime; that financial incentive has now been removed, as we move through our Diamond packages. Actually, the year before, we outperformed the other UK nations in terms of international and EU student recruitment, so it should not be unexpected. But that does mean we have to redouble our efforts, alongside our partners in HEIs and FE colleges, to spread the message of the strong offer that we have here in Wales.

This is why I recently was with Global Wales in New York, alongside the vice-chancellor of Swansea University, hosting a Study in Wales event and, most recently, in Vietnam, where we were able to negotiate with the British Council a significant tranche of new Chevening scholarships—Wales universities having the most of them—to attract Vietnamese students to our country, and we will continue to support our university colleagues in their recruitment activities, where we can add value to them. 

This is initially a pilot for short periods of study abroad. As I said, this is a result of research that has been done by WISERD on behalf of the Welsh Government, because we feel that this is where there is the largest demand. Demand for international placements has been growing steadily in Wales, but at 2 per cent, we lag behind England and Scotland in the number of Welsh undergraduates who avail themselves of these opportunities. This is an attempt to supplement what we're already doing to increase those opportunities, especially for those students, as I said, from particularly disadvantaged backgrounds who have been least likely to apply for previous opportunities or for study abroad in the round.

We will continue to keep under review, given the financial constraints that we're currently working under in the higher education sector, whether we would move to a situation where we would fund entire degrees in international universities. We are not in a position to undertake that at this moment, because we believe that there are other pressing needs on the higher education budget in Wales, and our priority for the Diamond dividend is to reinvest in expensive subjects and to increase resources going into the sector here at home.