Plaid, you get away with amendment 4, as you characterise it as a new sub-point. To be clear, just because we welcome Welsh Government's resources, it doesn't mean that we think it's enough. I'm not even convinced that they're additional, but I'll come to that in due course. But let's start with point 2 of our motion:

'students deserve value for money in return for the investment they make in their higher and further education.'

How has COVID affected the college student? Well, we still might be seeing higher numbers of entrants choosing to stay at home at a time of great uncertainty about travel, lockdown and, of course, employment. Some may not want to run the risk of running up the debts that come with going to university just when the jobs market, particularly for young people, is looking more fragile. And what will they get? In the evidence to the Children, Young People and Education Committee, ColegauCymru said that there were expensive challenges ahead, especially if the number of entrants was to go up. The £23 million from the Welsh Government to meet the COVID need will certainly have helped with challenges such as achieving social distancing or meeting IT equipment needs, but you can't summon up more experienced tutors out of nowhere to meet the need that is created by social distancing. The use of some of that money to transfer some teaching online is better than not having it at all, but it's still not the same as a face-to-face experience. And while online learning may suit some students—I don't think we should overlook that fact—how is it going to impact on those courses with a high level of practical teaching or experience in the workplace?

Let's not forget either that Welsh Government was planning to cut the money going to further education's contract partners for work-based learning—something highlighted by the Welsh Conservatives—reducing even further the scope for students to really benefit from building relationships and skills with employers from a wide range of businesses and innovators. If Welsh Government can't guarantee enough funding for appropriate equipment, software, licences, connectivity for students to work on campus or at home, it certainly has no business undermining colleges' own commercial activities, which could be funding them instead.

The value-for-money question is perhaps even more acutely defined for university students. If you are going to accrue a minimum of £27,000-worth of debt for tuition in order to do an undergraduate course, you're going to want £27,000-worth of quality education. And again, blended learning may be part of that quality offer, but, as I say, if you're paying that kind of money, I think you really want to be able to see the whites of your tutor's eyes and to have them there to engage in discussion. And that's why we put the emphasis, in point 6(b) of our motion, on live streaming, which is for colleges as well, by the way. By all means, make lectures and seminars available on catch-up, but, for supervised learning, you need the immediacy of human interaction for it to be worthy of the description 'supervised'. And what we can't have is 10 hours of live tuition replaced by three hours of recorded online lectures, as was recently reported to me is happening in one of our universities. I'm sure that that's a one-off, but it has happened. And while we might all find the fact that QAA frameworks offer quality assurance for university courses, there's not really yet been the opportunity to formally evaluate the effect on quality of the different delivery of those courses.

Meanwhile, the National Union of Students survey told us that 27 per cent of university students couldn't access online learning even if they have the equipment; 15 per cent said they didn't even have the equipment; 38 per cent said that the quality of online provision was not of a good standard; and, unsurprisingly, two thirds of students said that COVID was negatively affecting the vocational elements of their courses. Some of these university students, of course, will also have felt the effect of lecturers' strikes, depriving them of hours of supervised learning for which they have paid. So, it's little wonder that some are demanding refunds. 

This part of the motion doesn't just talk about value for money, it talks about investment, and I hope that we will hear from the Minister a response to the question, if you like, about human investment. Again the NUS pointed out that none of the money coming from Welsh Government was ring-fenced for student hardship. And while I am genuinely pleased that there's been no clawback of maintenance finance, the inability of students to work during this period to supplement their income has resulted in some real hardship, especially for those from poorer backgrounds, those with a poor relationship with their family or who simply live too far away from the family home to leave their university town during lockdown.

Members, I'm going to have to leave point 6(c) of the motion to others, I'm afraid. I hope the Minister will say a few words on it in her response, but if I'm going to progress my final point, and give others a moment to say something, I'm going to have to come back to it at a different time.

My final point is this: colleges and universities need money to provide the best quality education. They have taken a financial hammering over COVID, despite £50 million being effectively reclaimed from the COVID pot by the education Minister, and distributed accordingly to the universities and our further education institutions. That certainly helped with easing cash-flow problems. The student finance brought forward by the UK Government has also helped with cash-flow problems, so it's been a welcome intervention. But the most recent prediction for Welsh universities, for the coming academic year, is a loss of £400 million to £500 million, which is an extraordinary sum by anybody's measure.

The £23 million for FE and £27 million for HE mask the fact that the education budget itself was cut by £47 million to go into the Welsh Government COVID pot—completely understandably—along with various consequentials from the additional UK money found for education. And I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm, hopefully with some evidence, about how much of the consequential for FE and HE has been passed on to those sectors.

The Plaid amendment suggests that the Welsh Government must make sure that the sectors have enough money to do what they need to do and provide that quality education, and, yes, we agree. That is not the same, however, as saying that Welsh Government, and even the UK Government, should be responsible for finding all that money. Both these sectors can, and do, make money for themselves, and Welsh Government decisions should make it easier, not harder, for them to do that. I've already mentioned the threat to one income stream for further education, but Welsh universities are still waiting, after Professor Reid's recommendations all those years ago, for help to facilitate the kind of strategic partnership bids that would give them much better access to a high level of innovation or QR funding from UK Government, and elsewhere.

It would still be fair to say that both sectors have been underfunded by Welsh Government over the years, and FE has been more exposed to that, I think, especially at the end of the last Assembly term and the beginning of this one, because it's more directly dependent on the public purse. Universities have more scope for commercial work, but they've also overborrowed, and that leaves them with a different vulnerability. Some universities, however, may want to explain why they're holding on to such phenomenal unrestricted reserves, some of them more than 100 per cent of their income.

The argument that I expect to hear during the course of this debate will be that giving students a rebate will just add to the financial worries of the institutions. What I want to know is: why should it be students who have to carry the cost of COVID when, despite undoubted efforts by leaders in both sectors, students themselves fear that they are not getting the full education they were promised and so many of them will be getting into debt to do that? Thank you.