input: Text: Lynne Neagle AM: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. We've received apologies for absence from Suzy Davies and there is no substitute. Janet Finch-Saunders is joining us from the Assembly offices in Colwyn Bay via video conference. Can I ask Members if there are any declarations of interest, please? No. Okay. Item 2, then, this morning is a post-legislative scrutiny session on the Higher Education (Wales) Act 2015. I'm very pleased to welcome Kirsty Williams AM, Minister for Education, and Huw Morris, who is director of the skills, higher education and lifelong learning group in Welsh Government. Thank you, both, for attending, and thank you for the paper that you provided in advance. I will just start the questioning by asking whether you are planning to repeal the 2015 higher education Act, or will it be amended by the post-compulsory education and training Bill? Kirsty Williams AM: Thank you very much, Chair. I'm very pleased to be with the committee again this morning, although it's in slightly unusual circumstances. As a piece of post-legislative scrutiny, this was a Bill that was taken forward by a different Minister in a different administration, but I think it is really valuable work in the context of the question you just set out: what can we learn from the implementation of this piece of legislation as we move forward with our reform journey and with this Government and my proposals to introduce a new commission for tertiary education? There is much, at the moment, that lies within the 2015 Act that we will look to bring forward into the new legislation, but there are certainly experiences—and I'm sure we'll come on to some of the evidence that has been received about what's worked, what perhaps hasn't worked—that we all want to reflect on and be mindful of as we take forward the new Bill, including the report of this committee as part of it. So, it is our intention that this Bill will be superceded by the new PCETR Bill. Lynne Neagle AM: Okay, thank you. We've got a series of questions now from Siân
  Question: What was the current situation about HEFCW's powers of intervention?
  Answer:
output: Dawn Bowden AM challenged that informal measures or actions had been taken in their role as regulator, and Kirsty Williams AM explained that the commission was expected to be able to have a series of abilities to intervene, from the soft, flexible type, which was non-punitive but actually allowed people to participate in it. Meanwhile, Huw Morris suggested that specific mechanisms and informal interactions with FE college principals, with the work-based learning provider network, etc had been used to hopefully achieve some alignment in the tertiary sector. Also, as a loan-based system of student finance, a system of block grant allocations and conditions could be attached to those grant allocations by HEFCW when things went wrong.