During her budget statement on 4 December, the Scottish government’s Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government Shona Robison said:

…not only will we keep tuition free but we will increase total investment in eigher education by 3.5 per cent

That’s just not true. It was never true, as pretty much everyone pointed out at the same time.

The figure can’t be defended from any of the detail that was subsequently published. The actual change in investment in higher education, best we can tell, is equivalent to a 0.7 per cent real terms cut.

If you push at many of the headline figures relating to education and skills you can feel them collapse in a similar way. We’re a month out from the budget and we are still no clearer as to why what was announced and what appears to be happening are so far at odds.

All of which will make for a fascinating scrutiny session at the Holyrood Education, Children, and Young People Committee, due on Wednesday 8 January. A committee paper sets out where we might expect questions to land – and there is plenty for higher education.

The attached briefing from Universities Scotland, appended as Annex B, is helpful. The policy team has figured out that you can get to 3.5 per cent in cash terms if you vire £14.5m of funding associated with “SQA places” (which applies to students recruited during the admissions uncertainties of the pandemic and are due to graduate in 2025-26) to the main Scottish Funding Council pot. Nobody seems to know precisely what the fate of this fund will be, so it is very much to be hoped that we will get answers on Wednesday.

In the grand scheme of public spending, £14.5m isn’t a lot of money. The fact that the sector lobby is pushing hard on the fate of these funds underlines just how perilous the finances of some individual institutions are currently looking. Universities Scotland notes that:

in terms of teaching grants, the overall cut year-to-year was -3.6% in cash terms but at institutional level this ranged from -0.6% to -10% in cash terms.

There are requests that the funding council considers the impact at institutional level of funding allocations for 2025-26, and – even more unusually – the actions of the “clawback” system (where funds are removed from providers when student outcomes are shown not to be as expect) should be subject to decision making that is “cognisant of the impact this has on institutional stability”. We don’t get names of individual at-risk institutions, but we are told that these tend to be “modern” providers.

Whatever comes out of the scrutiny session (and it will be a lively one, covering many areas of the education system – there’s another set of questions due on the rise in National Insurance contributions announced in Rachel Reeves’ UK budget) this Universities Scotland submission may be the clearest indication yet of how scary the financial position of some providers is getting.