Recommendation 29

In terms of the impact of the UK Government interventions, and collaboration between the two Governments, we were told by Karen Watt, Chief Executive of the Scottish Funding Council, that: 66 HMG, UK Government to fund international Covid-19 studies in Scotland, 5 September 2020 67 “More mental health support for students”, Scottish Government, 6 November 2020 68 “Extra funding for student associations”, Scottish Government, 11 December 2020 69 “Financial support for students”, Scottish Government, 23 December 2020 70 “Financial support for students”, Scottish Government, 23 December 2020 71 “Support for students in hardship”, Scottish Government, 26 January 2021 72 “Additional funding for FE and HE to help with COVID-19”, @ScotGovEdu, 16 February 2021 73 Scottish Funding Council, Additional funding for universities in FY 2020–21 (24 March 2021), p 4 18 Universities and Scotland My understanding—and we are collecting data on this—is that there has been a fairly low take-up on the [UK Government] loan schemes, but much more on the [UK-wide] job retention scheme. [ … ] We were part of the UK research sustainability taskforce. We were involved in UKRI’s costed grant extensions, which were very important to make sure that we were keeping some of the staff costs in universities stable.74