Category: Scotland

  • How do you get from skills planning to effective learning provision?

    How do you get from skills planning to effective learning provision?

    For countries, regions and organisations across the UK and globally linking learning and skills has been a perennial problem. Employers and governments talk about skills gaps and shortages and look to education and skills providers to plug them. If it were that simple, gaps would be plugged already – so what gets in the way? And how might we create the conditions to overcome challenges and build a system that works?

    Through the Regional Tertiary Pathfinders programme the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) worked alongside enterprise and skills partners and colleges and universities to take a “learning by doing” approach to finding out how Scotland’s tertiary education and skills system can be made more responsive, more integrated, and better able to support regional economies.

    Seven pilot projects operating in the North East and South of Scotland helped us do just that, providing a real-world opportunity to learn from their work to deliver quick improvements. We are grateful to all the people in colleges, universities and regional organisations that have been involved along the way.

    The projects are delivering changes in their curriculum, course offer and marketing materials which will have positive impacts for learners, improving the information on which they base their choices, smoothing and supporting learner journeys and pathways, and enabling them to progress into key areas of employment in the region or beyond.

    Working regionally and as part of the programme, the education partners involved – three colleges, three universities and a tertiary institution – have been able to test how best to deliver ‘“next level” collaboration and together determine how best to achieve a shared local understanding of issues and needs.

    The programme has also enabled us to test what collaboration across the two halves of tertiary provision might look like. Too often people think tertiary means merging colleges and universities – it might, but there are other models. We’ve been able to see new forms of shared governance develop, pursuing a greater emphasis on a systems approach which moves to lower, blur or remove some institutional boundaries.

    Learning from experience

    As one of the Pathfinder participants told us: “Defining what is different about the approach is important, it’s not just a talking shop; it’s about getting things done and meeting the needs of our young people and industry and for the region.”

    The programme has been rich and multidimensional, providing insights at a project, regional and system level. I can only provide a flavour of the learning here with much more specific and practical learning contained in the reports, videos and other resources published on the Scottish Funding Council’s website.

    At a programme and system level the factors for success have been:

    Creating the right conditions for collaboration. It is important to have the right governance structures to facilitate effective collaboration with clear roles and responsibilities for development and delivery. It is also crucial that senior leaders provide the authorising environment for the work and are seen to be actively involved and supportive.

    Working together differently. This was made possible by focusing on joint curriculum development, shared resources, and regional agreement on shared priorities. It enabled institutions to collaborate to create more effective learner pathways, courses and information products. Examples from the programme demonstrate how deeper, sustained partnerships between colleges, universities, and employers contributed to more dynamic and responsive education models, providing benefits to both learners and the regional economy.

    Different models of collaboration. Formal institutional agreements emerged and provided long-term stability, while informal partnerships allowed for flexibility and adaptability in responding to emerging regional demands – and both provided opportunities for collaborations to grow and deepen into new curriculum areas.

    Skills planning partnerships operating to influence the successful development of learning provision. It is vital that there is a clear and coherent approach to accountability so there is clarity about the roles and responsibilities of various stakeholders within existing regional and local partnership planning fora in developing and delivering regional skills priorities and associated provision.

    Improving communication channels and formalising responsibilities ensures all partners understand their contributions to skills planning, enabling more effective alignment between educational pathways and regional economic needs. To enable more cohesive skills planning across sectors and partnerships, educational institutions should be empowered to lead skills responses – effectively using their brokering role to plan across multiple local authority areas and partnerships within a region.

    Supporting long term success

    Spreading and sustaining impact will be important as we move from programme to business as usual. Some key features which support both project and longer-term success include:

    Inter-regional collaboration: A consistent feature across all projects was the collaboration between institutions in different localities, aligning their programmes and resources to serve the broader region. This approach has not only reduced duplication but also created more cohesive learning pathways. Expanding this model to other sectors and regions offers the potential to improve coordination, ensuring consistent and accessible educational opportunities across local authorities.

    Recognising the role of the project co-ordinator: The project co-ordinator played a critical role in ensuring project success by facilitating collaboration, engaging the right stakeholders, and maintaining continuous progress. The success of this role demonstrates its potential to be scaled and adapted for use in other projects, ensuring smooth facilitation of partnerships and sustained momentum in multi-institutional collaborations.

    Data sharing and collaborative analysis: Several projects benefited from data-sharing agreements that allowed institutions to analyse application and enrolment data together. Shared analysis helped align recruitment strategies, improve learner outcomes, and enhance marketing efforts. The model of using shared data to drive collaborative insights and decision-making can be scaled to other institutions, sectors, or regions, offering a framework for improving alignment between educational programmes and market needs.

    Cross-institutional dialogue at multiple levels: A key feature of projects was regular dialogue between senior leaders, heads of departments, and professional service teams (including recruitment, admissions, and marketing). This dialogue enhanced collaboration at multiple levels, ensuring that institutions were aligned in their goals and activities. The multi-level dialogue model can be adopted by other institutions aiming to build closer working relationships across departments and leadership levels.

    Sustaining collaboration

    My list for enduring skills partnerships includes:

    • Developing a shared understanding of how to work together within the learning, skills and economy regional planning structures.
    • Avoiding over-reliance on individual relationships, which can be put at risk due to staff turnover. Take a systems-based approach instead – there is a role for the Scottish Government and SFC in creating the conditions for the system to work effectively.
    • Recognising there is an institutional cost associated with co-ordination and appropriately resource the partnership element of the work.
    • Having a dual focus on doing things together and maintaining the relationships that underpin joint delivery.
    • Obtaining meaningful buy-in from leaders at all levels, to enable and encourage staff to take the time required to build relationships and explore opportunities for deeper collaboration.
    • Discussing and agreeing attitude to risk – how open are partners to exploring and testing innovative solutions?
    • Including regular review points (as built into the Pathfinders programme) where partners step back and review, reflect and adapt together.
    • Facilitating better liaison with employers. For example, encourage more industry engagement in curriculum for a wider range of work-based learning opportunities.
    • Improving data sharing, e.g. Create central data sharing agreements to reduce institutional burdens, and have overarching tracking data for all.
    • Continuing to ask the questions:
      1. How far will our proposals meet learner, employer and societal needs?
      2. To what extent will they enable us to cope with increasingly tightening budget settlements?

    A project lead told us: “What makes the approach successful is being really clear about what we’re trying to achieve; using action plans for delivery means people own the actions and the outcomes; they can see that the outcomes will make a real difference to learners, college staff, employers and employees and make life easier for business providers in the region.”

    We want colleges and universities across Scotland to be inspired by what we’ve learnt through this programme and to use the Pathfinders resources to see what is possible. I hope the lessons learned (things to do, and things to avoid!) can be used to roll out a new approach more widely. The Pathfinders are an example of policy making as bottom-up, action-based research.

    The full suite of Pathfinders reports is now available Regional Tertiary Pathfinders – Scottish Funding Council.

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  • What the UK can learn from Scotland’s tertiary pathfinder experiments

    What the UK can learn from Scotland’s tertiary pathfinder experiments

    It is commonly believed that, if we only had accurate up-to-date data on what skills employers were looking for, we could solve most of Britain’s productivity and social mobility problems in one fell swoop.

    There’s a kind of big state approach to collecting and sharing that knowledge we could follow – all kinds of architectures and data collections we could dream up to ensure that every course offered in every educational establishment was laser-focused on a particular industry demand.

    To do this at the level of fidelity and timeliness needed would be either expensive, or impossible, or both. Remember, right now, we can’t even accurately tell you how many people are currently working in the UK. And even if we did have this up-to-the moment, detailed, reliable data on employer needs: would the sector be able to use it? And would learners see any benefit?

    Pathways and pathfinders

    On the other hand nine projects, funded at a total of just £500,000 by the Scottish Funding Council, offer a glimpse of a set of approaches that are making a real difference to education and employment. It’s the opposite of big and flashy – building on existing structures and using small amounts of money to facilitate data sharing and collaboration. And it might just be a glimpse of the future.

    The key components are what the Regional Tertiary Pathfinder programme calls Regional Delivery Boards – the pathfinder iteration saw two established, one covering Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire (north east Scotland), the other covering Dumfries and Galloway plus the Borders (south of Scotland).

    If you are in England, you might be thinking these are pretty much the same as the Employer Representative Bodies that develop Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs). And you’d be wrong. The LSIP approach simply brings together employers to state their needs and then invites providers (just FE colleges and private training providers, obviously) to meet them. Ewart Keep, in one of the vast numbers of reports published around the programme, describes the LSIP approach as:

    the employer is viewed as a customer (more or less demanding but detached from the actual process of skill production) within a marketized, one-way street, relationship with a range of suppliers

    In contrast, the Regional Delivery Boards encompass providers at all levels (from schools through to universities) and treat employers and industry bodies as partners in designing and delivering not only the provision directly linked to that particular momentary skills need, but in helping to shape a whole skills ecosystem.

    It is, after all, not really worth designing an undergraduate level energy transition course (for example) aimed at a locality if people in that area are not going to have the qualifications and experience required to benefit from it, and if there is no local aspiration to work in that field. Every individual project supported by the board will be taking into account employer demand as one factor, alongside a consideration of wider skills pathways, of learner demand, and of the wider endeavour of offering people good quality and stable employment.

    I’ve always been a fan of small projects that use low levels of funding in carefully targeted ways to make transformative changes and build capacity. I’ve spent large parts of my adult life setting them up. It does not take a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things, to bring about lasting change. Especially if you build on existing interests, existing partnerships, and even existing plans.

    Building on the past

    There’s various models of change and innovation available, but the one I’ve always known to work draws on Eric Von Hippel’s lead user theory which can be summarised as: smart people on the ground doing the work are already inventing ways of getting stuff done – find these people, listen to them, and make the changes they suggest to enable others to do the same. The strength of the Regional Tertiary Pathfinders model is that it explicitly builds on existing work, existing relationships, and even existing projects – offering legitimacy and political backing as much as money to supercharge the good work that is already happening.

    You sometimes come across agencies and individuals that want to start from scratch, designing the perfect system that will replace everything that has gone before. While this is undeniably fun, it ignores the fact that the same people and the same groups that have been working on similar projects before will be unimpressed with branding and a tidy new organogram being presented as a way to solve the problems they’ve been working on for years. You could call it “producer interest” – I much prefer the term “people who are actually going to do the work to solve the problem” interest.

    It doesn’t matter how good you are on PowerPoint, those new boxes are going to be populated by existing domain experts – it would probably save a lot of time if we started listening to them.

    What about the data?

    One of the impressive facets of both the Regional Delivery Boards and the projects they support is what I might term a pragmatism about data. It actually turns out that data on employer needs is just one of the wells that need to be drawn on, of arguably equal importance is data on the needs of the kinds of students who may want to take the new course you are designing.

    It surprises many to learn just how many (technical, legal, procedural) barriers exist around sharing data across educational phases. Schools will have detailed data on their pupils, not just on attainment and personal characteristics, but on career intentions too. But it is rare to see such detailed information shared with colleges, and by the time you get to university or employment a pupil is flattened out to a list of grades and a very generic reference.

    Likewise, different parts of the system will be getting different kinds of information from employers and industry bodies. While an individual employer may be reasonably expected to understand their own immediate skills needs, to get a fuller or longer term picture you need more than one data point. The various employers, bodies, and providers involved all had light to shed – on a global, regional, and local level.

    In order to ensure that skills pipelines are unclogged working in the way they might be needed you need to bring all of these data sources together, and it is to the credit of the two boards that this has been able to happen.

    Designing and delivering courses

    Any provider worth bothering with will be drawing on all kinds of information in designing new courses and reviewing old ones. There’s a landscape of professional bodies, subject interest groups, QAA benchmarks, and comparators that can help academics and quality assurance staff decide what needs to be covered in a course. This intelligence is married with an institutional insight into its own purpose and mission, and the missions of other local providers.

    Employer engagement can and does happen at the design, delivery, and review phases of courses – each of these allows for direct input into the curriculum mediated by the kinds of wider understanding detailed above. What we are also starting to see is partnerships between providers across phases feeding these processes in a similar way – schools, local authorities, and FE colleges, are all components of the skills pipeline and have a key role both in directly preparing students for admission, and in raising awareness and aspiration more widely.

    This nicely illustrates a central strength of the regional tertiary pathfinder approach, an emphasis on the wider needs of the learner. Rather than seeing learners, Gradgrind-like, as vessels to be filled with the correct skills there is a recognition of “meta-skills” and graduate applicants: a genuine consideration of the careers and lives of learners rather than just thinking about the immediate employer or industry need. Again to quote Ewart Keep:

    There are a number of professions and occupations where we know that labour shortages in part (sometimes a growing proportion) spring not from a shortage of individuals qualified to undertake the work, but from the fact that those that are qualified and have entered the workforce are now choosing to leave the occupation because individuals are concluding that the pay and/or working conditions and stress levels are unacceptable

    Courses more closely aligned to employers needs are certainly useful in addressing skills needs – they are not a means of attracting young people to work in unlivable jobs.

    Beyond the programme, beyond Scotland

    The initiatives that the Regional Pathfinder Programme have fostered and nurtured are already becoming “business as usual”, though how the funding council can support and grow this activity remains an open question. The project coordinators that did so much to drive success were largely funded by the small SFC grants – whether such dedicated project delivery roles would exist without this small amount of funding is not clear. Likewise, the attention that SFC involvement (and, frankly, SFC oversight) drove at a senior level is difficult to sustain. As of yet we don’t know how or in what form the programme will continue – but given the small amount of funding involved and the scope to spread the lessons learned so far to other areas it would feel very short-sighted to abandon the approach.

    In other nations of the UK skills planning cleaves much closer to the employer-as-purchaser model that relies on the optimistic idea that employers are engaged in long-term skills planning that can be aggregated and delivered. The results from Scotland should inform England’s long-awaited reform of the LSIP process – and hopefully put a human face on what frequently feels like an impersonal and deterministic skills strategy that understands neither the people who have the skills, the institutions that develop them, and the the employers that react to a rapidly changing world.

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  • Scotland’s “sleeping giant” looks to international recruitment

    Scotland’s “sleeping giant” looks to international recruitment

    Although the history of the institution dates back over 100 years, it only achieved degree-awarding powers last year. Specialising in agriculture and life sciences, SRUC hopes to become an increasingly attractive choice for international students.

    “For many years, SRUC’s been a sleeping giant,” SRUC’s principal and chief executive Wayne Powell told The PIE News. “Now we’ve awoken and we can see huge amount of potential in what we can offer here in Scotland.”

    Offering international masters programs including international food and agriculture business, business consultancy and project management, Powell said the institution is “creating a future which is much more aligned to what students for the future will want to do” – with international recruitment efforts largely looking to students from India, Pakistan, Nigeria and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

    With six campuses located around Scotland, SRUC’s Edinburgh campus launched a £1.8 million vertical farming innovation centre in January, making it the first Scottish higher education institution in Scotland to create a commercial-sized vertical farm to help address global and local food production challenges.

    “Some of the things that we work on are at the nexus of the most important challenges facing society. So how do we feed a growing world?” explained Powell. “How do we support environmental sustainability?”

    He continued: “We are interested in attracting students that have an identity and an interest in sustainability and how the sustainability will play out over their lifetimes”.

    But while sustainability is undeniably a focus for the institution, Powell stressed that prospective students are also being enticed by curriculums focussing on business – especially as SRUC runs its own “successful consultancy business”.

    Now we’ve awoken and we can see huge amount of potential in what we can offer here in Scotland
    Wayne Powell, SRUC

    Learning about international agriculture, food and business in tandem is also a focus for programs, “particularly the potential for acquiring those business skills as part of a green economy”, Powell said.

    “And our location in Edinburgh [creates] a fantastic opportunity to come and live and work and study in a great city,” he added.

    “There’s something here which is going to be attractive and we’re keen to market that in the right way and creating the first cohort of students coming into something really special.”

    It comes as Scotland has taken steps to position itself as an attractive destination for international students. In late January, the country’s universities were encouraged to take “collective action” to promote Scotland as a study destination.

    In the same week, Scotland’s first minister John Swinney made the case for a bespoke visa for skilled international students graduating from the country’s colleges and universities. However, it is understood that the UK government has no plans to make good on these ambitions.

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  • New legislation in Scotland increases the SFC’s powers, but only up to a point

    New legislation in Scotland increases the SFC’s powers, but only up to a point

    Post-school reform in Scotland continues to chug along, following last month’s announcement of the preferred future shape of the funding body landscape.

    Today sees the legislation that will enact the changes introduced in Holyrood: the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill.

    We’ve been over how responsibilities for further education student support and apprenticeships and skills funding will shift around, and the bill also contains expected changes to the governance arrangements of the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), as well as some technical changes relating to fees and private provision.

    But what’s emerged as perhaps the more pressing question for the higher education sector is how the legislation will change SFC responsibilities and powers, as these apply to its work with universities. The legislation sets out the route the Scottish government will take here, and it’s a fairly balanced one – we are still a long way from an England-style “boots on the ground” regulatory environment, likely to the relief of many.

    Tell us about your finances

    Much of what the bill will do legislatively is through modifications to the Further and Higher Education (Scotland) Act 2005. Section 22(4) of this gives the SFC various powers to “pull” information from universities – or strictly, from their governing bodies – but only where the funder knows that the information exists, or may exist.

    The new legislation aims to create a landscape in which post-16 education bodies must “proactively notify SFC of certain developments of which the SFC might otherwise be unaware” in what the bill’s policy memorandum characterises as a “push” of information – a responsibility to notify the funding council of things it would not have known otherwise. Those who are more used to other UK systems will probably be thinking of “reportable events”.

    It’s suggested that notifications would likely be sought in the following kinds of situation:

    • Where a university is planning voluntary or compulsory severance (so no daily refreshing of the QMUL UCU cuts tracker for the SFC)
    • Where a university has reached a certain threshold in a rapidly worsening financial viability situation
    • A major data breach, such as resulting from a cyberattack.

    But exactly how this will work is not specified on the face of the legislation – it would be determined by ministers via the laying of regulations, with consultation and an affirmative procedure in the Scottish Parliament, “given that they could potentially place significant obligations on post-16 education bodies.” But this does mean that there is a lack of clarity on exactly what the bill is going to mandate.

    Part of the rationale for beefing up the legislation from what was previously anticipated (and let’s be honest, what was in the consultation) seems to be that ministers have not received enough clarity about the financial challenges being faced by certain universities and colleges. When the policy memorandum notes that “there can be challenges for SFC in getting information from post-16 education bodies about their financial sustainability,” you feel that really the issue is about ministerial oversight and the sense of having active levers to pull. This is given an explicit tweak elsewhere in the bill (again, quoting the policy memorandum):

    New section 15A(2) allows the Scottish Ministers to seek information and advice from the SFC relating to post-16 education bodies, this could be an individual body or the bodies as a whole. Section 15A(3) requires the SFC to respond to any such request from the Scottish Ministers and the SFC may also offer information proactively when it considers it appropriate to do so. This is necessary because unforeseen circumstances may arise of which the Scottish Ministers might otherwise be unaware (and so would not know to enquire).

    So what are you going to do about it?

    Also in the 2005 Act is provision for the SFC to “secure the promotion or carrying out of studies designed to improve economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the management or operations of any fundable body” – but no such power exists where the matters are not related to financial support.

    The new legislation would amend this, with the intention of making the SFC able to “address a broader range of matters to assist with performance improvement.” So in scope for an efficiency study would now be the needs and interests of learners:

    The policy intention is that the SFC could, particularly where notified of certain adverse circumstances (such as course closures), instigate studies or reviews of the impact on students and learners so that assistance could be provided to ensure they are not negatively impacted. For example, if a college was heading towards needing to close courses before students could complete them, the SFC could help to make arrangements for the students to continue their education at different colleges.

    Bringing the student interest in scope sounds sensible in theory, but there remains the question of what changes on the ground, beyond the production of a study. The 2005 Act allows the SFC to attend and speak to an institution’s governing body – the new section 15(4) of this bill will extend this to the issuing of a set of written recommendations.

    So the SFC will be able to recommend setting specific improvement targets, or requiring the development of an improvement plan. And it will now even be able to publish these, “where there is wider interest amongst institutions, or the public, in the recommendations and they are not sensitive.” But it won’t be obliged to.

    And what if its recommendations are ignored?

    As with the SFC’s right to address meetings, already provided for in section 16 of the 2005 Act, there is no corresponding duty on the fundable body to do anything in response to the recommendations. However, as a matter of good governance and practice, the Scottish Government would expect the fundable body to consider them appropriately.

    But beyond these recommendations, in the legislation as it stands there would be proper statutory powers for the SFC to influence educational institutions’ behaviour, through the issuing of guidance, which currently is “purely administrative” (though presumably always very welcome). The Tertiary Education and Training Bill will change this, so that institutions must have regard to the guidance, in the carrying out of their funded activities (note that “have regard to” is quite woolly language – something that the Office for Students has exploited frequently within the way HERA was drafted). But the SFC will have to consult both ministers and institutions in issuing guidance.

    It could have been otherwise

    Various alternative approaches were considered and rejected. The use of codes of conduct (“for example to address concerns around breaches of fair work conditions”) was felt to potentially lead to complex interactions with other requirements, and diminish autonomy. Plus there would have been a need for “appropriate enforcement mechanisms,” which is a whole other question.

    More powers of audit and investigation were also considered and not taken forward, which would have been a move towards a “more interventionist SFC.” Likewise for stronger enforcement and intervention action, including serving enforcement notices or the removing, suspending, or appointing of officers or governing body members.

    But this would have been “a fundamental change to SFC’s role which requires more careful consideration” – and would have gone way beyond what was originally consulted on.

    There’s still a long way to go here – Universities Scotland is already noting the “new, very broadly defined provisions regarding the monitoring of the financial sustainability of institutions,” and raising concerns that too much change in the relationship between the SFC and universities (or universities and the Scottish government) could jeopardise the classification of universities in the Office for National Statistics classification.

    The Scottish government seems to be aware of this particular risk – but there are certainly MSPs keen for the SFC to become more “interventionist”, and the legislation now faces a complicated passage through a Parliament in which the SNP does not hold a majority. The ministerial statement to Holyrood launching the bill saw Ross Greer of the Scottish Greens concerned about whether the SFC would have the ability to intervene in matters relating to fair work – higher education minister Graeme Dey said he would be happy to discuss the issue further.

    For now the legislation aims at a delicate balancing act between juicing up the SFC’s role and preserving universities’ autonomy. The next question is whether this persists in the face of deeper scrutiny and parliamentary compromises.

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  • A new funding body landscape emerges in Scotland

    A new funding body landscape emerges in Scotland

    Last June the Scottish government set out two proposals for changing up the funding bodies in post-compulsory education, following James Withers’ damning indictment of a “lack of cohesive approach, common purpose, or strategic narrative” in how Scotland’s skills system was organised.

    There were two options on the table, and the less drastic reshuffle has prevailed following consultation: the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) will take on all the funding responsibilities from Skills Development Scotland (SDS), which currently handles apprenticeships and training. And the Student Awards Agency Scotland (SAAS) will take further education student support off SFC’s hands, rather than being dissolved as per the other consultation option.

    We’ll be left with one funder – SFC – and one student support distributor – SAAS. SDS will still exist, retaining its careers information and guidance roles. It all sounds fairly coherent, when put like that, though open to criticism that it is simply a rejiggling of the funding system component parts (Annex B to the business case presents an exhaustive list of all the possible permutations of changes to the landscape, which some poor civil servant had to go through). Certainly from what we’ve seen, many consultation responses stressed that when it came to funding, the burning question is “how much” rather than “who”.

    Whether student support responsibilities stayed with SAAS or became a department of SFC was probably at the end of the day a somewhat moot point, and the Scottish government doesn’t bother to give any particular justification for the decision, besides it being slightly preferred by consultation respondees (44 per cent to 35 per cent). It would likely have been a whole heap of organisational work for little strategic reward.

    But let’s not underestimate the overall change that’s going to take place. We’ve now got post-school funding responsibilities all in one place within the SFC, including apprenticeships and other training – a landscape-wide role for new chief executive Francesca Osowska (who starts this week) to get thinking about. It’s a similar tertiary lens to Medr in Wales, and the kind of thing that some commentators on the English system would bite your hand off for. That said, there’s no indication that the Scottish government will think about giving the SFC freer rein to assign funding across the skills system as it sees fit – we’ll still be puzzling over itemised budgets each December covering exactly how much will be spent where, for the foreseeable future.

    Legislation to enact the changes will now arrive “in the coming weeks”, with a view to it all being in place by autumn 2026. This may prove ambitious given that there are elections in Holyrood in the interim.

    Anyone for new powers?

    The consultation also asked for feedback on changes to SFC governance (all largely welcomed by respondents), as well as on “enhanced functions” for the funding council. This wasn’t a set of proposals, but more along the lines of a call for ideas, on issues like the information that those funded need to return to SFC, or the strengthening of data collection processes (respondents unsurprisingly were pro-strengthening rather than anti-strengthening).

    But it’s worth thinking about what’s changed since the consultation was launched. The financial situation at various Scottish universities has worsened significantly (meanwhile in England the sector has been hammering its regulator for not having collected more timely financial data). Higher education minister Graeme Dey has explicitly linked possible new powers with the SFC – for oversight and intervention – to its ability to respond to university financial crises.

    So in the consultation responses we see “calls for up to date information on the financial sustainability of institutions and skills providers, and the financial health of the skills sector as a whole” – moves here would seem to chime with ministerial thinking. On the question of new powers of intervention, there’s likely to be much more pushback:

    A number of fundable education bodies, individuals and others […] did not see any need for additional powers for SFC. These respondents suggested that SFC had all of the powers required for their current role, and that proposed reforms should be implemented before reviewing the need for new powers. This was also linked to a view that implementation of reforms should initially focus on policy and support.

    Today’s announcement on the preferred rearrangement of funding bodies is not accompanied by any indication of where government policy is going on powers and duties for the SFC – this will come with the legislation, and then almost certainly be the subject of parliamentary horse-trading during the bill’s passage through Holyrood.

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