Tag: Scotlands

  • All about Scotland’s newly passed Tertiary Education and Training Act

    All about Scotland’s newly passed Tertiary Education and Training Act

    For the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Act, the journey from review to consultation to bill to law has been a long one – but it’s finally complete.

    As the dust settles, we can heuristically chop its protracted passage up into three stages according to where the policy focus was.

    First came the Withers review and its push to reconfigure the funding body landscape to promote coherence, which resulted in the accumulation of new responsibilities for the Scottish Funding Council, and the corresponding diminution of Skills Development Scotland’s remit in a way that was at times quite fractious.

    If you’d responded to the 2024 consultation on funding body reform, you could be forgiven for assuming that this shake-up would have continued to be the central area of prominence as the legislation was introduced. It’s true that plenty of parliamentary time and written evidence was taken up with the mechanics and technicalities of moving staff and capabilities from one arm’s length body to another, but for much of last year the real action wasn’t around the SFC/SDS/SAAS moving parts – rather, it related to questions of sector financial oversight and how the legislation could better speak to these.

    Former higher education minister Graeme Dey kicked this phase off last January by musing that the bill could beef up the funding council’s “powers of intervention”. In light of the crisis at the University of Dundee, and emerging issues elsewhere, it became politically tricky to press forward with a bill that could be potentially criticised as rearranging deckchairs (there was no great cross-party love for it – it later squeezed through stage one with support from the Scottish Greens, who explicitly said they wanted it to progress so that they could append stuff to it later).

    So when the legislation was published, we got some additional but still fairly tenuous new powers for the SFC. These included greater scope to conduct the investigations known as “efficiency studies”, and the ability to issue written recommendations (possibly publicly, but I wouldn’t hold your breath) and guidance that governing bodies will need to “have regard” to. Plus there will be a responsibility on funded education bodies, including universities, to proactively notify the funding council in the event of “certain developments”. But exactly what these will be is left to secondary legislation – it’s likely to include job cuts and specific financial thresholds, but the process has been left convoluted and it’s clearly not a system that’s going to be springing into action any time soon.

    While the desire to use the bill to speak to the government’s job of monitoring the financial health of the system has not gone away, it’s also been clear since the autumn that ministers didn’t want to go too far either, shooting down amendments on issues like governance reform (as well as proposals on executive pay caps, student union funding, and mental health).

    Rather, the final run-up to the legislation’s passage at stage three was dominated by both opposition MSPs and the government adding other bits and pieces to the legislation in a series of compromises (we can but speculate on how the reshuffling off of Graeme Dey led to more compromising than might have been the case otherwise).

    As a result, the headline measures that the newly passed Act will bring about feel quite distinct from where we were at the start. Let’s take a look how it changed.

    A national strategy

    The bill’s long title was originally as follows:

    An Act of the Scottish Parliament to make provision about the functions and governance of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council; to make provision about financial support for students in further and higher education; and for connected purposes.

    Following stage three, it’s now

    An Act of the Scottish Parliament to make provision about a national funding strategy for tertiary education, skills and apprenticeships; to make provision about the functions and governance of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council; to make provision about financial support for students in further and higher education; and for connected purposes.

    You get the sense that the repeated questioning in Holyrood of the need for this legislation – at a time of serious challenges for Scotland’s universities, colleges and apprenticeship system – has played a role here. The Act is now squarely about funding, even if it has done so in a way that leaves the actual content until after the election.

    Scottish ministers will now be obliged to prepare a national funding strategy, specifying needs, priorities and outcomes for different aspects of the tertiary system. Consultation with learners, trade unions, employers and education bodies will be mandatory. Regular progress reports are stipulated. In the Scottish Parliament, higher education minister Ben Macpherson said that having a strategy will ensure that funding decisions are based on an “even more robust understanding” of skills needs.

    The language of “as soon as reasonably practicable” gives leeway for this to appear after the ongoing Future Framework for Universities project, and to be informed by its findings. Which is not to say that the Scottish higher education sector is necessarily thrilled about it – in the stage three debate, we heard that Universities Scotland has expressed concerns about autonomy. The minister was at pains to stress that for universities the strategy will not direct funding to specific provision.

    Fair work, GBV, and access

    Last week – a cynic might suggest there was a final push to get the legislation over the line – the Scottish government announced that the bill would enable action on both fair work requirements and prevention of gender-based violence on campus. Something similar happened ahead of the stage two vote, where provisions for data sharing in support of the access agenda were unexpectedly introduced, despite previous indications that the Scottish government was reluctant to take these forward in the current parliamentary session.

    The fair work announcement – an agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens – will see colleges and universities expected to adopt further Fair Work First criteria by April 2027, including no inappropriate use of zero hour contracts, flexible and family-friendly working practices, and action on workplace inequalities, all of which are currently only encouraged. The announcement to Parliament does note that where a case is made for more time is required for an institution to make the changes, this may well be accepted.

    Including a condition of funding around preventing gender-based violence was first proposed at stage two in a slightly different form, supported by campaign group EmilyTest. This didn’t pass, but new Scottish government amendment 29 will enable the SFC to impose a condition of funding on education bodies around the prevention of gender-based violence, both in terms of taking action to prevent gender-based violence against staff and students, and in reporting on action taken. Before issuing guidance, the funding council will be required to consult both campaign groups and education bodies.

    All these measures – promoting fair work, enabling data sharing, and preventing gender-based violence – got a shout-out in the minister’s closing speech as among the substantial benefits the bill will bring. All of them have quite a long way to go as well. On the free school meal data sharing question, it’s been widely suggested that the limited nudge the idea gets in the legislation is a long way from ironing out all the technical barriers.

    The SFC and its role

    During the legislation’s passage the government hinted it was open to renaming the Scottish Funding Council to reflect its expanded role. It hasn’t happened, but Ben Macpherson still told Holyrood he was open to the idea.

    Stage three did, however, see amendments to the bill which will see the Scottish Funding Council board expand, with a new maximum size of 16 members appointed by ministers, up from 14. The government also put forward, or accepted, some degree of stipulation on who those board members should be – under pressure from other MSPs – though it ended up couched in the language of “have regard to the desirability of” rather than a prescription. This will now include learner representatives, SFC employee representatives, and education sector staff representatives.

    We explored in our original write-up how the legislation seeks to give the funding council new powers, up to a point, to monitor and influence the education bodies it funds (and there’s a summary above). While during parliamentary passage many MSPs sought to push for further duties and means of intervention, the Scottish government largely saw these off, arguing for the importance of university autonomy and the purported risks around Office for National Statistics public sector classification.

    But there were a few small changes along the way, for example the insertion of powers for the SFC to secure the carrying out of an independent examination into the financial sustainability or financial governance of an education provider it funds, and the remit of funding council “efficiency studies” has been extended to consider the needs and interests of staff as well as students.

    An opposition amendment that will require the SFC to conduct an annual report on the financial sustainability of the further and higher education sector was accepted by the government – some would say the funding council already does this, but now it’s in the legislation. This was made more interesting by a rival opposition amendment which sought to make this an independent review of university financial health (it was suggested that Audit Scotland would take the lead). However, this was shot down.

    Apprenticeships and future battles

    For all that MSPs have used the bill’s passage as an opportunity to probe the Scottish government’s stewardship of the university sector – and it shouldn’t be underestimated how much the legislation’s eventual form has been shaped by reaction to funding crises and job losses – the issue that has been most prominent throughout Holyrood debate has been about shifts in apprenticeship responsibilities and the wider question of how much funding goes to this kind of post-16 provision.

    Amendments requiring the Scottish government to publish an account of how apprenticeship levy consequentials are being spent, or to introduce an apprenticeships guarantee, or ringfence funding, or to specify a commitment to foundation apprenticeships, were all voted down. But the question of Scotland’s level of apprenticeship starts – and how the government deploys levy money, to the extent that it can be said to – has continued to grow in importance as perhaps the pre-eminent attack line on the SNP from opposition parties in post-compulsory education policy.

    There’s an important takeaway for the sector here, in how much political pressure is being brought to bear on boosting apprenticeship numbers, rather than university degree places. It’s already an argument the sector is trying to get ahead of – an article from Universities Scotland today makes the case that universities want to do more in the graduate apprentice space, and are being held back by a lack of flexibility.

    The tertiary bill, in the form it eventually ended up in, puts new duties on universities, as well as taking some tentative steps which – if followed through in implementation – could contribute to them being better places to work and study in. It also heaps more responsibility for overseeing the disparate parts of the system on the funding council, while introducing reforms to its corporate structure which will inevitably take time to process.

    It even, via the last minute changes, commits the next Scottish government to spelling out its approach to funding. But it doesn’t speak to the quantum of that funding, and for universities it’s never been clearer that there exists both growing financial pressures elsewhere in the tertiary space, and growing political pressure to pay attention to areas outwith higher education, an issue that will grow in prominence in a likely more divided and certainly more unpredictable Holyrood after May’s elections.

    Source link

  • Podcast: Budget, R&D, Scotland’s tertiary bill

    Podcast: Budget, R&D, Scotland’s tertiary bill

    This week on the podcast we examine how Budget 2025 reshapes the university funding model – from the international levy and modest new maintenance grants, to confirmed tuition fee uplifts and changes to pension tax arrangements that will affect institutional costs.

    We discuss what the package tells us about the government’s approach to public finances, the politics of international recruitment, and the sustainability of cross-subsidy in a tight fiscal environment for higher education.

    Plus we discuss research and innovation announcements and get across debate in Holyrood on the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill.

    With Ken Sloan, Vice-Chancellor and CEO at Harper Adams University, Debbie McVitty, Editor at Wonkhe, David Kernohan, Deputy Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

    On the site:

    Budget 2025 for universities and students

    Universities now need to be much clearer about the total cost of a course

    Student finance changes in the budget – Director’s cut

    Reclassification ghosts and jam tomorrow at stage 2 of Scotland’s tertiary bill

    A government running out of road still sets the economic weather for higher education

    A change in approach means research may never be the same again

    You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.

    Source link

  • 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.

    Source link

  • 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.

    Source link

  • WEEKEND READING: Why Scotland’s student funding system is “unfair, unsustainable, unaffordable” and needs to be replaced with a graduate contribution model

    WEEKEND READING: Why Scotland’s student funding system is “unfair, unsustainable, unaffordable” and needs to be replaced with a graduate contribution model

    • These are the remarks by Alison Payne, Research Director at Reform Scotland, at the HEPI / CDBU event on funding higher education, held at Birkbeck, University of London, on Thursday of this week.
    • We are also making available Johnny Rich’s slides on ‘Making graduate employer contributions work’ from the same event, which are available to download here.

    Thanks to the CDBU and to HEPI for the invitation to attend and take part in today’s discussion. 

    My speech today has been titled ‘A graduate contribution model’. Of course, for UK graduates not from Scotland, I’m sure they would make the point that they very much do contribute through their fees, but the situation is very different in Scotland and I’m really grateful that I have the opportunity to feed the Scottish situation into today’s discussion.

    I thought it may be helpful if I gave a quick overview of the Scottish situation, as it differs somewhat to the overview Nick gave this morning covering the rest of the UK. 

    Although tuition fees were introduced throughout the UK in 1998, the advent of devolution in 1999 and the passing of responsibility for higher education to Holyrood began the period of diverging funding policies.

    The then Labour / Lib Dem Scottish Executive, as it was then known, scrapped tuition fees and replaced them with a graduate endowment from 2001-02, with the first students becoming liable to pay the fee from April 2005. The scheme called for students to pay back £2,000 once they started earning over £10,000. 

    The graduate endowment was then scrapped by the SNP in February 2008. A quirk of EU law meant that students from EU countries could not be charged tuition fees if Scottish students were not paying them but students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland could be charged. This meant that from 2008 to 2021/22 EU students did not need to pay fees to attend Scottish universities, though students from the rest of the UK did. 

    We’re used to politics in Scotland being highly polarised and often toxic with few areas of commonality, but for the most part the policy of ‘free’ higher education has been supported by all of the political parties. Indeed at the last Scottish election in 2021 all parties committed to maintaining the policy in their manifestos. It is only recently that the Scottish Tories have suggested a move away from this following the election of their new leader, Russell Finlay.

    But behind this unusual political consensus, the ‘free’ policy is becoming increasingly unsustainable and unaffordable. Politicians will privately admit this, but politics, and a rock with an ill-advised slogan, have made it harder to have the much needed debate.

    The Cap

    While we don’t have tuition fees, we do have a cap on student numbers. And while more Scots are going to university, places are unable to keep up with demand. Since 2006 there has been a 56% increase in applicants, but an 84% increase in the number refused entry. 

    It is increasingly the case that students from the rest of the UK or overseas are accepted on to courses in Scotland while their Scottish counterparts are denied. For example, when clearing options are posted, often those places at Scotland’s top universities are only available to students from the rest of the UK and not to Scottish students, even if the latter have better grades. As a result, Scots can feel that they are denied access to education on their doorstep that those from elsewhere can obtain. Indeed, there are growing anecdotes about those who can afford it buying or renting property elsewhere in the UK so that they can attend a Scottish university, pay the higher fee and get around the cap.

    Basically, more people want to go to university, but the fiscal arrangements are holding ambition them back. This problem was highlighted by the Scottish Affairs Select Committee’s report on Universities from 2021.

    Some commentators in Scotland have blamed the lack of places on widening access programmes, but I would challenge this. It is undoubtedly a good thing that more people from non-traditional backgrounds are getting into university, it is the cap that is limiting Scottish places, not access programmes. This is a point that has been backed by individuals such as the Principal of St Andrews, Professor Dame Sally Mapstone [who also serves as HEPI’s Chair].

    Financial Woes

    The higher education sector in Scotland, as with elsewhere in the UK, is not in great financial health. Audit Scotland warned back in 2019 that half of our institutions were facing growing deficits. Pressures including pensions contributions, Brexit and estate maintenance have all played a role and in the face of this decline, but nothing has changed and we’re now seeing crisis like those at Dundee emerge. Against this backdrop, income from those students who pay higher fees is an important revenue stream.

    There is obviously a huge variation in what the fees are to attend a Scottish university, considerably more so than in the rest of the UK.

    For example, to study Accounting and Business as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, the cost for a full-time new student for 2024/25 is £1,820 per year for a Scottish-domiciled student (met by the Scottish Government), £9,250 per year for someone from the rest of the UK and £26,500 for an international student. 

    It is clear why international students and UK students from outside Scotland are therefore so much more attractive than Scottish students.

    However, there is by no means an equal distribution of higher fee paying students among our institutions.

    For example, at St Andrews about one-third of undergraduate full-time students were Scots, with one-third from the rest of the UK and one-third international. The numbers for Edinburgh are similar.  

    At the other end of the scale, at the University of the Highlands and Islands and Glasgow Caledonian, around 90% of students are Scottish, with only around only 1% being international.  

    So it is clear that institutions’ ability to raise money from fee-paying students varies very dramatically, increasing the financial pressures on those with low fee income.

    However, when looking at the issue, it is important to recognise that it is not just our universities who are struggling, Scotland’s colleges are facing huge financial pressures as well. 

    The current proposed Scottish budget would leave colleges struggling with a persistent, real-terms funding cut of 17 per cent since 2021/22. Our college sector is hugely important in terms of the delivery of skills, working with local economies and as a route to university for so many, but for too long colleges have been treated like the Cinderella service in Scotland. The prioritising of ‘free’ university tuition over the college sector is adding to this problem.

    Regardless of who wins the Holyrood election next year, money is, and will remain, tight for some time. It would be lovely to be able to have lots of taxpayer funded ‘free’ services, but that is simply unsustainable and difficult choices need to be made. 

    This is why we believe that the current situation is unfair, unsustainable, unaffordable and needs to change.

    Reform Scotland would offer another alternative solution. We believe that there needs to be a better balance between the individual graduate and Scottish taxpayers in the contribution towards higher education. 

    One way this could be achieved is through a fee after graduation, to be repaid once they earn more than the Scottish average salary. This would not be a fee incurred on starting university and deferred until after graduation, rather the fee would be incurred on graduation.

    In terms of what that fee could be, the Cubie report over 25 years ago suggested a graduate fee of £3,000, which would be about £5,500 today.  This could perhaps be the starting point for consideration.  

    Any figure should take account of different variations in terms of the true cost of the course and potential skill shortages. 

    However, introducing a graduate fee would not necessarily mean an end to ‘free’ tuition. 

    Rather it provides an opportunity to look at the skills gaps that exist in Scotland and the possibility of developing schemes which cut off or scrap repayments for graduates who work in specific geographic areas or sectors of Scotland for set periods of time. 

    Such schemes could also look to incorporate students from elsewhere for Scotland is facing a demographic crisis. Our population is set to become older and smaller, and we are the only part of the UK projected to have a smaller population by 2045. 

    We desperately need to retain and attract more working-age people. Perhaps such graduate repayment waiver schemes could also be offered to students from the rest of the UK who choose to study in Scotland – stay here and work after graduation and we will pay a proportion of your fee. A wide range of different schemes could be considered and linked into the wider policy issues facing Scotland. 

    According to the Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) there were 3,370 graduates from the rest of the UK who attended a Scottish institution in 2020/21. Of those, only 990 chose to remain in Scotland for work after graduation. Could we encourage more people to stay after studying?

    Conclusion

    A graduate fee is only one possible solution, but I would argue that it is also one with a short shelf life. As graduates would not incur the fee until they graduated, there would be a four-year delay between the change in policy and revenue beginning to be received. Our institutions are facing very real fiscal problems and there is a danger of a university going to the wall. 

    If we get to the 2026 election and political parties refuse to shift the dial and at least recognise that the current system is unsustainable, then there is a danger that nothing will change for another Parliamentary term. I don’t think we can afford to wait until 2031.

    There is another interesting dynamic now as well. Labour in Scotland currently, publicly at least, oppose tuition fees. However, there are now 37 Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster who are backing the increase of fees on students from outside Scotland, or Scottish students studying down south. Given the unpopularity of the Labour government as well as the tight contest between the SNP and Labour for Holyrood, it seems unlikely that position can be maintained.

    All across the UK there are increasing signs of the stark financial situation we are facing. Against that backdrop, along with the restrictions placed on the number being able to attend, free university tuition is unsustainable and unaffordable. People outside Scottish politics seem to be able to see this reality, privately so do many of our politicians. We need to shift this debate in to the public domain in Scotland and develop a workable solution.

    Source link