How you can get an honours degree by going to a college – Iain Hawker

With SQA exam results just around the corner, there’s never been a better time to emphasise to young people, their parents, guardians and teachers that college is a great option for getting to where they want to go, writes Iain Hawker of Fife College.

Students attending Fife College who achieve a Higher National Certificate or Diploma qualification over one or two years can progress directly into year two or three of a degree course if they get the required grades (Picture: iStockphoto/Getty)

Gone are the days when going to university, straight from school, was the only way to secure a great career with a higher education qualification.

Just like everything else in life, there’s been an explosion of choices – from the range of television and home entertainment channels we watch to food products on supermarket shelves – we are confronted with choices every day and it’s the same when it comes to education.

I’m delighted to be playing my part in widening education choices for young people and adults in Fife and flying the flag for articulation routes – this means that students attending Fife College who achieve their Higher National Certificate/Diploma (HNC/HND) qualification over one or two years, providing they achieve the necessary grades, progress directly into year two or three of a degree course.

For some of our students that can also mean staying at Fife College to complete their full degree or honours degree.

From September, we will also be offering two new degree programmes, an innovative top-up degree for those in employment covering business and enterprise with our partner Edinburgh Napier University and for our students progressing from HND social sciences to an on-campus delivery model of the Open University BA(Hons) social sciences degree.

At Fife College, we have tripled our formal articulation routes for HNC/HND study on to degree courses in the last year – up from 84 to 255, one of the highest of any college in Scotland.

All our curriculum areas have at least one articulation route in place for every HND course and we currently have articulation routes to degree study with 15 universities throughout the UK.

Although 33 per cent of school leavers in Scotland put in an application for university this year, the BBC reported this month that there were 610 fewer university applications compared to 2018.

So what else are we doing to promote choice? We are finding new ways to get our message out there through new partnerships and links with schools. Our new partnership to create First Chances Fife is a perfect example of this, where we have joined a long-established partnership between the University of St Andrews and The Robertson Trust to help break down barriers to learning for pupils in Fife.

The University of St Andrews and ourselves recently received £567,000 of funding from The Robertson Trust to expand the programme, which focuses on raising the aspirations and attainment of school pupils from P7 to S6.

This will allow the programme to be rolled out to an increased number of schools, enabling more young people, who may face barriers to learning and progression, to benefit from the initiative.

With many school rolls continuing to fall, more pupils staying on at school to S5 or S6 and universities reviewing their entrance criteria, it’s a challenging time for colleges.

We receive a lot less funding than schools and universities yet we’re just as important and successful at educating and transforming people’s lives. Colleges need to be seen as a real first choice, not plan B.

Iain Hawker is assistant principal (quality and academic partnerships) at Fife College