How manifestly unfair treatment of colleges compared to universities is holding Scotland back

Each year, the Auditor General for Scotland publishes his considered analysis on the state of Scotland’s colleges. This year – and not unexpectedly – his analysis makes particularly grim reading.

The stark picture painted by the Auditor General is one of a college sector bedevilled by growing funding and financial pressures, and blighted by dither and delay as it sorely cries out for a list of clear priorities from the Scottish Government’s reform agenda.

Specifically, colleges have endured a 17 per cent real-term cut in core funding over the last three years, compounding over a decade of under-investment in digital learning technologies and the campus estate. Indeed, Audit Scotland make very plain in their latest assessment that clear advice from government is now crucial if colleges are to make properly informed decisions about where to invest their reduced resource.

Economic growth and child poverty

We might reasonably ask how it has come to this cliff edge. Of course, we understand the very significant pressures on the public purse, but it is difficult to square this laissez-faire treatment of Scotland’s college sector with the Scottish Government’s core priorities.

Quite properly, the First Minister has identified his top priorities as the eradication of child poverty and growing Scotland’s economy, both of which can be realised with a sustained and purposeful investment in skills.

Put simply, if Scotland is ever to deliver the bold ambitions the Scottish Government has set, there has to be a commensurate investment in the anchor institutions of the Scottish skills system – its publicly funded colleges.

Even before the pandemic, Brexit, or the war in Ukraine, our hard-pressed colleges were on the slippery slope of financial decline. However, with centuries of characteristic stoicism behind them and being highly resilient, colleges have quietly kept calm and carried on helping employers – large and small – and communities, whether they are island, rural or urban. Colleges have been helping some of our most fragile individual learners flourish by meeting their practical and STEM skill needs, tackling their disadvantage, reducing their inequality with peers, and closing their skill gaps.

Offshore renewables, shipbuilding, social care

The trouble is that if you are unheard, you inevitably become unseen. And doing the right thing without the right funding is ultimately unsustainable. Funding cuts undermine the pipeline of future skills the Scottish economy needs to support the offshore renewable sector, shipbuilding or retrofitting our housing stock, and weakens today's workforce which needs specialist skills in care, hospitality or business. Surely there must be a better way.

It is sobering that on a recent visit to Glasgow, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) identified a range of endemic challenges for the Glasgow city region, including low productivity, high economic inactivity, and high levels of poverty. With the fresh eyes of the outsider, the OECD drew attention to the growing challenge for the city region of worsening skills shortages and the associated need for reskilling and upskilling.

One-in-four Scottish employers now report vacancies – with a third of these classified as skill-shortage vacancies. It is a false economy merely to grow apprenticeships whilst simultaneously reducing our specialist skill base amongst craftspeople, technicians, and technologists.

Halting race to the bottom

To my mind, the challenges that the OECD identified represent a real and present danger for Glasgow and Scotland. So, what can be done to halt this race to the bottom?

For a start, prioritise the funding for skills, including upskilling and reskilling. Scotland’s colleges have a long and distinguished track record of agility in responding to workforce crises, and bring inherently practical, tried and tested solutions to the urgent needs of the economy and tackling poverty within our neighbourhoods.

Naturally, we should continue providing skills to those just leaving the post-16 education system, but a greater focus must be placed on those more experienced workers – reskilling, upskilling and lifelong skilling are vital if we are to succeed in filling skills shortages.

Second, relax the strictures of the UK statistical body’s classification to enable colleges to retain end-of-year trading surpluses. As things currently stand, those surpluses that are generated simply return to central government – hardly an incentive to the entrepreneurial mindset which we will need following the UK Chancellor’s Budget.

Third, we would ask the government to value and more assertively advocate for the cost-effective and value-for-money higher education delivered by Scotland’s colleges like my own City of Glasgow College.

Fourth, restore the fees that colleges receive for delivering higher education in line with inflation. These fees have been inexplicably frozen for colleges – but not for universities in Scotland – for over a decade, which is manifestly unfair and counter-productive. Furthermore, as institutions centred on teaching, why are colleges still restricted to a third of the funding allocated across the tertiary sector for teaching, and to less than one per cent of the funding for innovation?

Delivery not delay

In short, I contend that colleges are pivotal in driving economic recovery and building a better Scotland – a case fully set out previously in the 2020 Cumberford-Little Report but eclipsed by the rapid onset of lockdown to mitigate the Covid pandemic.

Skills shortages are a real threat to our economy and to tackling poverty. We must pick up the pace of reform to find a resolution. ‘Delivery not delay’ should be our mantra.

Colleges are the quintessential solution in driving economic recovery and building a better Scotland: let us resolve to reprioritise funding and investment in them. And most of all, let us work in partnership to avoid another lost decade and yet another lost generation of talent.

Dr Paul Little is principal and chief executive of the City of Glasgow College