The Covid-19 pandemic has already affected every single person in Scotland. However, we know that it has not affected everyone equally. At the College Development Network (CDN), we want to identify and understand how certain groups of people, particularly college students, have been affected by the health and economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
During lockdown, Scotland’s colleges worked extremely hard to make sure that students had access to laptops and devices so that learners could continue to study remotely and so no student was digitally excluded. A huge effort was made by college support staff who left their college gates to deliver appropriate equipment (at a safe distance) to students who were previously unable to access devices at home. The recent announcement of a £5 million "Digital Poverty Fund" by the Scottish Funding Council, to help colleges and universities address the so-called "digital divide", further highlights this problem: some disadvantaged students continue to be unable to access online learning owing to a lack of appropriate devices, ICT equipment or lack of appropriate space to work in.
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That is why CDN’s latest research, to drive enhancement and to help equip the Scottish college sector for the future, is a national college Poverty and Deprivation Enquiry, analysing the ways in which colleges can work across the country to address complex poverty challenges in Scotland’s communities. This week is Challenge Poverty Week in Scotland, which is all about raising awareness and support for solutions to poverty, so now feels like the perfect time to tell you about this important research.
The CDN team has established a new partnership with the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Scotland to undertake a nationwide poverty enquiry, in which we will seek to answer the question: "How can colleges continue to tackle poverty and inequality in the post-Covid-19 context?" We have invited every college in Scotland to participate in our research and are working with colleges in each region of Scotland. A series of think pieces have been gathered, drawing on case studies and examples of action from across the sector. These case studies explore the college sector’s potential contribution to tackling poverty and inequality in the new Covid-19 context. We want to collaborate and communicate the impact colleges are making in this area, share our findings with the sector, so that the issues can be addressed and so that we can all plan for the future.
The Cumberford-Little Report, which looked at the economic role of the college sector in Scotland, also highlighted a need to look more closely at how colleges act as community anchors and the role they play in tackling poverty at a community level. Colleges are agents for economic and social change in their regional economies and communities. During lockdown there were countless heartening examples on social media of colleges working to address poverty-related issues, working with partner agencies like the NHS, local authorities and the third sector. Through our research, we want to highlight the full range of lifeline services provided by colleges, to ensure that the scale of their impact is recognised and understood. We also want to evaluate what lessons can be learned from previous experiences. I hope our findings will help us understand more clearly what colleges do as community anchors and allow all colleges to see what each other are doing.
We have just completed the first of two stages of the work: the collection of project data, case studies and local data. We want to build an effective sector-wide case for tackling poverty. The aim of the completed research is to feed directly into the Scottish government’s decision making around helping colleges meet the needs of students, tackling problems related to poverty and inequality in Scotland’s colleges.
We want to do all we can to ensure that a post-Covid-19 Scotland is a better and fairer place to live. We look forward to sharing our findings towards the end of this year.
Jim Metcalfe is chief executive of the College Development Network
