The Scottish Funding Council’s landmark review of the coherence and sustainability of further and higher education institutions “should lead to fundamental change over time” – and could include mergers or closures and more formalised collaboration between universities and colleges, the SFC’s chief executive has said.

Karen Watt told Tes that change in FE and HE needed time to get consensus from the sector. She said it was a complex process, but added: “This is a review that should lead to more fundamental change over time. We are not committed to all the existing arrangements and constructs and we have said that the future won’t look like the past.”

Ms Watt told Tes that in these early stages of the review, it could not have predicted what the outcome would be, and the SFC had no preconceived ideas of what the post-16 education sector should end up looking like.

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She said: “We aren’t coming at this with a particular blueprint at all. This is very much about what the shape of provision might be and looking at the objectives we are trying to achieve.

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“We expect change. We think there will be different options for individual institutions to explore, but there are some drivers which I think are particular to the Scottish system, and that is that we do favour collaboration, we are looking at keeping our commitment to widening access. These are fundamental objectives that will still ripple through whatever needs to happen. 

“There is not one single right answer. There are only choices in all of this, and there are different ways in how we could approach this, depending on what we see as the mission for individual institutions or how they see themselves in the broader ecosystem of colleges and universities.”

Scotland’s colleges were restructured less than a decade ago, when they were reorganised into 13 college regions, most with one single, large college. While collaboration with universities exist, it is down to individual institutions and there is no sector-wide approach. Federations or even further mergers between colleges, or universities and colleges, have been mooted in the past, but are yet to materialise.  

The SFC was asked to carry out the review by the Scottish government earlier this year. It is meant to consider how best to achieve coherence and sustainability in the delivery of further and higher education during the Covid-19 crisis, EU exit transition, and beyond, while “maintaining and enhancing quality”.

In a Tes article last month, Ms Watt stressed that, with the country and its education system in the middle of a pandemic, now more than ever we need to know how FE and HE can weather the crisis and adapt so that we keep a world-class system. “What we know is, not just in response to the Covid and economic challenge, we know universities and colleges are an engine for jobs and, ultimately, human flourishing,” she wrote.

She explained that although there were financial challenges, the review was less about efficiencies and more about sustainability. She said: “We are a long-term investor in the sector and we will be asking questions on what could be done better and what should we stop, but also where should we look at growth. We will need to think about the shape, the scale, the nature of provision. We will need to ask ourselves whether better collaboration could lead to better outcomes – not just for institutions, but, first and foremost, for students. This is about what is going to give us the best high-quality learning experience and what is going to equip them with the right pathway to flourish.”

The Scottish Funding Council is also reviewing its outcome agreements – the agreements that set out what institutions will deliver in return for their funding. This could, for example, look at whether the right outcomes were being measured and appropriate behaviours incentivised.

Ms Watt told Tes: “The two main planks will remain a review of our funding model and arrangements and a review of outcomes agreements. Those are some of our fundamental building blocks as a funding council, and we are opening those up to say, 'If we are clearer about the answers to those big questions about what are the objectives for the system, how do we want the system to develop?' Then, by necessity, our funding and our outcome arrangements will need to adapt and shift also. We will want to make sure what whatever happens, change in the system is managed to best effect.”