It feels like a lifetime ago now, but back in 2014 my family and I moved back to the mainland from the Isle of Arran, where I had been teaching in the high school. We had been very happy on the island, and wanted to stay, but events outwith our control (including the early days of what is now a full-blown ferries scandal) forced us back over the water. It was not a happy time.

Obviously, I needed a job – but this was all happening after the summer holidays, so the school posts were mostly gone. I therefore took a job teaching in a college and expected to stay for a few months until I found a high school to teach in again.

I ended up staying for nine years.

Why? Because I went into teaching to help people, and – pound for pound – colleges do that better than any other organisation in the country.

Colleges are full of people who need help, and full of people who want to help them.

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I left school with nothing but college has changed my life

They offer alternative routes to people who have gotten lost in the system. They provide a second chance to people who have been let down, or let themselves down, in the past. They are a beacon for people whose lives have been damaged by all kinds of trauma.

And they do all of that without ever receiving the recognition, the respect, or the funding that they deserve.

While teaching in the further education sector, I realised that the people who run Scotland just do not seem to care about it, no matter what claims they make in public. I've said before, more than once, that for this particular group of people, colleges are for other people's children.

Over and over, I saw colleges ignored at best and dismissed at worst while Scotland’s politicians talked about education and equality being top priorities.

Again and again, I saw college students – my students – treated not even as second best, but as the least important people in an ever-lengthening queue.

And over all that time, the state of Scotland’s colleges consistently declined.

The sector has faced a decade of industrial disputes that, like so many problems, are rooted in a failure to provide them with the funding they require. Every time I see a government minister or SNP MSP insist that they really do value colleges, I think of that line of which President Biden is so fond: don’t tell me what you value – show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.

But it’s not just the government – nearly a decade of teaching in colleges led me to the conclusion that Scotland as a whole does not value colleges properly. Often this is because people don’t really understand what they do, how they work and who they serve, and because the sector’s extraordinary diversity makes it impossible to tell a simple story about why it all matters.

But it does matter.

Colleges matter to Scotland. They are essential to our present and future prosperity, and the only way for us to get anywhere close to net zero targets. They generate billions for the economy.

Above all: they change lives.

On a personal level, colleges obviously matter a great deal to me. It was a privilege to teach in one for so long, and now I consider myself lucky to be able to help tell their story.