How we shone a light on The State of Scotland's Colleges

The deeper we got and with every interview, the clearer it became that this would be just the start. Future college coverage is vital.

There’s the unique situation with Orkney College, the only one still owned by a local authority., while some of the UHI partner institutions – such as the Scottish Association for Marine Science(SAMS) in Oban – are world-renowned. We are keen to explore both areas in the coming weeks and months.

Then there are the colleges in Edinburgh, the Borders, Perthshire and Moray and the north-east, all of which are anchor institutions for their communities in the same ways as the colleges we visited.

Of course, we’re enormously proud of what we have already achieved. In writing these articles, we have learned about the near-half-a-billion pound funding gap crippling colleges, falling student and course entry numbers, the poisonous impact of a years-long industrial dispute, and what appears to be a complete lack of faith in the Scottish Government’s handling of the college sector.

We also learned about adult education provision across the highlands and islands, including at Scotland’s only Gaelic-language college, as well as the sector’s importance to the country’s net-zero ambitions.

Read more: The State of Scotland's Colleges: Find all articles in the series here

Inside Sabhal Mòr Ostaig - Scotland's only Gaelic college

Above all, we learned that colleges boost communities and change lives.

Although our series only provided a snapshot of what’s happening on campuses around the country, the overall picture became clear: the sector is facing significant challenges and is running short on solutions. Bar one.

Even in this one week, it has become clearer than ever that almost everyone involved with colleges believes that the government must step in to save the sector.

The Scottish Government funds colleges, because they are public sector organisations, but then says that the institutions themselves are responsible for pay deals with staff, although they must make them within a national bargaining framework that was introduced as a Scottish Government policy.

As we have now shown – and as the colleges minister himself has now accepted – a huge financial gap has opened up in the last three years, and colleges simply do not have the money they need to keep up with the costs they face.

That’s why everyone we spoke to, whether they were running colleges, teaching courses, or representing students, offered some variation of the same argument and told us that the government has to act.

The choice appears to be stark: step in and resolve the current crisis, or stand back and allow the college sector to collapse.

What does ‘step in’ look like? The first and loudest call is that more money is necessary.

Audit reports on the sector’s financial health have shown that the current funding level is putting significant numbers of jobs at risk. It’s important to keep in mind that this is entirely separate from any new pay deal. And it also doesn’t take into account the major capital costs that colleges face in keeping buildings wind and water tight and maintaining equipment for technical learning.

The national bargaining system has also ground almost to a halt. Years of bad blood make negotiations slow and tedious, and major confrontations over pay and terms dominate, leaving no room for employers and staff to come together and make positive, proactive decisions to help the sector thrive.

Problems like this are why, for many, more money is not enough, and would amount to sticking a plaster over a gushing, gaping wound. They want far more fundamental questions – up to and including conversations around possible renationalisation – to be asked instead.

Speaking to us anonymously, one well-respected figure with decades of experience across the college sector said that “regionalisation has been an abject failure for students and staff, and the return to unfunded national bargaining was going to lead inevitably to the current financial position".

They added: “The cuts from the sector to pay for no university fees is the elephant in the room which never gets the serious attention it deserves for obvious political reasons. It’s hard to see a way out of it without radical change which is unlikely with the current Scottish Government or, to be honest, anyone else who could be in power.”

If they’re right, or even just not entirely wrong, then a one-off budget bump, though desperately needed in the immediate term, isn’t going to be anything like enough to save Scotland’s colleges.

The story of Scotland’s college sector is a complex and contested one, and it has been a privilege to try to tell it over the past week - but we’re not stopping there. This special was never meant to be a one-off set piece; it was always a starting point.

To that end, we’ll be running a few more stories about Scotland’s colleges over the coming days, offering even more insight into these extraordinary organisations.

And after all this coverage, we’d also love to hear what you, our readers, think about the State of Scotland’s Colleges.