The Scottish Government

The Differences Colleges Make

Starter Paper by ASC

Scotland's Colleges play a vital role in lifelong learning for vast numbers of people in Scotland and further afield. Education and training in the Colleges makes an immense contribution to the employability, social inclusion, and quality of life of the students.

What Colleges Do

The question of what colleges do has had many different answers. This is because Scotland's colleges do so much and the term further education (FE) is so all-encompassing.

An answer (adapted from Michael Leech, 1999) in simple lay terms is that the work of colleges is "principally, vocational education and training, but in addition general education, access studies and adult and continuing education courses". Another way of putting this is that colleges are Scotland's comprehensives of lifelong learning.

This formulation does not do justice, however, to the:

· range of specialisms (from the very general such as literacy, numeracy, and IT to the very specific and occupational)

· different levels of study from basic to intermediate and to advanced higher education

· different modes of delivery from full-time college attendance to part-time and distance learning of varying intensity and duration

Nearly a decade ago, it was memorably put by Helena Kennedy that the reason why so few policy-makers and influencers (knew) about FE or Colleges is because so few of them (had) direct personal or family experience of it. This is changing as more and more Scots take advantage of learning and training in Colleges.

Funding of Colleges

Scotland gets, for the public money spent on its Colleges, a national service of lifelong learning, particularly of vocational qualifications, for those who live and work in Scotland, which is delivered locally.

The substantial sums of grant-in-aid paid out by the Scottish Funding Council provide the capacity for colleges to do a wide range of things suited and adapted to their local circumstances, and to deliver collectively Ministers priorities for lifelong learning for Scotland as a whole.

Funding - both the core grant-in-aid and tuition fees - tend to be standard amounts for a very wide range of activity. Overall levels of public funding for colleges need to be sufficient to:

• Provide a realistic and sustainable unit of resource for tuition and services to the student;
• Encompass high costs of
• • low class sizes
  • students with above average needs
  • other factors that low cost funding will not deliver
• Enable colleges to offer courses, facilities, and qualifications up-to-date and relevant to employer requirements
• Encourage more people living and working in Scotland to develop their own employability and careers
• Reward and motivate College staff to develop and deliver high quality learning and teaching to all students

Lifelong learning is a key driver of policy imperatives such as employability, productivity, active citizenship and social inclusion. For more than half Scotland's people colleges are the main provider of new opportunities through lifelong learning. To develop schools and universities without commensurate investment in Colleges would be to leave these key tasks half or more undone.

Colleges have to be better funded so they can provide the better level, range and quality of education and training Scotland needs, its employers require, and its students deserve.

Opportunity

Scotland's Colleges provide quality education to a great diversity of students across a wide spectrum of subject areas and levels of qualifications. They provide opportunities for people of all ages throughout Scotland to develop the learning, enterprise, and skills they need to:

• Sustain employability
• Develop careers
• Become more active citizens
• Combat social exclusion

Scotland's incorporated colleges have doubled participation from 1 in 23 Scots in 1993 to 1 in 10 in 2003. ASC believes that Scotland should substantially increase opportunities to participate in lifelong learning to 1 in 5 by 2013.

It speaks to the flexibility of Scotland's Colleges and the service they provide to students that learners are able to access a variety of courses on terms that suit them, rather than being forced into a prescriptive model of learning.

Of all those who enrolled in colleges last year, 2/3 had no previous qualifications recorded. Some of these will have had qualifications which they did not declare to the college, but it still remains that a significant number come to college with very limited prior engagement with structured learning. Some left school to work; others may have become disengaged due to negative experiences with formal education. Either way, college offers a chance for students to gain confidence and qualifications that equip them not only for work, but also for life.

The student profile of Scotland's Colleges with regards to the socio-economic background of students broadly matches that of the population as a whole. This represents the huge contribution that Scotland's Colleges are making to inclusiveness and to extending opportunity to all people in Scotland.

The Age Participation Index (API) measures the percentage of young Scots entering higher education for the first time anywhere in the UK in a given year. In 2002-03, the last year for which data is available, almost 1/3 of students in Scotland who entered higher education for the first time did so in colleges. Without colleges, the API would have been just 33.2, as opposed to 48.9 when colleges are included. More than 50% of all Scots entering higher education in Scotland for the first time do so in colleges. This is because many students embark on HE part-time at a local college and only later decide to go on to a full-time HN or degree programme.

Colleges cater to the needs of learners at all stages of their educations, lives, and careers. 60% of all enrolments in Scotland's Colleges are by people 25 or older. These may be people who have been working but are seeking further professional qualifications, people looking to retrain in a new area to change their careers, or those who may never have worked but are now seeking to expand their skills and employability.

Accessibility

Scotland's Colleges are easily accessible to the vast majority of the Scottish population as well, with 22,000 staff and 4,000 learning sites accessible within 30 minutes of travel for 90% of Scotland's people and within 2 miles for 40%, and a total budget of £600 million.

Subject Areas

In total, well over two hundred different subject areas are identified by the Funding Council, but the broader categories are outlined in the graph below. Computing is the most popular area of study, with 84,000 enrolments, but within that single category there a huge variety of courses ranging from courses entitled "Computers Don't Bite" and "Computing for the Terrified" to advanced programming.

Qualifications

Similarly, all programme groups offer courses that span a wide range of ability and experience levels. Courses range from very basic, confidence building courses, to courses offering advanced professional and vocational qualifications. These are both academic and vocational qualifications in a variety of subject areas and at all levels.

The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework

The development of the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework has provided an easy to understand overview of the range of qualifications available in Scotland. Colleges are providing education at every level: from access courses for those with severe and profound learning difficulties, to Professional Development Awards at SCQF levels 11 and 12.

*Shaded cells indicate provision available through Scotland's Colleges.

Scotland's Colleges offer a very wide range of courses at a variety of levels of qualification. Almost 730,000 SQA qualifications were awarded at various levels to students at Scotland's Colleges in 2004, as outlined in the table below.

Quality

Colleges provide lifelong learning of high quality for all levels of qualification and all stages of work and life which is:

• Tailored to meet the requirements of employers
• Easy to access on campus, in the workplace or the community, or at home
• A wraparound service of support and care

HMIe

A complete picture of the work colleges do cannot be painted by solely looking at statistics about the sector. Rather, there is a need to examine particular case studies to see how the sector operates and to understand the differences colleges make to individual learners and to their communities. A few examples taken from HMIe's inspection reports for several of Scotland's Colleges published in 2005 are given in Annex 1.

Productivity

Scotland has fundamental economic weaknesses of

• Demography (aging population falling replacement rate of young people)
• Loss of traditional industries
• Excessive numbers of people who are economically inactive and/or have low or no qualifications for work or further study.

Futureskills Scotland surveys confirm that employers are more concerned about skills gaps, ie employees without adequate skills to do the work rather than skills shortages, ie insufficient recruits for the jobs they offer.

There are many different models of partnership between Colleges and employers. Some - particularly full-time programmes - are fully funded from public funds. Others involve elements provided in the workplace or funded by the employer and/or students themselves.

Generally there is a useful distinction to be drawn between

• Education to achieve work-readiness for a range of different jobs and for the next job; and
• Training to ensure job-readiness for a particular job or sequence of jobs.

College provision is vital for underpinning the:

• Teaching and training in skills employers require
• Upskilling existing employees to be more productive and capable
• Providing the skills most valued by employers
• • teamwork
  • communication skills
  • problem solving ability
  • leadership skills
  • planning
  • customer service skills
• Transfer of expert and specialist knowledge to business and public service users

Business engagement with Scotland's Colleges is not limited to recruiting school leavers. In the same Futureskills Scotland survey, 23% of businesses said they used colleges to provide staff training, with the construction sector the most likely to chose colleges.

Scotland's Colleges are able to offer flexible provision of a wide variety of staff training in various fields. The most common areas in which colleges provided staff training was business studies, such as management, sales, marketing, and distribution. Staff were trained part-time during the working day, on short day courses, or at evenings and weekends. Businesses satisfaction levels with the training provided at colleges were very high at 82%.

Relevance of College Provision

Colleges provide:

• Vocational and occupational learning supported by employers

· Training for today's jobs and a quick response rate to meet local and national skills needs

· Helping students from disadvantaged areas and backgrounds

• Personal development and fulfilment

Colleges serve:

• Student demand - for choice and progression
• Employers' requirements - for skills and enterprise
• Society's needs - for employability & social inclusion

Colleges are the nexus of lifelong learning supporting and working in partnership with a vast range of other providers of education and training.

There are many working partnerships between Colleges either for specialised provision or for working with particular partners. The sector as a whole has moved from competition for increasing volume to collaboration ensuring best use of available expertise and resources. ASC is compiling more material on the range of such partnerships which include:

• Links with schools for pre-vocationals and "skills for work" programmes;
• Consortia for modernising widely used HNC or HND titles;
• partnerships to develop local HE provision (such as the University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute, Crichton Campus in Dumfries and plans for Galashiels in the Borders);
• Shared teaching and learning materials (such as the Colleges Open Learning Exchange Group - COLEG); and
• Joint development programmes for staff and leadership in colleges (including Scottish Further Education Unit).

Colleges have also been major contributors to cross-sectoral initiatives or programmes. The range and extent of college involvement is very wide. Major examples include:

• EU Structural Funds (Agenda 2000 programmes which will run until the end of 2006) for both infrastructure (ERDF) and training or disadvantaged groups (European Social Fund);
• Community learning partnerships to improve services of adult and community education (with local authorities and the voluntary sector);
• Local Economic Forums to ensure that colleges contribute to business support and local economic development priorities (with the Enterprise Networks and other partners); and
• Further afield, the Sector Skills Councils and in particular Lifelong Learning UK for the Lifelong Learning industry itself.

Colleges are also main partners for delivering a wide range of Government Policy initiative including;

• Educational Maintenance Allowances;
• Individual Learning Accounts;
• Guidance and Counselling for Students (working with Careers Scotland); and
• Easier access to learning opportunities with Learndirect Scotland.

The key ambition of ASC has long been to establish the reciprocal principle. This is the other public agencies should seek to involve and work with colleges to the same extent that colleges are assumed - and ready - to support and work with them.

International

The contribution of Scotland's Colleges is not limited just to educating Scots. They also attract students from across the UK and around the world. Colleges offer a world-class education, whether in English language or other specialist subjects.

Last year, more than 4500 students from 112 countries studied at Scotland's Colleges. More than 2100 of these were from outside the EU. Scotland's colleges therefore have a global impact by attracting people to live and work in Scotland, ensuring that bright young people who return to their own countries have a lasting relationship with Scotland, and raising Scotland's profile around the world.

Entitlement

Opportunity for lifelong learning is heavily skewed in favour of those who succeed at school and in later studies. Access to publicly funded lifelong learning needs to be substantially enhanced for those who most lack the learning, skills, and experience needed for work and for success in their lives. These individuals are not only disadvantaged educationally : they have least resources to invest in their own lifelong learning and are most likely to encounter negative returns on the effort and opportunity cost they incur.

Improving their opportunity should be stated as an "entitlement" and should be the major priority for additional funding of lifelong learning and student support for the next 10 years.

One component of this should be a LIFETIME LEARNING ACCOUNT which ASC first proposed in 2001. For all modes and all levels of post-school learning and training, the LLA should include:

• A right to study out of work as well as in a job;
• A learning plan and agreement suited to the needs of the individual;
• A cumulative record of attainment (now developing as the Scottish Qualifications Certificate);
• An entitlement to student support (for fees, study expenses, and maintenance during full-time study); and
• A record of investment by the individual and his/her employer and family, and from the various sources of public funding.

Summary

Scotland's Colleges prepare people for work and for life making a real difference to individuals, employers, the economy, and society as a whole. They give students skills for work, skills for life, and skills for further learning. Scotland's Colleges play a vital role in extending opportunity and promoting social inclusion by offering accessible, quality education in academic and vocational subjects as well as basic skills to meet the broad needs and interests of people throughout Scotland.

ASC

18 October 2005 ANNEX 1

HMIe Reports

HMIe conducts inspections of each of Scotland's colleges every four years. These inspections are concerned with a variety of issues, from the teaching and learning environment to student support. As part of the inspection reports, HMIe publishes examples of best practice from the colleges, many of which highlight the innovative approaches to teaching, learning, widening access, and serving students that are making a real difference to students and communities.

1. "Development of citizenship in business, management and administration through voluntary work in the community (Angus)

"The Angus Gold project with Angus Council encouraged Angus College students to work in the community as IT tutors for people of more than 50 years of age. Volunteers went through the normal Angus Council application procedures including disclosure checks. Initially, six HND Administration and Information Management (AIM) students acted as trainers in day-care centres, sheltered accommodation and nursing homes in Arbroath, Forfar, Kirriemuir and Montrose. The HND student volunteers undertook training in health and safety, dealing with confidentiality and volunteering more generally, and helped to organise and participate in a two-day event in a local hotel for learners and volunteers. The HND students were involved in one-to-one and group tutoring, and supported more than 100 learners every week. Some of the existing volunteers were keen to continue in the role after successfully completing their HND AIM programme.

"Overall, the volunteers helped to support a large number of participants in the community to develop their IT skills. The volunteers gained from:

• involvement in the community as active citizens;
• development of interpersonal and employability skills;
• improved knowledge through preparation for the specific training; and
• growth in confidence, self esteem and social skills."