Higher Education for the 21st Century Response to the Garrick Report

1. INTRODUCTION

This report sets out the Government’s response to the recommendations of the Scottish (Garrick) Committee of the National (Dearing) Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education. It is being published in parallel with a UK response to the main National Inquiry Report and should be read in conjunction with that response (available from the DfEE website at http://www.lifelonglearning.co.uk). Although many of the Scottish Committee’s recommendations stand in their own right, the Government’s response should be viewed in terms of the overall response to the main Committee Report. The role of higher education within the Government’s policies for lifelong learning will be dealt with in a Scottish Office paper later in the year.

The existence of the Scottish Committee stems from the important and distinctive nature of Scottish higher education. Higher education is an important area of Scottish life and one in which The Scottish Office invests about £1 billion annually. That investment is of a higher order than elsewhere in the United Kingdom because of both the higher funding per full-time student in Scotland and the higher proportion of young people who enter higher education in Scotland. The latest figures show that around 46% of young people were taking a higher education course in a higher education institution or at a college of further education. Moreover, we educate a large number of students from the rest of the UK and elsewhere in the European Union. Scotland imports students and export graduates.

It is therefore reassuring that the Dearing Committee has been complimentary to the Scottish system and has based a number of its recommendations on existing practice. For example, the Scottish Credit Accumulation and Transfer System (SCOTCAT) is recommended as a model for the rest of the UK. We have also been successful in expanding higher education provision through sub-degree courses.

However, it would be wrong to be complacent. The challenges facing the Scottish sector are the same as elsewhere in the UK. Our institutions need to maintain and improve their teaching reputation to continue to attract the one-third or so of students in our higher education institutions who come from outside Scotland. They also need to continue to improve their research activities compared to the rest of the world. The Government is committed to working with the sector towards those ends and expects that the new Scottish Parliament will take a close interest in higher education when it takes over responsibility in 2000.

The Government’s Vision for Higher Education

A vision for higher education in a learning society was set out in the main Dearing Committee Report. The Government shares that vision and has responded to it in parallel with this document. Of course, any vision of higher education in the future needs to take account of the distinctive nature of the Scottish educational system.

Taking account of Scottish factors, the Government’s vision for higher education in Scotland is of:

a sector which encourages and achieves equal access for everyone who has the potential to benefit from higher education regardless of the individual’s social or economic background;

a higher education sector that, through its teaching and research, supports the competitiveness of the Scottish economy and helps meet the needs of our society;

a student support system that delivers promptly and efficiently an equitable means for students to support themselves;

a higher education sector where institutions set and maintain high quality and standards and give students and employers the information they need to choose the programmes best suited to their needs;

a sector that promotes lifelong learning, meeting the aspirations and needs of students and heeding the requirements of employers by offering various entry and exit points; and offers credit for students’ relevant study, work and experience, so that they can stage their studies to meet their evolving needs across the years;

institutions that place as high a value on good teaching as on research and who increasingly employ staff trained and accredited in teaching and learning;

institutions that collaborate with each other and across sectoral boundaries to assist the furtherance of teaching and learning, and high quality research;

institutions that continuously review their processes, use of facilities and teaching methodologies to ensure effectiveness, efficiency and the best value for money;

institutions where governance is open, inclusive and accountable, and meets the high standards rightly demanded of all publicly funded bodies;

a policy and funding framework that is able to take decisions at the interfaces with secondary and further education and employment to ensure consistency of access, funding, quality and standards.

Such a vision will, of course, require all of the stakeholders to the Dearing compact to play their part. Moreover, it is a vision that may evolve and change as democratic accountability for higher education is achieved through the new Scottish Parliament.

The following sections contain the Government’s specific response to the 29 recommendations in the Report of the Scottish Committee. Some of the recommendations are fairly central to the above vision whereas others are fairly specific recommendations for changes in the machinery of government. The Government believes that its response to the specific recommendations are consistent with achieving that overall vision.