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

4. SUPPORTING RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIPS

4.1 Collaboration

Recommendation 11 - We recommend to the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council that it should identify how it might encourage and facilitate research collaboration within its funding streams.

Recommendation 12 - We recommend to the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council that it should give further consideration to how, and on what basis, collaborative research centres might be best facilitated and organised in Scotland.

Recommendation 13 - We recommend to the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council and the Research Councils that they should, as appropriate, make available additional funding to ensure that outstanding researchers, irrespective of location, have access to research facilities.

The Government welcomes these recommendations. It believes that SHEFC already seeks to encourage research collaboration amongst higher education institutions and between those institutions and other bodies. Its guidance to SHEFC for 1998-99 asked them to consider targeting some research development funding at those institutions in Scotland which have had only limited opportunities to create centres of research strength and which can demonstrate viable, well developed research proposals. It asked SHEFC to do so in terms of encouraging specific research groups. SHEFC also seeks to further encourage collaboration by, for example, promoting access by researchers to facilities outside their own institution. SHEFC has been asked to address, with the higher education sector, any barriers that currently prevent such co-operation.

4.2 Employer Partnerships

Recommendation 14 - We recommend to higher education institutions that they should identify and establish links with industry to foster and facilitate work-based research training. These links should enable industry staff to gain high quality postgraduate qualifications through in-house research projects.

The Government attaches great importance to this recommendation and looks forward to seeing the progress institutions can make. It believes that the Teaching Company Scheme and the recently launched Faraday Partnership programme are good examples of such links.

4.3 Chief Scientific Adviser

Recommendation 15 - We recommend that the Secretary of State for Scotland should consider filling the post of Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland. One of his or her primary responsibilities would be to identify and develop, where possible, from the diverse research base in Scotland, an integrated strategy for Scottish research.

The Government agrees that it would be beneficial to develop a more integrated strategy for Scottish research. As well as fostering excellence this would help in securing better value for money and in underpinning Scotland’s industrial development. However, the Government does not believe that filling the post of Chief Scientist would be the best way of meeting this aim. It will consider further how the strategy could successfully be developed.

The Government also believes that it is important to develop Scottish science in the context of UK and international science. One of its strategies for doing so - the Foresight programme - is being tailored to the Scottish science base through collaboration between The Scottish Office, SHEFC, Scottish Enterprise (SE), COSHEP, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) and CBIScotland, and the activities of other individuals and organisations. Scotland has the added advantage of the joint SE/RSE initiative, Technology Ventures. Both influence the research undertaken in Scotland, and the choice of how best to reap associated commercial benefits.