Legislation to restructure colleges in Scotland took effect in September consolidating individual institutions into regional colleges and representing the most significant change in the sector in 20 years.
Supporters of the policy hope it will give colleges more foreign student recruitment power.
“Many of the colleges have distinctive offerings and I’m quite certain regionalisation will give them a much greater mass in order to compete in international recruitment” Scottish Education Secretary Mike Russell told The PIE News.
Russell proposed the plans for regionalisation in his paper “Putting Learners At The Centre” in February of this year. The regionalisation will see the sector move from 41 individual colleges to 13 college regions with mergers (or close working and collaboration) between individual colleges within each region under the direction of new regional college boards.
“We have opportunities to do things on a larger scale and in bigger partnerships than we had previously as three individual colleges”
Since the policy took effect two months ago, two colleges have already emerged, Edinburgh College and Scotland’s Rural University College.The rest of the regional hubs are expected to come into position in the next 12-18 months.
Mandy Exley, principal of Edinburgh College, the result of a merger of Edinburgh’s Telford College, Jewel & Esk College and Stevenson College Edinburgh, echoes Russell’s opinion. “We have opportunities to do things on a larger scale and in bigger partnerships than we had previously as three individual colleges,” she told The PIE News.
Over 3,500 “non British students” from more than 90 different countries studied at the colleges last year and now, three months in, they have just under 2,000 students and expect to get a similar number to last year.
Exley says being able to use brand Edinburgh to attract students is a benefit the colleges didn’t have before. “Because Edinburgh as a city is so well known and loved around the world, coming together as Edinburgh College gives us that cache to operate in that international market place.”
She says that regionalisation has facilitated the development of opportunities in India and Saudi Arabia. “When you’re a larger organisation with 70 million turnover with a reasonable amount of flexibility you can do a lot more.”
However, critics of regionalisation argue that it asks colleges to do the same with less resources. John Spencer, convener of Scotland’s Colleges, issued a warning over the plan in September.
He said: “Our concern in the direction of travel for the Government is they appear to be seeking efficiencies in having fewer colleges, but delivering the same teaching activity to the same numbers of learners.
“This would be a very challenging agenda in any circumstance, but it seems likely we will soon hear that colleges may be asked to do this while absorbing a tough funding settlement.”
