02 Mar 2020
On a Chamber trade visit to the Chinese city of Hangzhou last year, amongst the delegation was a representative from City of Glasgow College.
Of the members he was by far the most familiar with the largest city in Zhejiang province because the College has an established relationship with Zhejiang Technical Institute of Economics, selling course material on global supply chains in industry.
We shouldn’t have been surprised to find a Scottish college selling its expertise overseas. The recently published Cumberford-Little report reviewing the economic impact of colleges for the Scottish Government contains a world map showing the reach for just two of the sector’s larger players - Edinburgh and City of Glasgow. Together they have activity on almost every continent.
The report goes a long way to clarifying just how significant our college network is to Scotland’s economic performance. With nearly 265,000 students, of whom over a third are from the country’s lowest socio-economic backgrounds, the role of colleges in shaping the skills that Scottish industry needs is considerably less appreciated than it should be.
Over a quarter of Scottish domiciled first degree entrants to university get there via college, and colleges deliver over a quarter of all higher education in Scotland.
Three detailed recommendations explore the purpose 21st century colleges should have, the measures needed to help colleges expand their current relevance to business and the adjustments needed to the sector’s funding model. The report’s dominant theme however is agility.
The impact of artificial intelligence on the world of work is widely expected to be radical and swift and we will need a tertiary education system that can react rapidly to create new learning offers often - as the report suggests - in ‘micro-chunks, validated with micro-credentials’.
The system will have to increase its collaboration with industry where the impact of Industry 4.0 will be the most acute and especially with the harder to reach smaller business community - helping to both upskill and reskill staff across working lifetimes.
That nearly three quarters of college students are part-time suggests the increased agility is well within the colleges’ capability to grasp.
There is a carefully phrased suggestion that one barrier to agility is the current scope of Ministerial guidance which the colleges receive each year. That guidance comes in the form of an outcome agreement from the Scottish Funding Council and grows ever more lengthy and prescriptive with colleges having to commit to over 100 different targets.
That level of micro-management is almost certain to limit the colleges’ freedom to respond to fast-changing jobs markets. One suspects the guidance letter from the Government to the Scottish Funding Council will have similar tendencies.
One might think back on the management missteps that emerged in a few colleges during the process of regionalisation that reduced the number of colleges to 26 as a result of mergers. Perhaps it was understandable Ministers should react with substantially closer attention to college governance and performance management.
As the regional structure matures though, the Scottish Government may have to consider whether it must trust the college sector with greater freedom to manoeuvre.
The true customers of the tertiary education system must be the students and, increasingly, businesses looking for help to fill skill shortages and help staff adjust to technological change.
Government invariably takes time to catch up with market developments and would be wiser to reduce both the length of its outcome agreements and the number of its performance targets.
The Cumberford-Little report is a thoughtful and focused assessment of what Scotland needs from its college sector and deserves a warm and agile response.
This article first appeared in Glasgow Chamber’s weekly column in Herald Business.
