Scottish Higher Education Regained: Accident Or Design?

Abstract

Until last year Scottish higher education was a fractured system. Its universities, which had played such a celebrated role in the assertion and definition of Scotland's national identity from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, were subordinated to an English-dominated quango, first the University Grants Committee (UGC) in London and more recently the Universities Funding Council (UFC) in Bristol, both of which in turn were responsible to the (English) Department of Education and Science (DES). The rest of Scottish higher education, the central institutions (CIs), were directly accountable to the Scottish Office Education Department (SOED), without the benefit of the dubious protection of a buffer agency like the UGC/UFC. Last year, following the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, the pattern of British higher education was restructured. The binary system - the separation between universities and polytechnics or colleges - was abandoned in England and less decisively so in Scotland. All the English polytechnics and two former colleges of higher education, Derby and Luton, became universities. In Scotland four CIs (Napier, Robert Gordon, Paisley and Glasgow Caledonian) also became universities. Equally significant was the decision to establish separate funding councils for England, Scotland and Wales. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) inherited responsibility for the 35 English universities and all the institutions previously accountable to the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council (PCFC). The HEFCE sector now comprises 68 universities and 49 colleges. In addition the council funds higher education courses in 77 further