> Professor Sue Trinidad: I think I might get started because I know we're a little bit late in the afternoon, and everyone needs to probably go right on 5. I'd like to introduce you to Bernadette Sanderson who is all the way from sunny Scotland [laughter]. She's really enjoying our weather here because this is the summer, isn't it?
> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.
> Professor Sue Trinidad: It's summer over there. It's been wonderful having a few days with Bernadette. I've been able to go through the annual report from her wonderful programme and have a look at how much of this is very similar to what we're doing here in Australia. And we were lucky to meet last year at the FACE conference which is the Further and Continuing… Forum for Access and Continuing Education [laughter]. It's over in the UK and I sent Paul this year to make sure that we were represented. And next year, the conference is going to be in Ireland. So I'll let everybody know here just in case you would like to present all the wonderful work you've been doing. Because it's a great group of people that come together from around the world to share their projects and things that they're doing within equity, student equity space. I'll hand over to you, Bernadette, to step us through as Director of the schools for higher education programme, which is FOCUSWest.
> Bernadette Sanderson: Thank you so much, thank you so much for coming along today. Especially at this hour of the day. I know people are going home to their families. And I hope it's worth your time just to be able to come along and hear my presentation on insights from the UK. So thank you very much, thanks, Sue, for inviting me. I'm so glad to be here at the centre, beautiful space, to do my presentation.
My talk is on university partnerships for community and school system development. But I'm also going to talk a little bit about the national context within which I'm working, because that's very relevant to how the operational work happens on the ground and affecting everything at the moment. And you'll see here on my first slide that I'm talking about Scotland particularly which is where my work is based. And I've put here just slightly in jest that we are still part of the United Kingdom.
Our union has been on the go since 1707, and it looks as if we're heading for a divorce. And so there's been a referendum which took place in 2014. And lots of people voted to be independent of England. Although there came of the referendum was actually a no vote, but since then, there's been a general election, and in Scotland, most people have voted for the Scottish Nationalist Party. Which is a big deal for us because it means that the way people are thinking, the national psyche, is moving very much to be separate from the rest of the UK. And we already have a very devolved system in Scotland of education and other things such as law. We have our own legal system and lots of other things that are devolved. But it's very important for us because we enjoy a lot of benefits at the moment from being part of that bigger picture, being part of the UK. Not just the monetary system, but access to research grants, access to all sorts of things, where the union has worked very well in the past. But it looks as if, you know, we might be heading for a bit of a divide in the future and obviously we'll see how that happens.
But for those of you who have not travelled to the UK before, this is our context. We're a very small country. Just over 5 million people, which, I think, is just about double the population of Perth. So we have a small population. We have a small land mass as well. And you would think that a policy area like widening access to higher education would work in such a small context, but we have a lot of the same problems as you have here in Australia, and I'm really interested to hear how things have been developing here and, perhaps, things that we can learn and apply back home in Scotland.
So just a little bit of context around that. I put this up, not just to make you feel relaxed about my presentation, but just an image of Scotland that many people have in their heads. So beautiful, rolling hills and heather, and an idyllic version of Scotland that some of you might have who've not travelled there. Or even an image like this which also exists in a lot of people's heads - a very kitsch, kind of touristy impression of the country. Although you do see quite a lot of this on the streets of Glasgow and in Edinburgh – [to Professor Trinidad] I don't know if you saw any of those? – so the pipers are piping.
But for me, the cane of reality of all the work that I do in widening access to higher education, because I work with secondary schools, is a very different kind of reality. I work with 40 secondary schools in the poorest parts of the city of Glasgow which is in the west of Scotland. And this kind of living situation in very poor flats is a sort of standard living situation for many of the young people that I work with. And this particular area is called Castlemilk. Which is very famous for having lots of gangs and a lot of poverty and a lot of generational worklessness. And it's really not the nicest place to grow up. So that's more the reality for me than those beautiful, touristy rolling hills, and all the rest of it.
So my programme is called the FOCUSWest programme. I've worked within the context of something called the Schools for Higher Education programme which is a Scottish government-funded programme. It's been running now since the year 2000, so we're in our 15th year. And it's a special, strategic programme in order to widen access to higher education. So this is how we call equity work back in Scotland, widening access to HE.
And FOCUSWest is an acronym that means Focus On College and University Study, and that's in the west of Scotland. We have college in there because our colleges in Scotland deliver quite a bit of higher education, and it's an alternative pathway, a different route to use, to get into university in Scotland. And it's a very underused pathway, so we try to promote that as much as we can.
So that's me and my programme. And I said here that I want to talk a wee bit before I talk about communities and partnerships just on how Scotland's progressing and that work on widening access to HE.
And I've said to you the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I'm not going to tell you what I think is the good, the bad, or the ugly - I'll let you work that out for yourselves.
So as I said before, Scotland is a population of just over 5 million people. And the next bit of information actually is something that looks very good. Our national participation in HE is sitting at about 36 per cent. And UK government makes a lot of noises about how they would like that figure to be up at 50 per cent so that 1 out of every 2 people is the holder of a degree, half of our adult population are graduates.
Well, we're sitting at 36 per cent, and that's about 10 per cent higher than what the figure used to be when I first came into this work about 15 years ago. So, so far, so good.
The second bullet here talks about a particular situation that we have in Scotland. We have no tuition fees for Scottish students. So students who are Scottish domicile who manage to access university directly do not pay any tuition fees. In the rest of the UK and England, there are fees, and those fees come in about 9,000 pounds per year. So a degree in England will cost you 27,000 pounds, in Scotland, we have 4 year degree so that would be 36,000 pounds. But if you're a Scottish student, you don't pay anything. That policy is a really… it’s the fruit of a very entrenched idea from the previous first minister of Scotland, a man called Alex Salmond. And he believed in this idea so much that he had a statement that is out on the web when he says the rocks will melt with sun on the day when Scottish students have to pay tuition fees. And he actually before he was defeated from his post, he actually commissioned a rock and he had that engraved on the rock, and it now sits on the campus of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
So it's a very entrenched view, and our current first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is of the same fixed mindset that there should be no tuition fees. And it's also something that divides us massively from our neighbours in England. Because in England, they are very pro those tuition fees. And, of course, in England, the tuition fees that the universities receive, allow them to grow and expand and develop and their campuses can build things, and you can do stuff, and they can develop their universities with those fees. Whereas in Scotland, with that capped system for home students, our university principals complain all the time they just haven't got the money. What they do try and do, therefore, is they try to expand this group so they have a huge recruitment drive and all the recruitment energy is spent on getting students to come up from England and to pay, and obviously international students as well.
John Phillimore: Excuse me, European students pay?
> Bernadette Sanderson: European students are, they do pay, yeah. So there is a fee that comes with a European student status. And that also brings in income.
> John Phillimore: But it's not as much as $9,000 pounds, is it?
> Bernadette Sanderson: It's not the same, yeah, no.
> John Phillimore: So a Danish or Belgium student would pay less than an English student?
> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, they would, yeah. So that's also an interesting one as well so. There's a kind of a ranking that's happening there especially in terms of what welcome that message that sends out. I also, another thing I wanted to note here is that we have 19 higher education institutions in Scotland. And they are actually mandated by legislation to widen access to higher education. So that's now enshrined in legislation. That was put together in 2013, it's called the Post-16 Scotland Act. The reality of that legislation is such that if you read the actual wording around it, although the universities are required to do it, the devil is in the detail about what that means in practice. So it doesn't quite… to my mind, it doesn't quite have a bite but it looks as if it has, you know, at first viewing.
Other things about our Scottish system, we have 25 further education colleges which provide vocational qualifications. Many of these, the early part of these vocational qualifications articulate then and to university degrees. So that's a really good pathway for students that maybe don't get all the qualifications they need when they leave school. They can. There's a possibility that they can go to FE College and then they can move into university that way. We have 25 of those colleges.
And then another thing that's worth noting is that our school system has also been reformed recently. We used to have a very fragmented school system, where we had the nursery system pretty much just doing what it wanted doing, learning through play… A primary school system which pretty much did its own thing, and a secondary school system that really just prepared students for qualifications and exams. And this wasn't particularly joined together. And then we have something that started a couple years ago to unify this, called the curriculum for excellence, and a lot of resource has been spent unifying that system. So this is what's been happening for us across the various sectors of education back in Scotland and it all looks very good, doesn't it? So far, so worthy.
However, countering all that good stuff, we also have something that the Scottish Tourist Information Board would not want you to know about - although, this is just factual information - our unemployment stats are rising. So despite all of this good stuff that's been happening around the education agenda, when you look at labour markets and when you look at employment, those figures are creeping up nationally. So we're now sitting at 6 per cent and then cities like my hometown, Glasgow, have some really serious problems with unemployment. And we are looking at a number of around about 30 per cent of unemployment in Glasgow. And that's a very bad figure. I mean, that's just not good for the health of a city or of a nation at all.
We have an issue around not just graduate labour markets, but labour markets per se. We don't manufacture very much anymore in Scotland, we don't really have a car industry, which is what many nations have as main exports. So we have a problem with that. So our young people look at this, and they, you know, you can't avoid this in Glasgow. And you know, even if your own family is in full employment, your neighbours will not be. So it's just something to bear in mind, you know, a backdrop against which we're working.
And also, just ally to that, we have a problem, a very live problem of poverty. A recent report showed that a really substantial number of Scottish people were living in poverty. And I don't know exactly how we've measured this around the [Bravelane?] report. But I think we're looking at essential household goods that people had access to. They came up with these numbers which, you know, are not great numbers. You know, talking about almost verging towards 1/5th of the entire population in Scotland creeping towards that Bravelane figure. And the numbers of children living in poverty has grown a lot in recent times.
So the economic situation - not that great when you think about it. And also I talked about working in Glasgow city. There are parts of Glasgow where I work, I mentioned Castlemilk, but a very famous St John’s Chapel and another place called Govan. In some of these communities, male life expectancy is only in the 40s. I think 44 or 46, you know. In some cases, the life expectancy in some of these parts of Glasgow is the same as your life expectancy in Iraq. Which is an appalling figure for a developed nation. So there's obviously a problem there. And government is aware of this, and they want to do something about it. They want to lift the educational level of the population. They want to start by looking at how they can work with young people to improve things. But there are some really big things that block all of that happening. You know, if we want to have more graduates in Scotland, this is very difficult in a system where we have a capped capacity of numbers that can access that system. And our universities don't help us always to make that happen, because for many of Scotland's universities, there's a very high tariff for direct entry. So the qualifications you need to access, direct access to university, usually you need As for everything in one sitting over time. So we have a capped number of places, and a very high entry system. And what that means is that the young people that I work with in some of the poorest communities and some of the, and the secondary schools where they don't have a great tradition of sending many people on to university, these kids just do not achieve the very high grades you need to get in. So that's, that gives us automatically, you know, an issue that we are working very hard to deal with.