All Scottish pupils 'should have one year at college' before university in radical education shake-up
Joanna Campbell is the new principal of Glasgow Kelvin College and believes the sector could do so much more to tackle child poverty and net zero with help from the Scottish Government.
All Scottish school pupils should have one year’s study at college before moving to work or university, it has been claimed.
The proposal comes from Joanna Campbell, new principal of Glasgow Kelvin College, who believes the entire higher and further education sector needs a radical shake-up.
This would involve putting colleges at the heart of the Scottish Government’s economic and net-zero plans.
Mrs Campbell said: “I honestly believe that if every student at school had the opportunity to complete one year in college before they went on to university, then you would you increase success rates in the university programs.”
Mrs Campbell, who took charge of Glasgow Kelvin College in April, said she was “absolutely wedded to the ethos” of the college system thanks to her own background.
During her first significant interview since taking office, she described how the college sector “transformed my life” as a young mother who went to Fife College to study an HND in business and juggled studying with raising a family.
“I went to college at a time where I felt my education had not provided the output that I would have wanted to allow me to pursue my goals in life,” she said.
An ‘exceptional’ college
Kelvin College operates in some of Scotland’s most deprived communities, with three campuses in Glasgow’s Springburn, Easterhouse and Haghill. After college, Mrs Campbell went on to university, worked in industry for several years and then opted to return to college as a lecturer.
As principal of Dumfries and Galloway College, Mrs Campbell turned the institution into what she describes as an “exceptional organisation” that is one of the best performing colleges in Scotland. The strain on the sector is multi-faceted, however.
“The challenges that students face now are very different and more pronounced than when I was a student,” Mrs Campbell said. “We see higher levels of homelessness, financial poverty, food poverty, heat poverty, also mental health and wellbeing.
“And there's so many students who come through the college system who are presenting with some really challenging mental health issues, ranging from low mood right up to things like schizophrenia.”
The Scottish Government, she said, must implement the mental health and wellbeing action plan that was mooted around two years ago.
“There were very specific actions in that,” she said. “The funding has gone from the college sector to support health and wellbeing, but what we've done in this college is we have decided to retain the services of counsellors, because it's so important to our students, and if we were to take that lifeline away, then it's ultimately going to affect not just the college, but also their their home life as well.”
As the university sector struggles to settle on a sustainable funding model and as institutions lose money to falling numbers of overseas students, Mrs Campbell said she believed closer working with the college sector could provide solutions.
“This isn’t something that’s going to be easy to fix, but there is an overlap in the system,” she said.
Capital funding challenge
Colleges receive less capital than universities and schools.
“There are overlaps in the senior phase of the school, and what colleges offer in our further education provision, and there's overlaps and what we offer in our higher education provision, and what is offered in the university sector,” Mrs Campbell said.
“If we were to create efficiencies around that learner journey, it would be better for the public purse, and it would also give those individuals an experience that they're not having to repeat parts of that journey over again.”
To create this new system would take an “honest conversation about who is best placed to offer what and we could, simply, remove some of the duplication”.
Mrs Campbell’s predecessor at Kelvin, Derek Smeall, took the college through a period of significant financial challenge and reduced college costs by 20 per cent.
When Mrs Campbell took over, the college was no longer in a deficit position and so she is now focusing on increasing Kelvin’s academic performance and growing its financial sustainability. Her plan is to work with Glasgow businesses to support specific skills gaps for the city economy.
At one end of the scale, she says, there is an “over-saturation of higher education”, while at the other, there are employability programmes.
“And then there is this bit in the middle, which is where the college sector plays into and actually is where the technical skills are that we're hearing that employers need,” she said.
Kelvin is part of a Glasgow College group that encompasses six regional areas of the Greater Glasgow growth deal.
“That’s absolutely where the colleges can provide a skills pipeline for the Glasgow economy,” Mrs Campbell said. “Now we can't do that alone in isolation. We need to work with our partner colleges across the Greater Glasgow region.”
This year’s Program for Government repeats the SNP priority on tackling child poverty.
One of Scotland’s most deprived areas
At Kelvin College, 41 per cent of students are from the most deprived parts of Scotland, making it the highest proportion across Scotland.
Mrs Campbell is alert to the challenges her students face - caring responsibilities, work - and some courses are tailored around the demands students face outwith college.
Community hubs allow students to come in with their families for family learning where they are given a meal, whether breakfast or lunch.
“We recognise that food poverty is a real issue and it has an impact on their ability to engage with education,” Mrs Campbell said.
The work of the college sector interacts with what are some of the Scottish Government’s major priorities: the implementation of The Promise, to improve life chances for care experienced young people; raising attainment; closing the poverty-related attainment gap; tackling child poverty.
“I do feel the pressure,” Mrs Campbell said. “But it's the pressure that comes from not being able to do enough. And we could do more, but we can't. We simply can't, because we're capped by volume.
“We would love to be able to do more work around supporting child poverty, improving outcomes for young people, but we can't take any more students in.”
Some 12 per cent of the college’s provision is for English for Speakers of Other language (ESOL). When the courses are advertised, they are filled within 24 hours with hundreds of people left on a waiting list. At the last launch of an ESOL class there were 1,100 applicants for 24 places.
Construction and engineering programs are also over-subscribed, yet it is not within a college’s gift to be able to take any more students due to a lack of physical and financial capacity.
“These are people who are not getting that opportunity to engage with college education, and many of these students are coming here because they want to then go on into the workplace,” Mrs Campbell said. “That’s a blockage in the system from a skills and labour opportunity and things like tackling climate change.”
There must, she adds, be investment into college campuses to introduce the technology needed to train students for a changing job market. “Of course, we don't have the necessary capital at our disposal to be able to do that,” she said.
In Glasgow, three colleges provide ESOL, but demand has crept up. Training has not kept pace with the volume because increasing ESOL provision would mean cuts elsewhere.
Keeping pace with demand
Scottish Government funding simply does not keep pace with demand.
Mrs Campbell said: “The issue there is we've not linked up - and this would be my ask of government - we’ve not linked up opportunity where we've got a migrant population who choose to settle in the city, and they absolutely should be given the opportunity to support the skills pipeline.
“But we're not putting the correct mechanisms in place from an education perspective to allow that to be the case. That’s an oversight.”
Mrs Campbell said there should be an increase in the budget allocated for people when they settle in Scotland and funding for every newcomer to have a universal offer from any college they choose to attend.
Pressures also come from the wide variety of options colleges are expected to offer - from access courses for medical degrees to life skills classes for young people who are out of the school system or who have additional support needs.
“Young people are signposted to the college for life skills and there is no support for those individuals and it’s putting additional stress on the system,” Mrs Campbell said.
She said councils, with pressures on their budgets, had diverted pupils they should be supporting into the college sector instead. “We haven't been able to cope with the demand there simply isn't the resource,” the principal added.
‘Creaking at the seams’
Mrs Campbell described colleges as “creaking at the seams”, but also working within an outdated system. The qualifications system has not kept up with the pace of change in the college sector.
While young people are using generative AI tools to support their learning, the qualifications system has remained static. Some 1,200 modern apprentices come into the college each year and go through a course where they learn a variety of trades, rather than the traditional focus on just one.
“The modern employer doesn't want the whole apprenticeship, they want somebody who can go in and fix something from start to finish,” Mrs Campbell said. “So there needs to be the agility to be able to develop those qualifications.”
The demographic of college students is changing too.
Mrs Campbell said more students were interested in part-time study and “you need to have short, sharp programmes to support them”. The other big issue for colleges has been the removal of the flexible workforce development fund.
This was a £15 million funding pot that was removed from the college sector for the 2023/24 academic year and not reinstated in this academic year. The fund allowed colleges to offer free training to employers.
“What I would like to see the Scottish Government do, as has been done in England where they are looking at growth, is that whoever is in the ruling post in May 2026 following the election, they see that there is an opportunity for the college sector to do more to support employers where they have skills gaps,” Mrs Campbell said.
She said she hoped legislation changes would see a change to the current funding model, which is “top sliced”. Rather than apprenticeship funding going directly to colleges, 40 per cent of apprenticeship funding goes towards management costs.
The main frustration
Mrs Campbell is frustrated when Scottish Government inward investment opportunities do not include the college sector.
“If people are seeking to locate and build their business in Scotland and they're not able to see what availability of training is available for the workforce to provide them with the skills that they need for their business, then they're not going to make a fully formed decision on whether they want to base themselves,” she said.
Glasgow, she says, has been a good example of an administration working with the college sector.
During the recent expansion of the financial services industry in Glasgow, Kelvin College was part of the conversation around expanding the workforce.
“If you look at the tertiary education and training bill, if you look at apprenticeship reform, if you look at skills planning, it absolutely is a great opportunity for colleges to step forward and do more, and it provides a level of parity between vocational academic qualifications that were perhaps haven't seen,” the Kelvin College head said. “But we need to also look at the funding that goes alongside that.”
Mrs Campbell said she believed the government needed to take a fresh look at funding.
While college finance is dealt with by the education directorate, she claimed the health and economy directorates should be involved too, given the role colleges play in those sectors.
“If you're focusing in silos, which quite often we do in Scotland, and you're not looking across those cabinet portfolios, then actually you're missing an opportunity there,” she said.
“There is fundamentally so much more the college sector could be doing if we were given proper resource.”
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