‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotland.’ So read the words carved into a stone outside Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh unveiled by Alex Salmond while he was first minister. But as the SNP’s education policy begins to unravel and the budgetary pressures build at Holyrood, how much longer before the Scottish government starts to revisit its practice of subsidising students, even middle-class ones who can well afford to pay tuition fees?
From the vantage point of a Scottish sixth former, the system north of the border looks great. Unlike their English cousins, Scots attending Scottish universities pay no tuition fees. Scottish students do have to pay their living costs, but even so, according to the Student Loans Company, Scottish students graduate with average debts of £15,430 compared with £44,940 for English students. But that presupposes that Scottish students can get into university in the first place. Scottish universities have a strong incentive to favour students from abroad, or from elsewhere in the UK.
Free tuition is gradually starving Scottish universities of cash. While English universities, too, have an incentive to favour overseas students over UK ones because they can charge them what they like rather than the £9,250 set by the government, in Scotland the situation is markedly worse. Give a place to a Scottish student and a Scottish university has just £7,610 a year available to educate them – made up a teaching grant which works out at £5,790 per pupil plus a shadow tuition fee (paid by the Scottish government rather than the student) of £1,820 a year.The overall per-capita funding of Scottish students in Scottish universities has fallen by 19 per cent in real terms over the past decade, according to a study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Not of course that spending more money would necessarily lead to better quality education, as the SNP has proved with schools. In 2000, soon after devolution, Scottish schools led the UK, with higher Pisa rankings than in England, Wales of Northern Ireland. They were still just about ahead in 2012 after the SNP introduced its Curriculum for Excellence, which downplayed the importance of knowledge in favour of instructing students in what are supposed to be transferrable skills. But those skills certainly are not transferring themselves into high Pisa scores. In maths Scottish pupils now trail English ones. The only consolation for Scotland is that Labour-run Wales is a little bit worse. It is certainly not down to a lack of money. Scottish schools now receive an average of £1,300 per pupil per year more than their English counterparts.
Scotland was once revered for its Enlightenment. The high value put on education was still visible at the beginning of this century. Yet under the SNP the Scottish education system has undergone a dis-enlightenment.
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