Challenges and opportunities in rural Scotland’s education sytem

Dave Roberts on how opportunities for further and higher education cannot be the same in rural Scotland as it is in our cities, and that we need to try and remove as many barriers as possible.

Considering Scotland is such a rural country, we have been very conservative in our approach to post-school education and training. For example, in Australia, the Country Universities Centre (CUC) has a network of locally governed centres with community-led study hubs as part of a wider strategy to grow the regional workforce, strengthen student pathways, and secure local employment in critical areas facing skills shortages. Scotland needs to consider innovative approaches like this.

Access to the most appropriate education

Education is not just about the course content. There is also pastoral care, guidance, social and sports opportunities. Each student is an individual and for some, the opportunity to live and study in a city is fantastic. we should therefore not encourage these students to stay in their home area. But for others, there are distinct advantages to studying nearer home, these may be financial but could also be emotional support of families and friends.

Travelling in rural areas

Most of our decision makers live in urban areas and/or have access to their own transport. They really don’t understand how difficult it is to travel by public transport in some rural areas. Colleges have partnered with local bus companies to provide services at the start and end of the college day, but it can be really challenging for students to travel outside of these times. Perhaps some of our ‘decision makers’ meetings should be held in a rural town, for example, New Galloway, and everyone would be expected to use pubic transport to attend. Good luck if the meeting starts at 10:00am and you live in Edinburgh!

Meeting the needs of local employers

Most of the employers in rural areas are SMEs and it can be difficult to identify what their skills-needs will be in the medium-to-long-term. More flexible training opportunities are needed for post-school students and for those already in employment. One example would be a more flexible approach to apprenticeships, for example, being able to work for more than one employer during an apprenticeship.

Education cannot be considered in isolation

Some of the issues on skills shortages in rural areas keep going back to the provision of tertiary education. This approach is too blinkered. Rural areas need to be more attractive for people with the appropriate qualifications to move to. Not only do we need improved infrastructure and connectivity, but we also need to:

• Move away from having salary as one of the main points in job adverts.
  • The important factor is what you can actually buy with the salary. Just look at the differences in house prices between our cities and rural areas.
• Help our SMEs become better employers with more innovative and modern employment contracts.

Make more of what we already have

Rural areas have some great tertiary education establishments, and in the South of Scotland, we have two excellent regional colleges. There are also university campuses – with the Open University having over 1,000 students in the South of Scotland. However, the funding models don’t seem to allow these organisations to be as innovative as they want to be. Whilst the amount of funding is important, it is equally important to allow our educational establishments to be agile to meet the differing needs in rural areas.

Dave Roberts, Emeritus Professor of Dairy Farming Systems at SRUC; Board Member, The Crichton Foundation, Borders College and LANTRA.

This opinion piece follows a partnership conference with The Crichton Foundation, which focused on pressing issues facing Scotland’s rural education system.

The RSE’s blog series offers personal views on a variety of issues. These views are not those of the RSE and are intended to offer different perspectives on a range of current issues