{"id":41323,"date":"2019-02-11T13:49:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T13:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sfc.6bdv.ws\/blog-68022\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T12:13:46","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T11:13:46","slug":"blog-68022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sfc.ac.uk\/gd\/blog-68022\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating talent"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Herald HE Awards 18 showed once again how much there is to celebrate in Scottish colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

\"BannerNews – Herald Higher Education Awards<\/a><\/p>\n

The Scottish Funding Council occupies a privileged position in the world of colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

We have this incredible responsibility of allocating \u00a31.8 billion of funding for teaching, research and the other essentials of further and higher education. But this is not what defines us. What defines us is how well we\u2019re able to support colleges and universities to achieve important things for learners, the future economy and for our wider society.<\/p>\n

Yesterday evening at the Herald HE awards we were able to celebrate what colleges and universities have achieved over the past year. If you take a look at the categories for last night\u2019s awards you get a sense of the significance of those achievements. We celebrated quality in both individual and institutional work in higher education. We celebrated how colleges and universities support their students both as people and as academic achievers. We celebrated Scotland\u2019s world-leading academic research and its continuing ability to innovate. We celebrated how colleges and universities work hard to spread the benefits of their work to the people who create jobs and build industries. We also celebrated how well people work together in higher education. Finally, we celebrated people\u2019s efforts to make higher education more inclusive and more able to include the most talented learners \u2013 no matter what their backgrounds.<\/p>\n

Because the Scottish Funding Council sponsored last night\u2019s awards for partnership and widening access I\u2019d like to talk a bit more about these two things.<\/p>\n

\"HeraldI happen to believe Scotland is really good at partnerships. We\u2019re a small and closely connected country. We\u2019ve exploited this to good effect in the SFC-funded research pools and innovation centres which are partnerships between global institutions that could be competitors but, being within close proximity and having a common purpose, collaborate extremely effectively. I\u2019m often asked why other countries can\u2019t replicate this and the answer is \u201cbecause they\u2019re not Scotland\u201d.<\/p>\n

On widening access I\u2019m clear that this is our greatest challenge and our biggest priority in higher education. We simply can\u2019t afford to waste talent and restrict people\u2019s life chances because of deprivation – it\u2019s not fair and it\u2019s not clever. The First Minister set us a challenge in her 2014 Programme for Government when she wanted us to determine that a child born today in one of Scotland\u2019s most deprived communities will, by the time he or she leaves school, have the same chance of going to university as a child born in one of our least deprived communities. We\u2019re all working very hard at this and every successful project now is a beacon of hope for the future.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s one award category I didn\u2019t mention in the earlier roll call and that\u2019s Campaign of the Year; the one that recognises outstanding communication. The Scottish Funding Council sometimes plays host to overseas visitors coming to Scotland to find out what makes higher education here so good. They often seem to appreciate the excellence of Scotland\u2019s higher education system more than we do ourselves. I think, for example, that it matters that people know that Scotland has five universities in the world\u2019s top 200 higher education institutes and I think it matters that people know that over 87% of college HE learners are satisfied with their educational experience.<\/p>\n

So I want to finish by thanking the Herald for its excellent efforts to shine the spotlight on Scottish higher education. It is something we all have a stake in and something we can all justifiably be proud of.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Herald HE Awards 18 showed once again how much there is to celebrate in Scottish colleges and universities.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCelebrating talent - Scottish Funding Council<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Herald HE Awards 18 showed once again how much there is to celebrate in Scottish colleges and universities.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sfc.ac.uk\/gd\/blog-68022\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Celebrating talent - 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