IT was a case of bad timing for officials from the Scottish Funding Council as they appeared before the public audit committee yesterday.
John Kemp, the SFC’s interim chief executive, was at the Scottish Parliament to answer questions about the efficacy or otherwise of the recent programme of college mergers.
Instead he found himself defending the organisation’s value in the context of a Scottish Government review which is looking at a better alignment of the work of the SFC with Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Skills Development Scotland.
Those who sat on the review panel were apparently as surprised as anyone else last week when it was suggested a by-product of this closer working could be the scrapping of the SFC board.
For an organisation seeking to defend its good working practices in the face of a threat of hostile take-over there was probably no worse occasion than the public audit committee’s scrutiny of a no-holds-barred Audit Scotland evaluation of the college merger process which the SFC helped to oversee.
The Scottish Government had said college mergers would improve engagement with employers, create financial efficiencies through reduced duplication and unnecessary competition and, crucially, boost outcomes for learners.
The SFC’s own evaluation concurred, but a rather different picture emerged from Audit Scotland which said there was a lack of baseline data to compare college performance, that there was “variable evidence” mergers had improved business engagement and that there had been a drop in student attainment and an increase in drop-out rates.
The SNP’s Alex Neil wasted no time in pointing this out to Mr Kemp telling him: “When you look at the report from the Auditor General the first conclusion you would reach is that this is not how to go about a major reform programme.
“There is a question mark over the added value and the competence of the funding council itself. It really has been a bit of a fiasco has it not?”
Mr Kemp admitted aspects of the merger process could have been improved, but by and large, said it had been a success, adding: “It was implemented fairly quickly and I think effectively by the colleges involved. I don’t accept it was a fiasco.”
Where it seems clearer that there has been a failing is in the fact neither the SFC nor the Scottish Government analysed the likely impact of an expansion of full-time courses for younger students at the expense of part-time courses populated by women and older learners.
Mr Kemp admitted that in 2009 when the policy was being implemented the SFC did not do anything that could be “properly described” as an impact assessment.
Proving the merits of the college merger programme is complex, not least because the Scottish Government has such a stake in showing it to be a success.
But in the context of a policy supposedly designed to improve the student experience it seems an unequivocal flaw that such a crucial assessment was never carried out.
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