As part of our special series on The State of Scotland's Colleges, education writer James McEnaney speaks to three people whose lives were changed by a little-known route to university on offer in colleges across the country.

When Nicola Ramsay was a teenager, she wanted to be a vet. In secondary school, she chose Highers and Advanced Highers that would move her closer to that goal, but personal difficulties meant that, in the head, she didn’t achieve the grades she needed to gain access to an incredibly competitive field.

And that, it seemed, was that.

“Back then entry requirements were based on first sitting of exams,” she tells me, “so resits would not be accepted.”

“As a fall back, I briefly attended university studying Electronic and Electrical Engineering, but realised after the 1st year, it was not for me. I dropped out of education completely at that point.”

A part-time retail job became a full-time commitment and, eventually, a career - Nicola worked her way through the ranks, was promoted to management, and moved to London, where she ultimately became a recruitment consultant.

But when illness forced her back to Glasgow to recover, her old dreams began to resurface.

“I had to pack up my bags and move back to Glasgow and live with my parents for a few months whilst I got 'well'. In that time, I was feeling pretty low, but it gave me time to reevaluate my life," she recalled.

“I still wanted to be a vet all these years later and felt I had never fulfilled a lifelong dream.”

Her first plan had been to pursue A-levels, hoping to bypass the ‘first sitting’ rule by jumping to different qualifications, but struggled to find anywhere that offered them. And then, by chance, she spoke to “a very useful and informative lady at one of the colleges” who recommended SWAP.

Developed in the mid-1980s by colleges and universities in Glasgow, the Scottish Wider Access Programme was intended as “a response to recession and de-industrialisation”. The scheme allows adults to return to education in a full-time, one-year Access course that offers direct links to higher education – put simply, it offers a rapid route to university.

What’s more, it is built on the principle of maximum accessibility, which means that there are no formal entry requirements, so having no qualifications is no problem at all.

Through SWAP, Nicola started an Access to Medical Studies at college. Despite the understandable anxieties associated with returning to education as an adult, she tells me that she was “still very excited that I had a chance to prove myself and potentially fulfill a dream of mine".

She soon realised that her existing skills and professional experience could also be hugely valuable tools for education, and that “the maturity that comes with age” also made things easier, but is also keen to tell me about the support she received from staff when she lost her mother to cancer during the latter part of her initial studies.

Read more: How we shone a light on The State of Scotland's Colleges

The State of Scotland's Colleges: Find all articles in the series here

After completing the Access course, Nicola successfully applied for Veterinary Medicine at the University of Glasgow. She graduated with a Commendation as well as The John Duncan Tharme Prize for academic excellence through adversity after undergoing treatment for breast cancer during her studies.

“I am now in my dream job as a Veterinary Surgeon for nearly two years,” she says, “and I am the happiest I've ever been. I still well up when I think of the day I graduated, it is one of my proudest achievements. It has been a long road, with many hurdles but it has been completely worth it.”

The Herald:

Across Scotland, there are dozens of Access courses on offer through the SWAP initiative, with provision split between the east and west of the country. Since its inception nearly 40 years ago, tens of thousands of people have been given the chance to change their lives, with the high success rates offering a testament to the transformative value of this sort of approach to education.

For Daniel McLachlan, participation in the SWAP programme helped him to rediscover his confidence in himself: “I enjoyed a lot of the course, and I would say in hindsight the best part of my experience was how empowering it became.”

Having achieved good grades at school, he originally studied music at university, but a childhood accident meant that he started to lose hearing in one ear, forcing a change of direction.

“I spend the next ten years going from job to job and generally being unhappy with my situation,” he tells me.

Daniel wanted to go back to university, but worried about the cost of some of the access courses he’d heard about. Then a friend told him about SWAP.

“I was 27, and worried about how old I would be when I finally achieved everything,” he says. “But I remember reading that if I was worried about being 35 when I graduated, and that made me not do anything about it, then I’d turned 35 and still be wondering: what if?”

“I went on to study applied psychology at Glasgow Caledonian University. The SWAP course provided me with the tools to succeed, and I graduated with a first-class honour in a BSc honours degree. Something I had never believed I could do before. Currently, I am studying a master's in clinical health psychology at Strathclyde.”

The next steps are work experience and, after that, a doctorate.

Another alumni of, and advocate for, the SWAP programme is Stuart Patterson, who returned to formal education after an absence of more than three decades.

Regarded as intelligent and promising as a child – he won a city bursary to attend Hutcheson’s Grammar School in 1981 – Stuart was pulled into Glasgow’s gang culture: “smoking hash, drinking wine, and fights.”

What followed was “a descent into full blown addiction leading to prison in my teens and then residential rehab at the age of twenty-seven.”

He rebuilt his life as a Christian minister, eventually founding the Easterhouse Community Church with his wife Tracy in 2011, but the urge to return to education was always there. One night, with his wife visiting her home in Dublin, he decided to find out if the dream was possible – and discovered Access to Humanities for Law.

“I applied and was ruthlessly honest about my past, I think in part hoping they would reject me. They didn’t. In fact, the response was so welcoming and putting me at ease and assuring me that the Access course was designed with people like me in mind.”

A whirlwind year followed, after which Stuart moved on to the University of Strathclyde to complete a degree in Social Policy, Journalism and Creative Writing, followed by an MLitt in Digital Journalism, with a PhD now also a very realistic option for the future.

But in the seven years since submitted that initial SWAP application, he picks out a very different highlight:

“My middle daughter Zoe was studying Nat 5 Maths at the same time as I was. Being able to study together and actually help her through it as a parent was proper dream stuff. I think she enjoyed it as well. We both passed.”