Meeting of the Parliament 08 October 2025
Alexander Stewart is absolutely right to point the finger at the Scottish Government.
The Scottish Government cannot blame the situation on Westminster or an overall lack of resource. Over the past five years, during which college payments have reduced by 20 per cent in real terms, the overall Scottish Government budget has had a real-terms increase of 2.5 per cent. The closures and cutbacks are entirely down to the choices that the SNP has made to deprioritise skills training for the future workforce that our colleges provide.
Some, but not all, apprenticeships are delivered through our colleges; yet, already, there are concerns about the shortage of apprenticeship places. In 2024-25, learning providers requested around 34,000 apprenticeships to meet the needs of the economy, but the Scottish Government funded just over 25,000, which left a substantial gap. The trade body Engineering Scotland has estimated that 20 per cent of the skills demand from employers has been unmet due to those real-terms cuts in apprenticeship spending, and, elsewhere, businesses have expressed concern about the growing skills gap. The Open University report “Business Barometer 2025” states that 56 per cent of Scottish businesses are experiencing skills shortages, while 39 per cent expect the skills gap to worsen in the next five years.
To give an example from another sector, the number of extra construction workers that are needed in Scotland for the period from 2025 to 2029 is estimated at 3,590 per year, yet we simply do not have the apprenticeship places available to provide the training to meet that demand. In the words of Michelle Ferguson, director of the Confederation of British Industry Scotland,
“Scottish Apprenticeships will be critical in building the future workforce”,
but we are simply not providing enough of them.
There has been some encouraging language from the Scottish Government about the need to promote parity of esteem between different learning routes. Apprenticeships are of value to our future economy, as are university degrees, but apprenticeships get much less attention and much lower funding—as do college places; figures from the Funding Council show that, for the 2024-25 financial year, funding per college student is just £5,054, while the equivalent per university student is £7,558, which is nearly half as much again.