Meeting of the Parliament 14 January 2016
When the bill was first mooted, the Scottish Government made it very clear that its only intention was to make some minor amendments to allow greater transparency when it came to the governance and management of universities and their accountability for large sums of public money. That public money sits alongside lots of other income streams and lines of accountability about which there seem to be no concerns in relation to university governance.
Something very different has transpired, as is clearly set out in the Education and Culture Committee’s report and as the convener set out in his speech. Notwithstanding the strong support from the UCU and the NUS, the bill met with an exceptionally hostile reaction within the university sector, which is a sector that in my opinion has always bent over backwards to work with the Government. The committee’s report states that the bill also met with a hostile reaction from groups such as the Scottish Council for Development and Industry and the Institute of Directors, and from many in civic Scotland.
There are several reasons for that reaction, but, as the committee’s report makes clear, one of the most important is the stark lack of good-quality data and analysis to demonstrate why the Scottish Government considered the bill necessary and its failure to provide bona fide evidence to support the key assertions in the bill. Education and Culture Committee members castigated the Scottish Government no fewer than six times for that lack of evidence and the lack of clarity in the proposals. Therefore, for many people the main issue remains the utter failure to demonstrate that there is a problem with the existing system of governance that somehow acts to the detriment of higher education.