Review of further education governance in Scotland

A. Context

When the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning asked me to conduct this review the terms of reference were set out clearly, and are detailed in Annexe B. That remit clearly splits the task I was given into two parts;

a) How the sector as a whole should be managed across Scotland

b) Having decided that, how each College or entity should be governed.

Two distinct tasks. You cannot do b) until a) is decided as we will explain later in this report. We will report on each separately.

However, subsequent to our starting the review, a consultation paper 'Putting Learners at the Centre' was published in September 2011. As a result of that the Cabinet Secretary amended the focus of the remit slightly, which is detailed also in Annexe B.

That consultation paper and the subsequent consultation paper on regionalisation set out a suggested new structure for the FE Sector based on a regional model. I should be clear that both before and after the publication of these papers the Cabinet Secretary has made it clear to me that what is said in those should not affect the thinking and recommendations of this review.

However, before the publication of 'Putting Learners at the Centre', we had already begun to consider a regional model based on our own thoughts and research. Also between the publication of 'Putting Learners at the Centre' and the regionalisation consultation paper, we had had discussions with both Scottish Government officials and those from the Scottish Funding Council ( SFC) with the result that the regions, with one exception, set out in the regionalisation consultation paper, are those that we would have recommended.

Therefore in terms of the first part of our remit, to do with structure and management of the sector, we will only make comment on this in terms of why we think what we propose right, and not just for the reasons of efficiency which featured strongly in both Government consultation papers.

In effect, for the purposes of this report we have made our initial recommendations based on the assumption that the first of these, namely the move to a regional model for the College sector, will be accepted and will be implemented. This allows this report to focus more on what that outcome means.