Universities Scotland has submitted its response to the Scottish Funding Council’s consultation on a draft Strategic Plan for the three-year period 2015-18.
Our response is summarised in terms of the following key themes:
- Partnership: Experience has shown that the best outcomes for the sector and for Scotland follow from a strong and productive partnership between the SFC and autonomous institutions. We very much welcome the foregrounding of partnership as an overarching theme. Our response considers how this may be reflected more consistently in the substance of the plan.
- Ambition and strategy: We welcome the ambition expressed in the plan and look forward to gaining deeper insight into how this can be quantified, and what strategic actions can be taken to achieve it, in the context of constrained resources.
- The evolution of the SFC: We believe that this plan represents an opportunity for the SFC to explore how it can adapt to support universities to deliver their economic, cultural and academic contribution to Scotland.
- Building on success: The Scottish HE sector is highly successful by many measures. The SFC and Scottish universities have a track record of collaborating successfully in a range of areas, including research pooling, the quality enhancement framework and widening access. Recognising and building on past and current success will be key to any strategy for the future.