Blog

The future depends on what we do in the present

Mahatma Gandhi once said: “The future depends on what you do in the present” and that’s the message that Scottish universities will be delivering to assembled guests, parliamentarians and the Higher Education and Science Minister on Tuesday 22 November at the Scottish Parliament. The future is uncertain: it’s believed that 65% of children who are…

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Refugees Welcome

Ulrike Peter, Senior Policy Officer (International) here at Universities Scotland discusses a brand new publication, Guidance for Universities on Providing Asylum Seekers and Refugees with Access to Higher Education. The guidance is a collaborative effort between the Scottish Refugee Council and heads of admissions from a range of Scottish universities.  Forms. They are a universal element of applying to a…

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Seizing the opportunities presented in the Blueprint for Fairness

Dame Ruth Silver led the work of the Commission on Widening Access over 2015-16 and its final report, A Blueprint for Fairness. The Blueprint, published in March this year, made 32 recommendations focused on widening access to university and reaching the First Minister’s aspiration that a child born in 2015 in the most deprived areas of…

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EU Referendum: the issues as they affect higher education in Scotland

Our Director, Alastair Sim, has written an extended piece for The Scotsman’s ‘Scotland’s future series’, considering the EU Referendum. Alastair considers the impact losing EU funding could have on scientific research in his piece first published on Thursday,  26 May.  Alastair: David Lurie is working on the next generation of MRI scanner. A scanner so…

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How your business can benefit from working with Scotland’s universities

Heather Alexander is Marketing Manager at Interface, the knowledge connection for organisations to universities and research institutions for the support they need to create and develop new products, services and processes. This free and impartial service has been designed to save businesses time and money in finding an academic partner and it has already helped hundreds of…

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Philanthropy supports research which changes lives

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Siddharthan Chandran is the MacDonald Professor of Neurology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of both the Euan MacDonald Centre for Motor Neurone Disease Research and the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic.  Professor Chandran works in the emerging discipline of Regenerative Neurology, combining laboratory and clinical research to understand and work towards new therapies…

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What next for Scottish higher education after the 2016 Scottish Parliament election?

Scots will go to the polls on Thursday 5 May to choose who gets to form a Scottish Government for the next five years. With the campaign in full swing, and with just one more manifesto to be published, our Director, Alastair Sim, writes about what the outcome of the election could mean for Scotland’s…

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Inspiring our children to learn

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The Children’s University at Queen Margaret University Edinburgh encourages children between the age of 7 to 14 to take part in out-of-school learning activities using Passports to Learning. In doing so it makes learning fun and raises aspirations and expectations of going to university amongst children from a young age. The recent report from the…

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Access to HE at home and abroad

Our Director, Alastair, blogs from Pakistan where he has spent the week with the British Council exploring potential partnerships between Scottish and Pakistani HE. Alastair Sim: It’s been a week of contrasting perspectives on widening access to university. The first excitement was the publication of the Commission on Widening Access’s report ‘A Blueprint for Fairness’. That…

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Gravitational waves: Scottish university research with global impact

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Professor Martin Hendry is Professor of Gravitational Astrophysics and Cosmology at the University of Glasgow, and Chair of the Institute of Physics Scotland. He is part of Glasgow University team at heart of an international effort proving Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves. Professor Hendry: On September 14th 2015, just before 10am Greenwich Mean Time, the Earth…

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