How systematic is Scotland’s system of tertiary education?

This seminar will present an analysis on the coherences and fragmentations within Scotland’s tertiary education system. It will expand on the role of distinct institutional settings such as universities, Further Education Colleges, and other training providers within the wider post-school education and training sector. The presentation will provide the latest insights on the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill, published in February 2025. In doing so, it will synthesise and contrast the current operations of agencies such as the Scottish Funding Council and Skills Development Scotland. The seminar will underline the country’s ambition for further streamlining of and integration between relevant stakeholders, and relate this to the core policy objective ‘to be more responsive to the needs of learners and the economy’.

Ellen Boeren is Professor of Education at the University of Glasgow’s School of Education. She is an active member of the School’s Centre for Research on Adult Development and Lifelong Learning (CR&DALL). She holds a PhD in Educational Sciences from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, has worked at the University of Edinburgh, and joined the University of Glasgow in 2019. Between 2023 and 2025, she led the £605k FEC ESRC Standard Grant project on the state-of-art and use of adult learning and education statistics across the countries of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. She is currently leading an ESRC Secondary Data Analysis grant on longitudinal patterns in lifelong learning participation, utilising data from the UK’s Understanding Society. She recently co-authored the OECD’s report on ‘Rethinking Informal Learning’, published in November 2025. Her other publications include the monograph ‘Lifelong Learning Participation in a Changing Policy Context: an Interdisciplinary Theory’ for which she won the 2017 Cyril O. Houle Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Adult Education Literature.