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From the Higher Education Policy Institute yesterday and echoed in reports from Universities Scotland and the NUS:
How Scotland has 21% more to spend on each school pupil but 24% less to spend on each undergraduate than England.
This is all much more important than it might initially sound. Policymaking in Scotland is shaped by the size of its relatively small polity, meaning the political class is tighter and universities have more direct engagement with their political overlords, at least compared to England. This changes the nature of the debate, in some good ways and some bad.
Most notably, the dominance of the ruling Scottish National Party and their long-standing ‘free’ higher education policy, meaning Scottish-domiciled undergraduates who attend Scottish institutions do not have to pay tuition fees, has tended to stifle debate on alternatives. No major political party, with the possible exception of Reform UK, have promised to change tack – at least, not recently or not yet.
Paying tuition fees is non-starter in Scotland thanks to SNP dominance and the other parties, rightly, fear challenging the idea. Good, we can leave that alone but the opening claim reminds me. I taught in Primary, Further and Higher education and along with most ‘Educationists’ I knew the finding was upside down, spending far more per student in higher education than in Primary or for that matter, Pre-school education.
The above claim does not, of course, and sneakily by the author, tell you what the actual spending level is.
Most of that which really matters, in language, mathematics and in utterly determining early social development, happens before 7 years of age. If that does not go well, you will rarely turn things round. Everybody who has seriously studied learning know that to be true, so if Scotland is doing as claimed, then good. More please.
Evidence? There are mountains of it now but this Harvard starter might do:
Early-years learning (roughly from conception through age 5–8) is uniquely important because the brain is constructing its basic architecture during this window. Later learning remains possible and valuable—the brain stays plastic throughout life—but it is generally less efficient, more costly to remediate, and builds on whatever foundation was laid early. The difference is not that children “learn more” in some vague sense; it is that the biology of development, the timing of sensitive periods, and the way skills compound make early experience disproportionately consequential. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/brain-architecture/
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