Following the Withers report on the skills landscape in Scotland, the Scottish government consulted on how to reshape the funding body landscape. The options would see the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) gain funding responsibilities from Skills Development Scotland, and possibly the student funding job of the Student Awards Agency Scotland (or things may stay the same, but I don’t think anyone should be expecting this outcome).

We should get a consultation response very soon, and the introduction of corresponding legislation is due in the 2024–25 parliamentary session. We’ll know how the macro funding body landscape will be rewritten – but the ensuing parliamentary passage of the bill could well see a deeper thinking through of SFC’s role. The consultation has some relatively basic stuff about SFC governance and data collection, but MSPs may well push for more.

And ministers too, potentially. Higher education minister Graeme Dey told the education committee today that the Scottish government will consider whether it needs to give the SFC more powers for oversight and intervention. The comments came in response to a lengthy question from Maggie Chapman MSP on governance at the University of Dundee.

This was followed up with a question on whether the minister was “happy” with SFC’s current level of oversight of universities. It’s worth quoting his answer at length:

That’s a difficult question to answer without being misconstrued or misrepresented. Let’s be clear that I’m not talking about one particular institution or one instance. I would want to be satisfied as a minister… that where public funds are being utilised by institutions, they are being utilised or deployed appropriately…

Perhaps one of the areas I have been exploring, convenor, in the context of the forthcoming legislation, is to ensure that there are mechanisms in place, in FE and HE, where whether it be trade unions or other groups have got legitimate concerns about activities in those institutions, they can be looked at, responded to.

Now, there needs to be a balance here, because as we know, the industrial relations in some of these sectors are very poor, and there is a risk that it would just be an endless stream of complaints. But on the other hand I do think we need to ensure that the SFC are in a position when legitimate concerns are raised to them, to investigate them, and to act.

And one of the drivers to me in looking at this legislation is that I’ve not been entirely convinced that their powers of intervention are as strong as they need to be. I may be proven to be wrong, but that’s certainly a driver here. So I’m keen to take the opportunity through this legislation, which the committee will be involved in, looking to ensure that we have the most robust set of powers available to our regulators to try and ensure that all of us as parliamentarians can be satisfied that appropriate use of public money is taking place.

While it’s clearly at an embryonic stage – which also raises suspicions that the bill itself will not appear any time soon – from what Dey has described we could imagine some form of notification system similar to that of the Office for Students in England, among other measures, and a specific new duty on SFC to respond to information received.

The Quality Assurance Agency already operates the Scottish Quality Concerns Scheme – this however is limited to concerns over academic standards and quality, and is open to staff, students and other parties. The ministers’ comments referred particularly to staff, but presumably there would also need to be a thinking through of the funding body’s relationship to students (student complaints are currently covered by the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman).

In launching its new Outcomes Framework and Assurance Model, SFC was at pains to stress that it did not see itself as moving towards a more regulatory role and would only intervene in institutions in a “proportionate, targeted, and bespoke manner.”

Universities Scotland already flagged in its consultation response the importance of autonomy for its members, in the context of funding body reform – it remains to be seen how kindly the sector would take to legislation granting the SFC more oversight powers. And we’re clearly quite a way away from having a full picture of what these might look like.