Scottish higher education – indeed, HE across the UK – is short of easy answers and long on difficult questions.
What happens when institutions are asked to do more for students and their regions with less certainty about future funding? How do you protect specialist and place-based provision that matters deeply to communities, without defaulting to the blunt instrument of merger or quietly shrinking what is offered?
Three institutions in Scotland are about to try something that, if it works, could give the sector a different story to tell.
Edinburgh Napier University, Queen Margaret University and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) are embarking on a project funded through the SFC’s University Transformation Fund, to design and test a strategic alliance – a deep collaboration vehicle that sits deliberately between “everyone for themselves” and “everyone becomes one”.
It is, very explicitly, not a merger. It is an attempt to find out whether autonomy, identity and radical collaboration can coexist in practice rather than just in strategy documents.
I will be the external Senior Strategic Advisor for the alliance, with a mandate to hold the overall vision, steward the governance and culture, and ensure that the learning from the project is captured and shared for the benefit of the wider sector, not just the three partners. From the outset, the principals have been clear that this must be a genuine alliance of equals: three institutions, each with its own history, mission and place, choosing to test how far they can go together while remaining themselves.
Not a merger – and not business as usual
It is worth dwelling on what “not a merger” really means here.
This is not a slow-burn consolidation in which three institutions quietly disappear into a single brand. Nor is it a tactical efficiency programme confined to a few back-office services. The intent is both more ambitious, and more constrained, than that.
On the ambitious side, the alliance will deliberately explore shared services, aligned procurement, collaborative curriculum development (within the guardrails of CMA guidance, naturally), data-sharing and better student transitions across institutional boundaries. The project will ask practical questions about what happens when you try to plan regional skills provision together, protect rare and specialist programmes collectively, and build common infrastructure that helps learners move more easily through the tertiary system.
On the constrained side, each institution keeps its own governance, Court or Board, degree-awarding powers, brand and public identity. The alliance is designed around the idea that institutional autonomy is not a barrier to shared transformation, but a condition of trust – and that the point of collaboration is to strengthen what each institution can do for students and communities, not to dilute it.
Sue Rigby, principal and vice-chancellor of Edinburgh Napier University, puts it like this:
Too often, collaboration is framed as a prelude to merger or as a marginal activity around the edges of core business. What we are trying to do here is something different: a structured, purposeful alliance in which three institutions remain themselves but choose, together, to build shared capacity and stronger pathways for learners. If we are serious about resilience and public value, we need models that do more than simply shrink or combine. We need to show that autonomy and deep collaboration can sit side by side.
Equal partners, different strengths
If this is going to work, it can’t be a story of one “lead” institution and two satellites.
The alliance joins together an applied, professionally-oriented university with strong international and partnership activity; a smaller, mission-focused university with particular strengths in public-service professions; and a specialist, distributed tertiary enterprise at the heart of Scotland’s rural and natural economy. Each comes with different pressures, different strategic ambitions, and different kinds of local responsibility.
Paul Grice, principal of Queen Margaret University, emphasises the equal status of the partners:
This alliance only has integrity if it is genuinely co-owned. Each of our institutions serves different communities and sectors; each has different strengths and constraints. The question we are asking is not ‘who takes over whom’, but ‘how can we design collaboration so that it honours those differences while creating value none of us could create alone?’. Equal status and autonomy are not slogans in this project – they are design principles.”
SRUC’s perspective is shaped by its identity as a relatively new kind of tertiary institution, operating across campuses, farms, veterinary and consultancy settings and carrying a particular responsibility for rural and land-based provision as well as an important function in understanding the nation’s food security.
Wayne Powell, principal and chief executive of SRUC, is frank about both the opportunity and the challenge:
For SRUC, this alliance is a chance to protect and strengthen specialist provision that Scotland simply cannot afford to lose, while engaging in a serious attempt at system working. We are proudly at the table as co-designers – bringing a different kind of institution into the conversation about what Scottish tertiary collaboration could look like. That matters for rural communities and for the natural economy, but it also matters for the sector because it stretches the model beyond a traditional university-to-university frame.”
Culture first, infrastructure second
One of the reasons alliances are hard is that culture tends to get treated as a second-order issue. Governance, tax, data and procurement questions soak up attention and resource. Differences in language, pace, trust and identity can go unspoken until they derail the work.
In this project, the Principals have been willing to put culture up front.
Alongside the legal and governance design, the alliance will establish explicit principles: preservation of institutional identity alongside shared endeavour; proportionality and fairness in contributions and benefits; early escalation of problems rather than quiet workarounds; and an understanding that not every output will advantage each institution equally at every stage, provided the overall bargain is fair over time.
That matters, because the story the alliance is trying to tell – to staff, students, Boards and the Scottish Funding Council – is not “we are cutting costs together”. It is “we are trying to build a collaborative model that improves the student experience, protects distinctive provision, and creates a template others can use”.
The project will also have to grapple honestly with asymmetry. No institution comes to this work from a place of complete comfort. Across the UK and in Scotland in particular, there is a growing recognition that long-standing assumptions about funding and demand cannot simply be relied on indefinitely. But the tone of this project is not one of crisis management. It is one of confident institutions choosing to face into complexity together, rather than hoping that individual, incremental adjustments will be enough.
One of the disciplines in the role I have been asked to play will be staying alert to the moment where urgency on one side of the table feels like opportunism on another, or where caution is seen as obstruction. Deep collaboration is not possible without that kind of radical transparency.
Tied to place, open to the sector
This is, at heart, a place-based project.
The alliance is being built around regions where the three institutions already work, teach, research and engage with employers. The ambition is to develop more coherent approaches to skills, business engagement and curriculum that are rooted in those local economies – whether that is public service, creative industries, sustainable construction or rural innovation.
But the ambition is also wider than any one region. The project’s funding commits the partners to producing public outputs – governance blueprints, templates, lessons learned, design principles – that other institutions and colleges can use as they explore their own collaborative options. The alliance is not intended to become a closed club; it is intended to demonstrate a model that others might choose to adapt or join when the proof of concept is in place.
In that sense, the work is as much about sector learning as it is about institutional sustainability. If the project succeeds, the win is not only that three institutions have found better ways to share resources and strengthen their offers; it is that the Scottish tertiary system has another, more nuanced option on the table when it thinks about how to respond to prolonged system pressure and changing learner needs.
Excitement, challenge, and seeing around corners
There is no guarantee that this will work exactly as intended. The governance will be demanding. The digital infrastructure will be complicated. The cultural work will be complex. And the wider environment in which all of this is happening is not going to become simple or predictable any time soon.
But there is, across the three institutions and in the conversations that have led up to this point, a genuine sense of excitement about being allowed to try something ambitious, difficult and publicly accountable rather than simply managing change in isolation.
The alliance is being set up with regular checkpoints and gateway decisions, and a clear expectation that if particular work packages do not deliver, they will be rethought or stopped rather than dragged on. That discipline – and the commitment to share what is learned – is part of what makes the project feel like a serious reframing rather than a rhetorical flourish.
What this work is really testing is whether Scottish higher education can learn to collaborate at depth without losing what makes its institutions different and valuable. If it succeeds, it may help the sector see around corners it currently feels pressed up against. If it fails in some respects, the failure will at least be visible, analysed and available as shared learning rather than buried as institutional folklore.
For now, three institutions have chosen to move beyond saying “we should collaborate more” in strategy documents, and to take on the risks and disciplines of doing it properly – in public, and together. That feels, in itself, like a story worth telling.
