Just don’t mention the F word

Alex Salmond’s “the rocks will melt with the sun” speech in 2011 fixed it as the symbol of a wider particular political project – defended at conference, brandished at elections, and used to mark the SNP off not just from Labour, the Tories, and the Lib Dems, but from anyone who dares not to be proud to be Scottish.

Hot on the heels of its first paper on value and purpose, the Carnegie Education Fund has now published output two from its citizens’ jury on the future of higher education in Scotland – this time on equity, access… and the F word.

The 19 jurors recruited by Ipsos for six sessions of deliberation across late 2025 weren’t defending a manifesto. But what they were defending, and how they thought about it, turns out to be more revealing than most citizens’ jury outputs manage.

What they heard

The jury began session one with a strong, financially framed view of access. Free tuition removes the cost barrier, therefore Scotland is fair. They contrasted this favourably with England, repeatedly, and with feeling. Several jurors had personally benefited from free education and offered moving accounts of being the first generation in their family to attend university. The starting position was anything but abstract.

Then they learned things, and to their credit, the things they learned changed the texture of what they thought.

The bursary cliff edge landed hardest. “One point and that’s your kid lost a grand a half of funding,” as one juror put it. The Welsh model – a sliding scale with more generous grants for lower-income households – emerged as a more equitable design in their eyes. Housing costs in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews complicated the “free at the point of access” framing considerably: maintenance support hadn’t kept pace with inflation, paid work wasn’t a lifestyle choice for many students but a structural requirement, and the debt deterrent was real.

Postgraduate study emerged as a hidden barrier, generated by the jurors themselves rather than prompted. “For some of the bigger universities, it’s £5,000, so there’s entire career paths that are shut off to you” – and the jury rejected the “you can take a loan” answer as inadequate. Caring responsibilities, disability, and rural geography rounded out a picture that was far more complicated than the one they’d walked in with.

They ended up with a more sophisticated view of access than they started with – one in which free tuition was a necessary but not sufficient condition for fairness, and in which the actual mechanisms of equity were the things sitting underneath it. That is, by any standard, deliberation working as advertised.

The standard and the asterisk

The principle that emerged was unanimous on its first half – higher education should be free at the point of access for all students living in Scotland, regardless of age, mode of study, or family income – with 18 voting for and one against. That’s a verdict about the present, not a finding about the future. The public, when given evidence and time, doubles down on free tuition.

More interesting is the second half. The jury was asked whether to append the words “However, the current free tuition model is not sustainable so needs to be reviewed” to the principle, to reflect the financial reality the evidence had laid out. The vote was 10-7 in favour, with two undecided. A majority – including, the paper notes, several of those most committed to free tuition – wanted the caveat in. A significant minority didn’t.

They worried that the caveat would give the Scottish Government cover to act on it. The principles, in their view, weren’t recommendations – they were ideals. Putting the truth into them was politically risky – because the truth might get used.

It’s one of the more interesting moments I’ve seen in a deliberative output. Jurors were doing politics in the entirely sensible sense of noticing that words on a page can be picked up and used by other people for purposes the original speakers wouldn’t endorse. They were thinking about audience, about consequence, about what their conclusions would be used to justify. That is deliberation getting serious about the world it’s about to enter.

It does, though, complicate the standard story about citizens’ juries as places where the noise of politics is stripped out so authentic public reasoning can emerge. What emerged here was authentic public reasoning that was already thinking strategically about the politics it was about to be dropped into.

Gaps in the brief

None of the following is a criticism of the jury – it’s a useful prompt for whoever designs the next deliberative process on this topic. The jurors clearly had the appetite and the cognitive horsepower to engage with material of this complexity.

The Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) mechanism – by which Scotland’s maintenance loans are financed by the Westminster Treasury rather than the Scottish budget – didn’t appear in the briefing pack. That matters because it explains the political economy of why the Scottish Government might find it attractive to keep loading costs onto maintenance debt rather than tuition support. The jury was reasoning about the consequences of the current model without access to the mechanism that makes it work the way it does.

Lifetime repayment data was also absent. The Scotland-versus-England comparison the jury kept returning to is considerably more ambiguous than it appears once you account for what English graduates actually repay over a career – a complication that would have sharpened, rather than undermined, the jury’s analysis.

The jury did its best with the menu it was given, working through fees for all students, fees for some, graduate contributions, general taxation, and delivery cost reduction with real intellectual honesty. What they arrived at – a course-differentiated model they generated themselves, prioritising public funding for skills shortage areas – suggests a public appetite for differentiation that the binary on offer didn’t otherwise allow them to express.

Reading the principles

The principles the jury settled on are more interesting than the headlines suggest.

The first – that funding models must ensure all higher education pathways are accessible to those from all backgrounds, with particular support for disadvantaged students, carers, disabled learners, those with additional support needs, and people in remote and rural areas – was unanimous. The jury didn’t just affirm fair access in the abstract. They specified the constituencies they had in mind, in a way that goes well beyond the standard Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation postcode framing of Scottish access policy.

The second – that living cost support should be means-tested using a sliding scale rather than a banded approach, with a focus on avoiding increased debt for disadvantaged students – is actionable. The cliff edge is a design choice, and the jury identified it as the wrong one. The vote was 13-3 with six undecided: a working majority for reform of the SAAS bursary structure that the Scottish Government could act on tomorrow if it wanted to.

The third – that higher education should be free at the point of access for all students living in Scotland, regardless of age, mode of study or family income – picks up something that the current Scottish system actually doesn’t deliver. Part-time students, mature students, distance learners, and postgraduates are all treated differently in the existing settlement. The principle, taken seriously, would push the system towards a more fully universal definition of “free” – a substantive expansion of the existing offer rather than a defence of it.

And running alongside all of this is the jury’s recurring concern about postgraduate access. A lay public, given evidence and time, has independently identified that postgraduate fees are closing off entire professions to people from lower-income families. This isn’t an argument that’s made much in public debate, and the fact that it surfaced organically from a deliberative process gives it a kind of legitimacy that advocates have been struggling to build for years.

What the totem is now for

Which brings us back to the question of what free tuition is actually doing in 2026, 15 years on from “the rocks will melt with the sun.”

It started life as a piece of policy distinctiveness for the SNP, and functioned as a partisan symbol for a long time. But somewhere in the last decade, while nobody was particularly watching, it stopped being a party symbol and became a country symbol. It’s no longer the SNP’s totem – it’s Scotland’s. And the thing Scotland uses it for is to mark itself off from England.

You can see this everywhere in the report. The early sessions are full of comparisons with England – the cost of English fees, the unaffordability of English higher education, and the disparity that’s grown between the two systems. “We’re very lucky to have that,” one juror says. “I think it’s an amazing thing that Scotland offers it,” says another. That’s closer to civic pride than ordinary party loyalty – and a far more durable thing, which is part of what makes the caveat vote so revealing.

Welsh higher education policy has often been read as “like England, but with the nastier edges shaved off.” Scotland’s claim is categorically different – Scotland does something England doesn’t. It explains why the emotional charge around free tuition in Scotland is unlike anything we’d find in a Welsh policy debate. Politicians there can adjust the levers. The jury’s reaction helps explain why Scottish politicians reach for this one at their peril.

I note, though, that the pride is in the price, not the product. The jurors were defending the fact of free tuition, not the quality of what’s delivered under it. Nobody was arguing that Scottish universities are better, that outcomes are stronger, or that access is more equitable in practice – because the evidence in front of them often suggested the opposite. The distinction changes what the totem is doing politically. To remove it would be to give up something Scotland uses to tell itself who it is – and that’s a much harder thing to spend, even when the policy underneath is clearly under strain.

The seven jurors who didn’t want the sustainability caveat in the principle weren’t defending the SNP. They were defending the marker. They worried that letting the truth into the principle would open the door to losing the thing that distinguishes Scotland from England.

The permission slip

Add it up, and for me the jury has done a piece of useful work that the political system can now build on, if it can square the circle.

They’ve reaffirmed free tuition with a clarity that takes one option off the table. They’ve also flagged that the things actually limiting access have little to do with the tuition fee. It is, in effect, a public mandate to fix the bits underneath the totem without touching the totem itself.

The risk is that the totem is so politically attractive that it absorbs all the available oxygen… and cash.

The opportunity is to protect free tuition – and perhaps even expand it to the part-time, mature, and postgraduate populations the jury identified – while doing what so many other countries have started to do: introducing fair contributions for the non-tuition elements of what a university does and provides – student services, facilities, and the broader support architecture that the jury spent six sessions discovering is where the real access problem lives.