The £500,000 Scottish Funding Council regional tertiary pathfinders programme kicked off back in the spring of 2022, off the back of the review of coherent provision and sustainability.

It was one of many recommendations from that report that slowly but steadily are making their way into policy delivery that regional assessments and skills demands would be assessed by a funding council convened collaboration involving employers, students, and providers. A cautious parallel may be drawn with the Local Skills Improvement Partnership (LSIP) collaborations in England.

The Regional Tertiary Provision Pathfinders can be seen as a first step in understanding the kind of benefits that these partnerships can bring. The reports today represent the initial findings of nine projects across north east Scotland (Aberdeenshire, Aberdeen City), and the south of Scotland (Borders, Dumfries and Galloway) – covering both highly industry-focused regional skills priorities (health and social care, energy transition, digital skills, land based industry) and learner pathways (online, transitions between sectors) capped by a regional delivery board (RDB) for each of the two regions.

The RDBs bring together local authorities, Skills Development Scotland, institutions across the full gamut of the skills sector, enterprise agencies, and employer representatives. The discrete projects were identified and endorsed by these consortia.

What have the projects been up to? We could best see them as testbeds for some of the approaches flowing from the Scottish Government’s thinking about the skills sector more generally. The future is collaborative and regional – and the experimentation has been around the ways in which collaboration can best work, how it can spur the development of new provision in response to new demands, and how it can offer a cross-institutional “talent pipeline” that works for students and industry.

Those involved in the projects have generally been very positive about how “clear and focused” this focus on local action has been. The past is littered with skills initiatives that never quite delivered, so the idea was to ensure that the pathfinder approach was both effective and replicable. And you’d better believe that there are eyes on these findings far beyond Scotland.

As far as there is a recipe for success:

• Good quality relationships between partners, with staff involved given permission to collaborate fully, with appropriate resources available
• A willingness to share data and resources
• A culture of continuous learning and evaluation

That’s not to say each project will start from the same space – beyond the pathfinder cohort there will likely be a variation in geographic reach, the “tightness” of project focus, the history that partners have in working together, and who the project was aimed at benefiting. As regards this crop of projects, all had a regional focus, focused on learners, most focused on specific products, and came about from existing collaborative networks.

Collaboration also stretched beyond localities and regions on occasion – helping to draw on the strengths of the wider skills sector. This included a huge number of opportunities for information sharing (both in terms of data and expertise). And having a single co-ordination function helped to keep things moving.

And the projects were overwhelmingly successful – five of seven have delivered clearly articulated routes for regional learners, three brought together new partnerships, and all saw significant sharing of data and resources. It seems that the small amount of SFC funding available to each consortium was instrumental in providing the underpinnings of making collaboration work: “small funding with a big impact”. We’ll be dipping into this collection a lot more in future.