Scottish Funding Council

Could you provide leadership for our investments in Scotland’s future, and champion change across the post-school education and skills landscape? We’re Scotland’s tertiary education and research authority, and our purpose is to sustain a world-leading system of tertiary education, research and innovation that enables students to flourish. Our current Chair’s second term of office will come to an end in April and Scottish ministers are looking to appoint a new Chair of the SFC board. The closing date for applications is 5pm on 23 December. https://lnkd.in/eS3ShHtg

BBC Scotland online has a great article at the moment about Glasgow Kelvin College’s remarkable success at the 2024 International Green Gown awards. For fans of the Great British Sewing Bee, the best way to describe the award-winning project is as a wedding version of the Transformation Challenge. Students created new wedding dresses by completely taking apart old ones and using the material to make new dresses to their own designs. And it’s not only the dresses that were transformed. There’s a great story in there too about the power of colleges to change people’s life – it’s an inspiring read! https://lnkd.in/euunVXsQ

22 of Scotland’s 36 finalists in the Worldskills UK Finals 2024 left Friday’s awards ceremony with medals or a ‘highly commended’. New College Lanarkshire had a hugely successful evening coming a very decisive first in the medal league table. Our latest website news story has more: https://lnkd.in/e3k6-McJ

A medal in honour of our amazing colleague, André Reibig, has been awarded by Winning Students 100 to Scotland’s gold-winning para-Olympics swimmer, Faye Rogers. Read the full story in our latest news article. https://lnkd.in/eigkhkMy

Public sector data is often locked away in lots of individual systems, across many different organisations, and isn’t in a format that makes access or integration easy. Launched in 2021, Research Data Scotland (RDS) helps researchers find out what’s out there, how good it is and how to get hold of it quickly. In our latest guest blog, Professor Roger Halliday, RDS’s Chief Executive Officer introduces the organisation’s pioneering Researcher Access Service and looks forward to its future innovations. https://lnkd.in/e47p3xZW

Get a flavour of yesterday’s CDN College Awards and find out who won the coveted Judges’ Award in our latest news article. If you want to finish the week feeling inspired by how much college education can mean to people, follow the link at the end of the article to the Award’s Shortlist Summary and look at the video submissions for the Student of the Year Award.  https://lnkd.in/eR-ujv68

Congratulations to all the winners and highly recommended entries at the 2024 Green Gown Awards UK & Ireland. It was great to see the awards ceremony coming to Scotland for its 20th anniversary, and we’re very proud to have been able to sponsor this year’s Creating Impact award. Our SFC news story today focusses on the Scottish stories from last night’s ceremony. https://lnkd.in/ezAgN7cn

The Scottish Funding Council and the University of Aberdeen are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Frances Medaney as the new Scottish Research Cultures Collaboration Manager. Working across all Scottish universities, Frances will champion collaboration and resource sharing, support the development of effective evaluation practices, and represent Scottish interests in UK-wide research culture discussions. https://lnkd.in/esdZ773a

Read our latest blog. It comes from Eilidh Fulton who looks back at the SFC event earlier this year to discuss equality outcomes. Eilidh explains what national equality outcomes are and how they came about. She also reflects on what we learned from the event in terms of both challenges and hope for the future. https://lnkd.in/e_gSr5KM

On Thursday 14 and Friday 15 Nov we’re holding online drop-in sessions for colleagues and students currently working on college and university self-evaluation and action plans. You're welcome to come along with any questions you have and we'll do our very best to answer them. Sign up is via the SFC website. https://lnkd.in/dDkRizyq