As we celebrate 25 years of the SCQF, we’re delighted to share a guest blog from the Scottish Funding Council, a long-standing partner of the SCQF Partnership.
Erica Russell-Hensens reflects on how the SCQF helps make Scotland’s learning system more connected and easier to navigate – supporting clearer pathways, recognition of prior learning and progression for learners.
For 25 years, the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) has helped make learning in Scotland easier to understand.
From the Scottish Funding Council’s (SFC) point of view, that matters.
A clearer, connected, system helps learners move through education with more confidence, and helps institutions and employers understand how different routes connect.
The SCQF gives learners, advisers, employers, schools, colleges and universities a shared language for Scotland’s qualifications. This supports a system where pathways are clear, prior learning is recognised, and students are not left to map out the system on their own.
It also gives employers a way to understand the learning people bring with them.
Making routes easier to navigate
Learners do not experience education in neat institutional boxes. They move between school, college, university, work-based learning and employment and back again often over many years. The SCQF helps make those routes easier to navigate.
That is particularly important for the recognition of prior learning. Students should not have to repeat learning unnecessarily, or lose the value of what they have already achieved because they move between institutions, routes or jobs. For SFC, this is part of making the system fairer, more transparent and easier to access.
There is also a direct link to Scotland’s Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework (TQEF) – our collective approach to quality assurance and enhancement for colleges and universities. The SCQF helps keep attention on the building blocks of programmes and courses and recognition of prior learning, ensuring the system works for learners.
A qualifications framework does not remove every barrier, but it can make learning more portable, progress more transparent, and choices easier to explain.
The power of partnership
One of the real strengths of the SCQF is that it has been built through partnership. It works because schools, colleges, universities, training providers, employers and others use it in practice.
As the SCQF marks its 25th anniversary, it is right to recognise the work of the SCQF Partnership and the contribution it has made to Scotland’s learning landscape. The recognition that this approach has gained internationally over this time speaks to its value too.
SFC has been an investor in, and partner of, the SCQF Partnership from the outset. Their work supports a more coherent tertiary system, with learners better able to understand where they are, where they can go, and how their learning is recognised along the way.
That is a strong legacy, and a strong foundation for what comes next. Happy 25th anniversary to the SCQF!