Get to know the people behind the SCQF Partnership (SCQFP). In this new blog series, we shine a spotlight on our Board members and the valuable experience, perspectives and leadership they bring to the organisation. This week, it’s the turn of Rob Stroud.
Rob is the Executive Director of Quality Assurance and Enhancement at the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), and was previously been Director of Assessment Services and Access to Higher Education.
Prior to this, Rob held senior roles at the Office for Students and Higher Education Funding Council for England.
As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the SCQF, we caught up with Rob to learn more about his vision for the Framework’s future.
What’s been the most rewarding aspect of serving on the Board?
For QAA, membership of the SCQF Partnership is more than a governance responsibility – it reflects our commitment to Scotland’s qualifications landscape and our standing as a global leader in quality assurance and academic standards.
That expertise is what we bring to the Board: a view across multiple national systems and international contexts that allows us to consider how Scotland’s approach to qualifications and credit transfer compares with best practice elsewhere.
The Partnership gives us a direct channel through which to contribute meaningfully to a system that matters to Scottish learners, and to ensure that quality assurance thinking remains at the heart of how the SCQF continues to develop.
What do you see as the SCQF’s most important contribution to Scottish education and skills development in the past 25 years?
The SCQF’s most important contribution has been establishing a single, coherent framework that spans all levels of learning in Scotland – from the earliest stages of formal education through to doctoral level, and across schools, colleges, universities, workplaces, and communities. That breadth, captured across 12 levels, means that every qualification and every learning pathway sits within a common structure, giving learners, providers, and employers a consistent way to understand and navigate their achievements.
The alignment with the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ) has been particularly significant, enabling Scottish qualifications in higher education to be understood and recognised across the rest of the UK.
The referencing to the European Qualifications Framework extends that recognition further still, connecting Scottish learners and institutions to an international context.
How do you see the SCQF evolving over the next 25 years?
I think the next 25 years will be defined by the challenge and opportunity of lifelong learning.
The world of work is changing rapidly, and people will increasingly need to reskill and upskill throughout their careers, not just at the beginning of them.
The SCQF has an important role to play in supporting that – providing the common structure within which diverse learning, at any stage of life, can be recognised and valued.
Recognition of Prior Learning is one area where I hope to see continued progress. The SCQF Partnership has worked with the Scottish Government and made a contribution here, and there is a growing body of work across Scotland and beyond – from employers, professional bodies, colleges, and universities – that is helping to make RPL a more accessible and understandable concept.
The Partnership is one voice in that broader conversation, and the SCQF can continue to provide a valuable framework within which that work gains coherence and credibility.
There is also scope for the SCQF’s international influence to grow further.
Can you share an example of how you’ve seen the SCQF make a real difference to learners, training providers & employers?
Perhaps the most tangible difference the SCQF makes is in supporting learner progression across different parts of the education and skills system.
Being able to understand and compare qualifications using a common level and credit structure opens up pathways that might otherwise be unclear – whether that is credit transfer between a college and a university, or a learner returning to education understanding where their prior study sits.
For training providers, the SCQF Register helps learners do exactly that – providing a transparent, consistent way to understand and contextualise what is on offer.
What has struck me as a Board member, however, is the breadth of organisations beyond colleges and universities that are coming forward to have their qualifications credit rated on the SCQF. This is the Framework reaching into parts of the learning landscape that sit well outside the traditional education ecosystem.
Why should learners, training providers and employers care about the SCQF?
Because it is, at its heart, a tool for making learning count. People’s time and resources are precious, and when someone commits to a period of learning they deserve to understand clearly what that qualification means, what level it represents, and how it compares to others in the landscape.
For learners, the SCQF provides exactly that clarity – a consistent way to understand where a qualification sits and what pathways it opens up.
For training providers, having their programmes on the SCQF Register means that learners can make that informed comparison, understanding the level and credit associated with what is on offer.
For employers, it provides a reliable common currency for understanding and comparing the qualifications of the people they are recruiting or developing. In a labour market where skills are increasingly what matters, having a shared framework to express and understand those skills is not a nice-to-have – it is essential.
What makes the Partnership model effective for Scotland’s qualifications landscape?
The Partnership model draws together organisations with distinct but complementary roles across Scotland’s education and skills landscape. That breadth means the Framework has representation from across the full range of learning contexts it serves, which is an important structural feature.
The presence of bodies such as QAA on the Board brings an external and independent perspective – one grounded in experience of quality assurance systems across the UK and internationally – and that kind of external input has a valuable role to play in any governance structure.
What’s one thing you’d like more people to understand about the SCQF?
That it has been specifically developed to reflect Scotland’s particular needs and context. The SCQF is not a generic framework – it was built to make sense of the particular range of qualifications and learning opportunities that exist in Scotland, and the work of the SCQF Partnership is to ensure it remains relevant to that context as Scotland’s economy, society, and education system evolve.
Keeping a framework current and meaningful over time is a significant undertaking, and that is a core part of what the Partnership exists to do.