What can 25 years of learning look like? For Terry McTernan, it’s a journey he could never have predicted.
As we celebrate 25 years of the SCQF during SCQF Week 2026, Terry reflects on where he was 25 years ago – and where learning has taken him since.
Twenty-five years ago, I was a Team Sales Manager in an outbound call centre, cold-calling customers of English water companies to sell insurance-based products.
If you had told that version of me that 25 years later I would have graduated from the University of Glasgow with a First Class Honours degree and be preparing to return to study for a Master’s in Human Rights and International Politics, I suspect I would have laughed at you.
University simply wasn’t part of the plan. In truth, I’m not sure there really was a plan.
My experience of school hadn’t left me with a particularly positive relationship with formal education, and I certainly didn’t consider myself ‘academic’. Higher education felt like something that belonged to other people.
The journey between there and here has been anything but straightforward.
And perhaps that’s the point.
A false start
My first serious attempt to return to education, significantly, 25 years ago. It was an HNC in Working with Communities at Reid Kerr College.
On paper, it should have been perfect for me. By then, I was already heavily involved in community activism in Ferguslie Park, Paisley, so studying community work seemed like a natural progression.
In reality, the two collided.
My activism and my studies increasingly came into conflict and eventually there was a breakdown in communication between the head lecturer and me. I left the course without completing it.
That experience reinforced something I had probably believed since school: perhaps formal education simply wasn’t for me.
School hadn’t worked particularly well. College hadn’t worked particularly well. Maybe I had missed my opportunity.
So, for a while, I resigned myself to the idea that formal education had passed me by.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that I hadn’t stopped learning.
Quite the opposite.
I was learning constantly through community activism, through Darkwood Crew and through living and working alongside people in Ferguslie Park. I was learning about poverty, inequality, power, participation, bureaucracy, community organising and what happens when people decide they are no longer prepared to simply accept decisions being made on their behalf.
I just didn’t necessarily recognise any of that as education.
Trying again
In 2019, I decided to make another tentative enquiry about education, this time about an SCQF level 5 Community Achievement Award at Glasgow Kelvin College.
As part of that process, I was asked to develop a project proposal.
Something interesting happened.
Once I submitted it, it was recognised that I was perhaps more advanced than I had given myself credit for.
That moment mattered.
It began to challenge the assumption I had carried that because my previous experiences of formal education hadn’t worked out, I somehow wasn’t capable of succeeding within it.
Then, in 2020, another opportunity appeared.
I enrolled on the University of Glasgow’s Activate programme, a 10-week course delivered in the Tannahill Centre, in Paisley’s Ferguslie Park.
Three weeks in, the world shut down.
Covid arrived, lockdown followed and my 10-week course was suddenly suspended.
I then had to wait more than a year for the remainder of it to be delivered.
So, as far as I’m aware, I may be the only person in the world who has taken almost 15 months to complete a 10-week course.
If nothing else, my educational journey has taught me patience.
Completing Activate guaranteed me an interview for the University of Glasgow’s undergraduate Community Development degree.
I got the interview.
And then I got the place.
I was delighted.
I was also terrified.
Maybe I actually belong here
One of my biggest fears when I started university was that history would repeat itself.
My previous HNC had fallen apart partly because my community activism and formal studies seemed to compete with one another. By the time I entered university, my involvement in community action had grown considerably, particularly through Darkwood Crew.
I worried that eventually I would have to choose between the two.
Instead, something completely unexpected happened.
They complemented one another.
The community work I was doing gave life to the theory I was studying, while the theory gave me new ways of understanding what I was experiencing in practice.
Suddenly, concepts such as participation, power, dialogue, collective action and asset-based community development weren’t abstract ideas on a page.
I could see them happening around me.
Sometimes I could see what happened when they were absent too.
Imposter syndrome was certainly there, particularly in those early days. I was surrounded by people and institutions that I had never imagined myself alongside.
But I discovered something else: writing an essay becomes considerably easier when you’re genuinely invested in what you’re writing about.
I wasn’t simply reading about community development.
I was living it.
When your community becomes your classroom
That relationship between lived experience and academic learning became one of the defining features of my degree.
Eventually, it culminated in my Honours dissertation, where I researched community engagement and participation in Ferguslie Park and explored what motivates local people to become involved in their community, and what can prevent them from doing so.
There was something quite powerful about that.
Ferguslie Park is a community that has been researched, measured, categorised and described by outsiders for decades, usually through statistics about poverty and deprivation.
This time, somebody from the community was asking the questions.
Being an insider researcher brought challenges around bias, ethics and my relationship with participants, but it also strengthened a belief that has become increasingly important to me:
Communities aren’t simply places where knowledge is collected. Communities produce knowledge too.
My degree also took me considerably further from Ferguslie Park than I ever anticipated.
Through university, I had opportunities to travel to Belfast, Japan, India and Kentucky.
Those experiences exposed me to different communities, cultures, approaches and ways of thinking that I will cherish forever.
Yet, strangely, travelling thousands of miles also helped me understand my own community differently.
I could compare experiences, recognise common struggles and see how questions about inequality, participation, power and human rights connect communities that can appear very different on the surface.
The unexpected challenge of succeeding
Perhaps the strangest challenge came when I started doing well academically.
I had expected university to challenge me intellectually.
I hadn’t expected it to challenge my identity.
My voice had always been rooted strongly in being working class and in lived experience. As I progressed academically, I began to wonder whether gaining qualifications somehow threatened the authenticity of that voice.
Would people see me differently?
Was I becoming part of the professional and academic world that I had sometimes challenged?
Could I still speak authentically about inequality and working-class experience while accumulating letters after my name?
Eventually, I realised I was asking myself the wrong question.
Education didn’t have to take me away from my community.
It could give me additional tools to contribute to it.
I didn’t need to choose between activist and academic.
Increasingly, I’ve become comfortable with the idea of being an academic activist, bringing academic knowledge into community spaces while also bringing community knowledge into academic ones.
What am I most proud of?
Graduating from the University of Glasgow with First Class Honours is undoubtedly one of the proudest achievements of my life.
Not simply because of the classification.
It represented the dismantling of a story I had told myself for years about what I was capable of and whether education was a place where somebody like me belonged.
But I’m equally proud that education hasn’t required me to leave community practice behind.
Today, as Volunteer Coordinator at the New Tannahill Centre and through my continuing community involvement, I see learning happening every day in ways that aren’t always recognised as education.
I see people developing leadership skills through volunteering.
I see residents organising responses to problems rather than waiting for somebody else to solve them.
I see people managing budgets, organising events, negotiating with organisations, supporting neighbours, developing projects and transforming physical spaces.
Many would never describe themselves as students.
Some would never describe themselves as leaders.
Yet they are learning, leading and producing knowledge constantly.
Perhaps I recognise that now because, for many years, I was doing exactly the same thing without recognising it in myself.
What would I tell the person I was 25 years ago?
I think it would be this:
Don’t confuse not having qualifications with not having knowledge.
For too long, I understood education through a very narrow lens.
School. College. University. Certificates.
Those things matter enormously, but learning is much bigger than that.
We learn through employment, caring, volunteering, activism, relationships, failure, community involvement and simply navigating life.
Sometimes the biggest barrier isn’t an absence of ability.
It’s that nobody, including ourselves, has helped us recognise the abilities we already possess.
I’d also tell my younger self that there is no expiry date on education.
There isn’t a correct age by which you’re supposed to have worked everything out.
Your pathway can change.
You can take a wrong turn.
You can leave a course.
You can convince yourself education isn’t for you.
You can take almost 15 months to complete a 10-week programme because a global pandemic gets in the way.
And you can still eventually find yourself walking across a graduation stage.
A different pathway isn’t a lesser pathway.
Why recognising different learning pathways matters
That is why the 25th anniversary of the SCQF has particular meaning for me.
My own journey has made me passionate about recognising prior learning and challenging the assumption that meaningful learning only takes place through formal education.
When we recognise different forms of learning and achievement, we do something much more important than allocating a level or awarding credit.
We tell people:
- What you have learned matters.
- What you have experienced has value.
- You are not necessarily starting from zero.
My own experience in 2019 illustrates that perfectly.
I approached education thinking about an SCQF level 7 course. It took somebody looking at the work I was already capable of producing to recognise that perhaps I was further along than I realised.
For somebody who has spent years believing that university is “not for people like me”, moments like that can fundamentally alter what they believe is possible.
Recognition of Prior Learning matters because people’s lives don’t fit neatly into institutional pathways.
Knowledge isn’t only produced in lecture theatres.
Ability isn’t only demonstrated through examinations.
And someone’s previous experience of education shouldn’t determine the limits of their future.
Twenty-five years later…
This year, I begin another chapter, returning to the University of Glasgow to study for an MSc in Human Rights and International Politics.
Again, I’m not doing it because I want to collect another qualification for the sake of it.
The questions that began for me at community level have simply grown.
Questions about poverty led to questions about inequality.
Questions about participation led to questions about power.
Questions about power increasingly led me towards questions about rights, politics and the structures that determine whose voices are heard.
Twenty-five years ago, while managing a sales team in an outbound call centre, I could never have predicted any of this.
My route hasn’t been linear.
School wasn’t a particularly positive experience.
My first return to college ended badly.
I gave up on formal education.
I tried again.
A global pandemic interrupted that attempt.
I eventually made it to university.
Imposter syndrome followed me through the door.
And somehow, along the way, education took a working-class community activist from Ferguslie Park to Belfast, Japan, India and Kentucky and ultimately back home with an even greater appreciation of the knowledge that existed there all along.
If there is anything in my story that might inspire someone else, I hope it isn’t simply that I eventually got a First-Class Honours degree.
I hope it’s this:
Where you start doesn’t determine where you finish, and learning that happens outside a classroom is still learning.
Twenty-five years ago, I didn’t think education belonged to me.
It turns out I had been learning all along.
I just hadn’t learned to recognise it yet.
Have you been inspired by Terry’s learning journey? Visit our support page for adults returning to education.