Scottish Week: Looking ahead to the Scottish elections

Welcome to Scottish Week on HEPI’s blog. In each of this week’s blogs, we will be focusing on higher education in Scotland, and discussing the hopes and fears of key individuals related to the Scottish Parliament elections in May 2026.

This first blog was kindly authored by Alison Payne, Research Director, Enlighten. 

As we get closer to the 2026 Scottish election, an increasing number of opinion polls are highlighting public priorities. The NHS is regularly the top concern. Immigration, economic growth, poverty and inequality, and the cost of living are all other key issues.

Education, however, is rarely mentioned. Too often, society seems to view education as something of benefit to the individual, but it is about more than simply providing the next generation with skills and knowledge.

Education is about ensuring that we have the workforce and ideas to grow the economy. It is about ensuring we have the doctors and nurses to treat us. That we develop technology and ideas to solve problems. That we can build the homes we badly need. That we have a high-skilled and high-earning workforce whose tax revenue can then fund public services – something that is even more critical in the face of our projected demographic challenges. 

Basically, without an education system firing on all cylinders, the many other problems facing Scotland cannot be fixed. 

But our education system isn’t currently working.

In our schools, Scotland is continuing to fall down the PISA rankings (Programme for International Student Assessment) and has been overtaken by England. We have problems with regard to behaviour and attendance. We are struggling to manage the growth in Additional Support Needs, and we lack robust educational data from which to either understand problems or fix them.

Our colleges, despite being the engine room of tackling skills shortages, have seen years of real-terms cuts to their budgets and are too often undervalued.

While we don’t have tuition fees for universities, we do have a cap on student numbers, with supply increasingly struggling to keep up with demand. As with universities elsewhere in the UK, the sector is not in great financial health and we are now seeing crises like those facing the University of Dundee, which has required bailouts from the Scottish Government. Others, including the University of Edinburgh, have warned of large scale redundancies – a situation which makes it even harder to attract international students or retain key staff.

Lifelong learning and careers guidance are in need of investment and renewal. And there is a debate over the effectiveness of how revenue from the apprenticeship levy is spent. In Scotland, the revenue is not accessed by employers to fund apprenticeships directly, rather it goes to the Scottish Government via the block grant and is incorporated into general spending.

And of course, all these issues are against a backdrop of growing pressures on the Scottish budget, an ageing population and growing demand.

In other words, the status quo is not an option. Innovation and reform are a must.

It would be natural to assume with  the Holyrood election so close, there would be impassioned debate about how we address these problems. There is not. Instead of long-term policy solutions, discussion is too often focused on the short term and what is expedient from a party-political standpoint. Fixing the education system doesn’t tend to bring short-term ‘wins’, which is why it is perhaps too often overlooked.

We need to address the gap between learning and work and recognise that too often our education system is stuck in a 20^th century idea of traditional career paths and jobs for life. Policies which address the growth in non-linear careers, which encourage and enable re-skilling in addition to providing solid educational foundations, are required.

With regards to school, Curriculum for Excellence is not serving Scotland’s teachers, pupils or parents well. For example, data published by Enlighten highlighted that after 11 years of school, less than half of the S4 cohort of pupils (those aged around 16)  were able to gain an A-C pass in National 5 Maths. (Scotland’s equivalent to GCSE).

Our Commission on School Reform has been setting out a range of reforms which highlight the central importance of knowledge. Schools should enjoy increased autonomy within clear national guidance to implement a knowledge-based curriculum. We also believe that in order to properly address issues such as attendance, behaviour and the growth in ASN, we need to review the pastoral capacity across both primary and secondary sectors. Work is also required to improve the quality of assessments and qualifications.

Crucially, we need better data, including a regular longitudinal survey following pupils through school and beyond to gather evidence of progress. There should be an Independent Office for Scottish Education Data to oversee and manage the data, which should be accountable to parliament, not government.

Following years of real-terms cuts to colleges, the Draft Budget announced in the Scottish Parliament on 13 January proposed a 10 per cent increase in investment for the sector.  The Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Bill has also just been passed by the Scottish Parliament with the aim of reshaping Scotland’s skills, training and post-school education landscape. These are potentially steps in the right direction. Time will tell.

With regard to universities, it is deeply frustrating that despite the many problems facing the sector, our politicians still shy away from talking about a student contribution. Given the state of Scotland’s finances and the fact that London Economics estimated that if Scotland were to implement the English fees system it would free up around £976m per year, it is baffling how unwilling MSPs are to at least have the discussion. What difference could that money make to our struggling colleges, or our housing emergency, or tackling social care?

I should stress that I do not want to see the English fee model adopted in Scotland. I think that with a graduate fee we can reform the system and maintain tuition free-at-the-point-of-use. But we should be having the debate. Spending money in one area means it cannot be spent elsewhere.

A graduate fee could be incurred upon graduating from university, liable to be repaid once an individual startes earning more than the Scottish average salary, and would not accrue interest. It would also not necessarily mean an end to entirely ‘free’ tuition. Rather, it would provide an opportunity to look at the skills gaps that exist in Scotland and the possibility of developing schemes which cut or scrap payments for graduates who work in specific geographic areas or sectors of Scotland for set periods of time.

Of course, any policy which is perceived to take away a ‘freebie’ is unlikely to gain much traction so close to an election, and all political parties in Scotland continue to support taxpayer-funded tuition. But there is potential to grasp the thistle on this issue as there are signs that the public understands the nuance around the debate.

Polling commissioned by the Carnegie Trust and carried out by Ipsos UK last year found that while 44 per cent felt that the Scottish Government should continue to fund all first-time undergraduates, 43 per cent said they would prefer those whose households could afford it pay at least some of their tuition fees.

In December 2025 the Scottish Government launched its Framework for Sustainability and Success of Scotland’s Universities, which is described as a collaborative project between the Scottish Government and Universities Scotland, with a steering group including student and business representatives. The review is expected to quantify the scale of the challenges facing HEIs and look at options to secure the future of the sector.

On paper this sounds like a great step forward. But, as ever, the difficult discussion is being avoided and short-term thinking has prevailed. It is understood that tuition is not part of the review.

I would like to think that once the election is out of the way, there will be a refreshed and renewed focus on all of Scotland’s challenges and some much-needed long-term thinking. Both the SNP and Scottish Labour are centre-left social democratic parties which agree on a great deal, so there should be potential for greater collaboration between the parties on an issue-by-issue basis. They need to learn from the experience in Wales, where Plaid Cymru and Labour have worked together and actually implemented reform in controversial areas, such as student finance and council tax.

Whether any joint working in the post-election period will depend a great deal on what happens on 7 May and what personnel are in place after it.

Polls at the moment suggest that the SNP will win a fifth term in office. We find ourselves in an odd situation in Scotland, where, despite having a very good idea who is going to win the election, there are so many unknowns that it is difficult to predict much about the class of ‘26.

We don’t know who the next Deputy First Minister is going to be because Kate Forbes is standing down. A third of the Scottish Cabinet is standing down, and we are not expecting a re-shuffle before the election, so there will be a number of new ministers in place post-election.

Around a third of MSPs are standing down, so there will be lots of new politicians.

Reform may return around 20 MSPs and, although we don’t know candidates as yet, it is likely that only Graham Simpson, who defected from the Scottish Tories, will have any previous experience of Holyrood.

The Scottish Tories are currently the official opposition at Holyrood but are likely to fall to fourth place behind Reform and Labour.  

The impact of the additional member voting system means that slight changes in constituency or list votes could have big impacts on seat numbers.

However, while the politics may be unknown, the current and future crises facing our public services are very well documented.

There is a role for all of Scotland’s parties to play in developing sustainable reform to these challenges we face. Undoubtedly, there will be disagreements along the way, but if country can be put before party there is hope for the future.

Want to understand more about Scotland and higher education?

In 2024, to mark 25 years since the devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, HEPI and The Education Group London published the collection of essays ‘Evolution of Devolution‘. It provides a comprehensive analysis of how higher education policies in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have evolved over the past quarter of a century.