Scotland funds shared services

The Scottish Funding Council has announced the successful projects funded via its so-called University Transformation Framework programme, a repurposing of funds from the 2023–24 academic year which had been previously “clawed back” by the funding council after allocated student places went unfilled.

The funding – which was launched via a bidding competition back in December – is intended to enable “vital transformation and innovation” in Scotland’s higher education sector, with priority given to collaborative proposals. The amount received by the seven successful projects is not revealed, but the original competition put a limit of £10m on the total funding that any one institution could pursue.

In the research space, the University of Glasgow has been funded to modernise its ethics review processes and – in partnership with the University of Edinburgh – establish shared systems to support the Scottish Health and Biomedical Institute. Elsewhere the University of St Andrews and the University of Dundee have received an award to “develop a future-facing partnership for medical education and innovation,” which will lay the foundations for shared curriculum development, research infrastructure and clinical academic pathways.

In response, Universities Scotland has emphasised that the transformation funding is “not new money”. It suggests that there may soon be a second round of allocations, but that it is not clear whether further funding will be available in future years.

The representative body argues that successful transformation at scale “requires very considerable resource, backed by multi-year commitments.” But it points out that the successful projects demonstrate that universities have “multiple creative and collaborative ideas” for new ways of working and responding to changing circumstances

Earlier this summer, six universities in the south of England – the University of Portsmouth, Southampton Solent University, the University of Chichester, Health Sciences University, Arts University Bournemouth and the University of Winchester – announced the formation of a shared virtual tech transfer office.

The University of Portsmouth is the lead institution for the south of England project and the host of its shared infrastructure, building on a Research England-funded pilot. A recent evaluation of the pilot, which was based on recommendations from the independent review of university spin-outs, found that six spin-out companies had emerged from the 13 collaborative projects, as well as 320 commercial opportunities that were identified and progressed.