Infrastructure Investment Plan 2015: progress report 2018-2019

Further And Higher Education

Progress

Further Education

Forth Valley College (Falkirk Campus)
In 2017 the Scottish Government approved the final design stage of the project and building work is underway. The total cost of the project is £78 million with Scottish Government investment in the project being £65 million capital funding. The operational date for this project is expected to be the end of 2019.

College Energy Efficiency Programme
In 2017, the College Energy Efficiency Programme provided £4 million towards low carbon projects in Borders College, Edinburgh College, Newbattle Abbey College and West Lothian College. Works were completed in 2017 and participating colleges are now in their final "savings" period.

Guaranteed annual energy cost savings exceed £0.3 million and annual carbon savings of circa 1500 tCO2e are anticipated. Initial assessments show significant reductions in energy bills across each of the colleges. Wider project benefits have also been realised including significantly improved teaching and working environments, as well as learning opportunities for students around energy efficiency technologies and general construction related activities.

College estate maintenance
The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) published its College Estate Condition Survey in 2017. Since then, the SFC has considered where new approaches may represent better value for money than continuing to address backlog repairs alone and the SFC introduced its new prioritisation framework.

The Scottish Government provided £26.9 million to fund very high priority estate maintenance issues in 2018-19 and funding has been provided in 2019-20 to continue to address lifecycle and backlog repairs. A learning Estates Strategy is being developed which will combine the best practices of development policies for schools with future development of Colleges and summarising these in a set of guiding principles.

Fife College
Fife College is in discussions with Fife Council on the development of a joint Dunfermline Education Campus. The aim is to locate the new College building and two of Dunfermline's high schools on the same site. Fife College purchased the land for the new college site in October 2018 for £4.56 million.

Higher Education

The total capital funding for universities in 2018-19 including Financial Transactions (FTs), was £81.3 million. FTs for the university sector grew substantially to £40 million for 2018-19. Taken together with capital maintenance funding, this represents a significant and welcome source of capital investment for Institutions. The Scottish Government will further build on this in 2019-20, with the Scottish Budget setting out a further increase in FTs, which when combined with capital funding will make £93 million available.

The SFC now has a robust evidence base of the higher education sector's year-on year life-cycle maintenance needs. This reflects the diversity across the Scottish Higher education estate of the costs associated with maintaining the sectors

teaching and research facilities. In 2019-20, we will continue to work with the university sector to maximise available resources and to deploy them to achieve the best value for money.

In AY (Academic Year) 2018-19, SFC is deploying up to £40 million of FTs on a range of university estates projects aimed at improving the student experience and the energy efficiency of buildings. SFC has an additional £55.5 million of FTs to deploy in AY 2019-20, for which scheme details are currently being developed.

HE Carbon Reduction Programme – the SFC announced a £20 million HE Carbon

reduction fund in 2017-18 to be funded through FTs. It deployed £16.19 million of FTs funding to support 15 carbon reduction projects at 11 universities. These projects will reduce the university sector carbon footprint by over 9,000 tCO2 a year.