Strengths

Strengths and benefits of education in Scotland

Scotland has numerous strengths in the education arena:

  • Scotland leads the world in terms of the number of citations per head of population, and the number of academic papers published per £million spent on education
  • Over 50 percent of Scottish education research is classified as "internationally excellent", according to the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), whose aim is to produce quality profiles for each submission of research activity made by institutions

The most recent HE-CBI Survey (2007-2008) showed:

  • Total income to Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) from knowledge exchange increased by 7 percent from £320.5 million in 2006-07 to £341.4 million in 2007-08
  • Income generated from collaborative research increased by 15 percent from £98.8 million in 2006-07 to £113.8 million in 2007-08
  • Income from contract research increased by 17 percent from £83.1 million in 2006-07 to £97.0 million in 2007-08
  • Income generated by consultancy contracts increased by 21 percent from £32.5 million in 2006-07 to £39.2 million in 2007-08
  • Income generated from Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses increased by 5 percent from £46.7 million in 2006-07 to £49.2 million in 2007-08

Strengths of international research excellence

Scotland maintains its world leading position on research quality and knowledge transfer:

  • Scotland’s performance for share of research papers relative to share of GDP is excellent, producing just under 75 research papers for every $billion GDP – more than twice the average for the G8 countries and substantially better than any competitor nation
  • The impact of Scotland's research, as measured by citations per paper, has been well above world average in recent years and rose by a further 21 percent in 2008
  • Scotland’s researchers are highly productive in terms of citations per researcher, and are ranked third in the world after Switzerland and the Netherlands, ahead of all the G8 countries

Learn about our international support for education and training projects