In July 2012 the Scottish Government published ‘Reinvigorating College
Governance: the Scottish Response to The Report of the Review of Further
Education Governance in Scotland’. The Report advanced a radical new structure
for the Scottish Further Education (FE) sector and the overall impact has been
unparalleled, creating seismic transformations to its operating structure and
governance. The newly emerging paradigm overturned previous structural and
governance arrangements, rescaling the Scottish FE landscape. This paper
analyses the recent policy context unfolding within the Scottish FE sector;
illuminating the central driving forces and legitimising discourses behind the
current restructuring, cognisant of the emergent European educational policy
space. It argues that the emerging policy reforms for Scottish FE, commonly
referred to as ‘regionalisation’, is simultaneously a continuation and departure from
the governing structures set in place in the early 1990s. The paper offers
productive ways of framing thinking about the regionalisation of Scottish FE.
Consequently, it will be of interest to Scottish Government policy makers and those
working within or in partnership with the Scottish FE sector
