This autumn has felt like a milestone season for Scottish education and skills – and for me personally, it’s brought a chance to look back on a partnership I’ve been closely involved in for a long time.

In September I had the privilege of joining the SCQF@25 conference, marking a quarter of a century since the framework first gave Scotland a common language for qualifications. It’s easy to underestimate what that achievement really means. Before the SCQF, a college certificate, a university degree and a workplace qualification could feel like they belonged to entirely different systems.

Sitting alongside that milestone is a quieter, more personal one: the relationship between Scotland’s training providers and our national awarding body. STF has represented work-based learning providers since 1990, and our formal partnership with what was then SQA goes back further than people sometimes realise – a first Memorandum of Understanding, then years of steadily deepening collaboration around Modern Apprenticeships, SVQs and the qualifications that sit behind so much of Scotland’s workforce development.

I’ve watched that relationship evolve from the inside. Joining the SQA Advisory Council in 2021 gave STF a direct seat at the table on qualifications policy; a year later, a place on the Qualifications Committee took that involvement further still, into the detail of how vocational qualifications get shaped. In 2024, for the first time, our conference was hosted at SQA’s own offices – a genuinely collaborative day on the future of apprenticeships, employability and skills, and a good marker of how far the relationship had come, arriving right alongside our renewed MOU as the sector prepared for the transition to Qualifications Scotland.

This October, we’re back at those same offices for the third year running – now as Qualifications Scotland’s guests, under the new MOU we signed together last year. When I stand up at our conference, I’ll be talking about that history. For more than two decades, training providers and our awarding body have chosen to work together rather than in parallel, because that’s what serves learners and employers best.

It also happens to be my last year as STF’s Chief Executive. I’ll be retiring in December, so this autumn carries an extra layer of reflection for me. Looking back across my time in this sector, the thing I’m proudest of isn’t any single project – it’s the relationships. The people who picked up the phone instead of sending a memo. The organisations that showed up for each other’s events, not because they had to, but because progress in this system only ever really happens when people work across boundaries rather than within them.

That’s what SCQF@25 and the STF Conference have in common, even though they’re different events with different audiences. Both are, at heart, about partnership doing the quiet work of making Scotland’s education and skills system easier to navigate – for learners, for employers, and for the training providers and awarding bodies in between.

I’m grateful to have spent a career watching that partnership grow, and prouder still to see it continuing well beyond my own time in the role.