Sir Peter Scott

Sir Peter Scott

Vice-Chancellor

Professor Sir Peter Scott has been Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University since January 1998. Previously he was Pro Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Education at the University of Leeds. He was also the Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Education. From 1976 to 1992 he was Editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement. Before that he was a reporter and then a leader writer on The Times.

He has a First in modern history from the University of Oxford (Merton College). He was also a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley while holding a Harkness Fellowship awarded by the Commonwealth Fund of New York.

Duties and responsibilities

Under the Instrument and Articles of Government Peter is the chief executive of Kingston University responsible for advising the Board of Governors on the education character and mission of the University and for the organisation, management and leadership of its staff. He carries out these responsibilities with the advice of senior colleagues on the Senior Management Group, which has eight members, and with the consent of the Executive Board, on which all Deans and Heads of Department sit. He chairs both bodies.

Peter is a member of the Board of Governors and an ex-officio member of all its sub-committees apart from the Audit Committee. He also chairs the Academic Board, the ‘third leg' of the University's governance (after the Board of Governors and the Vice-Chancellor). In addition he chairs a number of other committees, including the Professorial Appointments Committee and the Honorary Degrees Committee, and is a member of others (for example, the Academic Directorate).

External responsibilities

Peter has recently been appointed as first President of the Association of University Administrators and chairs the AUA's newly established council

He has been for six years President of the Academic Cooperation Association, the Brussels-based organisation which includes among its 27 members the British Council, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Netherlands Universities Foundation for International Cooperation (NUFFIC) and CampusFrance.

Peter chairs the Research Advisory Group of the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, and the Research Advisory Panel of the Higher Education Academy.

He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Higher Education Policy Institute and steps down later this year as Chair of the Universities Association of Lifelong Learning after two terms in office

Peter is also a member of the board of the Higher Education Statistics Agency

Earlier responsibilities

From 2000 to 2006 Peter was a member of the board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). HEFCE is responsible for advising the Government on the needs of higher education in England and also for distributing more than £8 billion to 150 universities and other higher education institutions. He chaired two of HEFCE's strategic committees – for Equal Opportunities and subsequently Quality Assurance Learning and Teaching. During his time as a HEFCE board member he served on a number of groups, including the group established to examine the future of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. He chaired a HEFCE review of special funding for the Institute of Education in 2000.

He was also a member the Lord Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Legal Education and Conduct from 1994 until 2000 and served as Vice-Chairman (and acting Chairman during the interregnum between the resignation of Lord Steyn and the appointment of Lord Nicholls, both Law Lords). The committee was responsible for advising the Lord Chancellor on a range of topics, including controversial issues such as the right of solicitors and employed barristers to appear in higher courts.

Honours

Peter was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2007 New Year Honours list for services to higher education.

He has also received the following honorary awards:

• Doctor of Laws (University of Bath)
• Doctor of Letters (Council for National Academic Awards, at its last awards ceremony)
• Doctor of Philosophy (Anglia Polytechnic University, now Anglia Ruskin University)
• Doctor of Letters (Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, Michigan USA)
• Fellow, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (now merged with the University of Manchester)
• Fellow, Bath College of Higher Education (now Bath Spa University)

Academic honours

Peter has received the following academic honours:

Member, Academia Europaea: The Academia Europaea is a European, non-governmental association acting as an Academy. Our members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research.  It was founded in 1988, and has over 2000 members from thirty five European countries and eight non-European countries. The membership includes leading experts from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and the law

Academician, The Academy of Social Sciences: The Academy is composed of Individual Academicians and Learned Societies. Academicians are distinguished scholars and practitioners from academia and the public and private sectors. Most of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences in the United Kingdom are represented within the Academy.

Fellow, Society for Research into Higher Education: The SRHE is a UK-based international learned society concerned to advance understanding of higher education, especially through the insights, perspectives and knowledge offered by systematic research and scholarship. The Society aims to be the leading international society in the field, as to both the support and the dissemination of research

Fellow, Royal Society of Arts: The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) described itself as having been ‘a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.  Our approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action'. It has more than 25,000 Fellows worldwide

Personal research and scholarly activities:

Peter's personal research is concentrated in four main areas:

• The development of mass higher education systems in their social, economic and cultural contexts;
• The evolution of new patterns of knowledge production, and implications for knowledge-based organisations (including universities);
• The governance and management of higher education institutions, and implications for the organisational culture of universities (and academic ethos and social missions);
• The internationalisation of higher education, in response to wider phenomena of globalisation.

Read Sir Peter Scott's full list of academic publications

He is also involved in a number of research-based projects – in particular, a European Framework 6-funded project led by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (SCASSS) at Uppsala University on the social sciences and humanities in the former Soviet Union and China (www.globalsocialscience.org); and a series of policy seminars sponsored by the Department for Innovation and Skills (DIUS), HEFCE, the Scottish Government and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) (http://crll.gcal.ac.uk/massHE/MassHE.htm).

Peter also continues to give keynote addresses and makes other contributions to conferences – for example, at the annual conference of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management and, most recently, at a symposium at the Institute for Higher Education Research at the University of Kassel.

He has also undertaken a number of evaluations of departments and academic programmes – most recently, of the Masters and Doctoral, and research, programmes in higher education in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto; and of the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School. In addition he is the external examiner for the MBA in Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education, University of London; and has examined four PhDs in the past year.