Armed Forces - Education Opportunities

We are committed to ensuring that those who serve or have served in the Armed Forces, and their families, are treated fairly and are not disadvantaged within the delivery of our services and policy making. We declared this publicly by signing the Armed Forces Covenant and were presented with a bronze award from the Armed Forces Covenant Employer Recognition Scheme in June 2016. We were then awarded a silver award in September 2017 and in August 2019 we are proud to be awarded the Gold Award.

Education opportunities for Armed Forces...

We offer a wide range of courses across our six Schools. Full course information can be found on our online prospectus and if you wish to speak to a member of the Team directly about your options, please contact Peter Tormey. Internally and externally, we are keen to develop our educational offering to the Armed Forces community and our Armed Forces Academic Lead, Maggie Anderson, is pleased to discuss area of opportunity.

For further information, please see https://www.napier.ac.uk/study-with-us/armed-forces/education-opportunities.

Enhanced Learning Credit Administration Service (ELCAS)

Edinburgh Napier University is a member of the Ministry of Defence (MOD)'s Enhanced Learning Credits Scheme (ELCA’s number 1159) and are on the MOD Principal Partner Supplier List as an education provider. The ELCA’s scheme provides financial support in the form of a single up-front payment in each of a maximum of three separate financial years. There are two levels of funding depending on how long you have served with the Armed Forces. This scheme is useful for any Service personnel who wish to study while still in active service or who has left service and wishes to follow an education pathway.

For further information or contact our colleague to manages the ELCA’s scheme within the university (Tom Evans), please see https://www.napier.ac.uk/study-with-us/armed-forces/education-opportunities.

Military qualification mapping
We collaborate with various organisations and education providers such as Scottish Credit Qualification Framework (SCQF), Scottish Funding Council (SFC), MOD Education Centres and Career Transition Partnership (CTP). We work closely with Glasgow Caledonian University to develop a learning pathway for the Armed Forces community that the Scottish Higher Education (HE) sector can all follow. SCQF and SFC have Armed Forces Working Groups established of which we are key partners with the aim of improving the education pathways and opportunities for the Armed Forces Community within Scotland. The SCQF Working Group is analysing the various qualifications those within service gain to extract evidence of prior learning that may allow them to enter college and then articulate onto a university place or enter straight into university.

To review the pathways currently analysed, please see https://scqf.org.uk/support/support-for-individuals/support-for-veterans.

Skills and Qualifications Discovery Tool

Key partners Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework Partnership (SCQFP), Skills Development Scotland (SDS) and the MoD collaborated to develop a skills profiling tool specifically for service leavers that supports them in understanding the skills they have gained in the military and how these translate into language easily understood by civilian employers or institutions in order to gain a job or move into further learning. This tool called Veterans’ Skills and Qualification Discovery Tool will also benchmark to the SCQF any formal qualifications gained during service.

There was a desire amongst those who support the resettlement of service personnel in Scotland to be able to easily describe the comparable SCQF level of qualifications taken during service to potential Scottish employers. This has led to the inclusion of an extra step in the Skills Discovery Tool already available on the SDS My World of Work website where, if an Armed Services role is chosen, service personnel get taken through to a page where they can search for and select the qualifications they have gained during service. The results page will then display the broadly comparable SCQF level of each qualification along with further information about the SCQF.

For further information, please see https://scqf.org.uk/support/support-for-individuals/support-for-veterans.