Stow College

Why Choose Stow?

Choosing Stow College as your location for learning means that you can be confident about the quality of the services you’ll receive. 

Like all colleges in Scotland, Stow is regularly reviewed by HMIe (Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Education) and their reports are published on their website.

What should reassure you is that the HMIe publish what are called ‘statements of confidence’ – where these are justified – and Stow is a College about which they are confident.

We are also reviewed by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) which is the body that awards your HNC or HND. These reviews are at both ‘system’ level and at ‘subject’ level and, again, Stow has a very strong record of success.

Stow set out, around ten years ago, on a journey to really raise the profile of quality improvement across everything it does. It decided that it would benchmark itself against not just other colleges or universities but against the best businesses in the UK and Europe.

It does this by using the European Foundation for Quality Management framework (EFQM) and it has routinely invited external scrutiny of its progress on this journey by an independent organisation called Quality Scotland. In 2009, Stow received not one, but two accolades for its successes.

It won the Quality Scotland Award for Business Excellence and then achieved recognition for the ‘Gold Standard’ in the EFQM. These are unprecedented achievements for a college.