Scotland’s first new university of the 21st century got a new campus to match, when Queen Margaret University moved into gleaming new premises in Musselburgh, to the southeast of Edinburgh, in September 2007.

The “campus in the park”, as it has been dubbed, was designed in consultation with students, and is only six minutes by train from the city centre.

Drama courses remain at Edinburgh’s Gateway Theatre to ensure that the university retains a foothold in the city centre.

The university is also opening the first UK university campus in Singapore, a joint venture with the East Asia Institute of Management, which has taught Queen Margaret degrees for several years.

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Speculation

But all has not been plain sailing for Queen Margaret, which has been struggling with a £20-million deficit and the subject of (hotly denied) merger speculation. Applications were down by more than 18 per cent at the start of 2009, mainly because of a reorganisation of ‘conservatoire’ drama courses in Scotland, and only one university had a lower average score in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.

Named after Saint Margaret, the 11th-century Queen of Scotland, the institution dates back to 1875 and was originally a school of cookery for women.

The college had been awarding its own degrees since 1992, but was too small to qualify for university status until 2007. Having achieved that ambition, the university made an auspicious debut in The Times League Table and has been outscoring many of the former polytechnics.

Health

Queen Margaret is the smallest university in Scotland and it says that it is likely to remain so. The strategic plan promises that the new university will be “smart, innovative and very clearly focused” to compensate for the limitations of size.

Three quarters of the students are female, seven out of ten of them from north of the border. Over 3,000 students are in the health sciences faculty, with social sciences and media, followed in terms of size by business and enterprise, the other main areas.

The four drama degrees have been consolidated into one interdisciplinary programme, under the title of Drama and Performance.

Health is an area of particular strength: Queen Margaret courses in an unusually broad range of subjects, from dietetics, podiatry and audiology, to art therapy, music therapy, and health psychology.

There is also a specialism in international health care, with students in Angola, Guatemala, Uganda, Ethiopia, Gambia, India and Cuba. Other international programmes run in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Greece and Switzerland, as well as on the new Singapore campus.

The projected dropout rate of over 19 per cent has improved slightly since the last survey, but is still higher than average for the university’s courses and entry qualifications. Three undergraduates in ten come from working-class homes and a similar proportion are over the age of 21 on entry.

Facilities

An impressive learning resource centre, parts of which are open 24 hours a day, offers a variety of study spaces. Specialist laboratories and clinics are well equipped. The nursing simulation lab, for example, is set out exactly like a hospital ward and there are specially equipped rooms for podiatry, radiography, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and art therapy.

There are 800 residential places on the new campus, 500 of them reserved for undergraduates. Other features include a student union building, indoor and outdoor sports facilities, a variety of catering outlets and landscaped gardens with a range of environmental features.

Queen Margaret claims that the campus is the “greenest” in Scotland – a high priority among the students. The campus has already won an award for sustainable design and has one of the lowest carbon footprints of any UK higher education establishment.

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