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.

The two main campuses from college days, in Corstorphine and Leith, are being sold, but drama courses will remain at Edinburgh’s Gateway Theatre to ensure that the university retains a foothold in the city centre.

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.

Best-placed

Now that it has achieved that ambition, Queen Margaret is by no means out of place in its new company. Easily the best-placed of last year’s new entrants, it finished higher in our League Table than many former polytechnics.

Average entry scores are the highest among its peer group and the university registers a series of good scores on other measures. With just over 5,200 students, 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.

Nearly 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 smaller School of Drama and the Creative Industries combines the conservatoire and university traditions, providing training for aspiring performers, directors, administrators and critics.

Health is an area of particular strength: Queen Margaret achieved the highest research ratings in Scotland in this area and offers courses in an unusually broad range of subjects, from dietetics, podiatry and audiology, to art therapy, music therapy, and health psychology.

International

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 Singapore, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Greece and Switzerland.

The granting of university status came too late to boost applications in 2007 – although there was a 2.4 per cent increase in any case – but Queen Margaret might have hoped for better figures at the start of 2008.

The projected dropout rate of nearly 20 per cent had worsened in the latest survey, having been better than average for Scotland and easily the best at the new universities north of the border in previous years. Almost one undergraduate in three comes from a working-class home and roughly one in five is from an area with little history of higher education. Over 30 per cent of first-year undergraduates are over the age of 21 and half of them are over 30.

Accommodation

There are 800 residential places on the new campus, 500 of them reserved for undergraduates. An impressive learning resource centre is open 24 hours a day, and 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” at any new university in Scotland – a high priority among the students. The campus has already won an award for sustainable design.

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