Welcome from the Director

"Welcome to the Academy of Government at the University of Edinburgh. The Academy has one fundamental aim: to help train the next generation of leaders in public service."

Our Master of Public Policy - the first in the UK - launched in September 2011 and offers recent graduates the opportunity to build the skills and ideas that will equip them to find solutions for tomorrow's policy challenges. An Executive Master of Public Policy will follow in 2012 to train rising leaders in the public and non-profit sectors or high performing professionals in the private sector who wish to move into the public or non-profit sector.

The Academy builds on the best of Edinburgh as the location of one of the world's leading universities, and the best of Edinburgh as the seat of Scotland's government.

The University of Edinburgh hosts some of the worlds leading researchers and analysts working on government at Scottish, UK, European and global levels, and on the key policy challenges our societies need to confront: on health, education and welfare, on the environment, energy and climate change, on international security and international development.

The University has a long tradition - extending back to the Enlightenment - of applying its scholarship to the public policy challenges of the day. It does so through its international expertise - on Africa, the Middle East, China, South Asia. It does so in cooperation with the European Union through one of the world's longest established centres of expertise on European integration, the Europa Institute. And it does so through its engagement with policy makers in the UK and in particular in Scotland.

Scotland has one of the most powerful sub-state governments worldwide, and one of the most open. The University has an immensely rich set of relationships with the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament. Its academics played a central role in designing those institutions, and their work since has been one of the main sources of advice and expertise Government and Parliament draw on in serving the needs of Scotland's people.

The Academy of Government has been established as a crossover point of expertise on policy challenges at Scottish, British, European and international scales and of work that crosses the boundaries of scholarship and policy practice. It is a powerful setting for building and developing careers in public service.

I hope you will join us.

Professor Charlie Jeffery
Director of the Academy of Government

This page was published on 27 January 2012