Scottish students at Edinburgh University start support group to counter ‘alienation’
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Only 25% of institution’s students are from Scotland, and they are more likely to be from working-class backgrounds. From the first day Shanley Breese started her law degree at Edinburgh University, she encountered demeaning comments about her accent. She was told she was hard to understand, and was asked to repeat herself in tutorials when she used words from the Scots language.
![[Shanley Breese and Freya Stewart stand in front of modern university buildings; they are both young women with long, dark hair. Breese is taller, with curly hair worn loose, and wears a light zip-up jacket; Stewart has tied-back straight hair and wears a black anorak]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a3eb975ca4564cced4ab63755ce829ca71ed5b81/0_387_5808_3485/master/5808.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“It was just a little thing to differentiate us and point it out … It meant that I didn’t participate in my tutorials,” she says. Breese was also shocked to walk around campus and hear students “slagging off” clothes from popular high street brands such as Primark and TK Maxx, as well as conversations in lecture halls about inheritance tax that concluded with statements such as “rich people just work harder than poor people”.
With only about a quarter of Edinburgh University’s students coming from Scotland, the rest being from elsewhere in the UK or overseas, Breese felt very much in a minority. In October, the student news publication The Tab Edinburgh received a backlash for commenting that the lack of Scottish students in one of its TikTok videos was “as God intended”. This comment was the final straw. Breese was so disturbed by the discrimination around her that she decided to set up a support group for students like herself.
The Edinburgh University Social Mobility Society was founded with the aim “to provide a community for Scottish students, who are often from working-class backgrounds and frequently experience feelings of alienation, microaggressions, and subtle acts of exclusion at the university”.
