Garrett Baylor Stell
Garrett Baylor Stell is an education correspondent at The Herald whose reporting tracks how structural shifts in university funding, international recruitment and policy decisions translate into concrete effects for Scottish students and institutions.
International students and the university business model
Stell’s core focus is the international student boom and the way it has reshaped Scottish universities’ finances and priorities.
In coverage of clearing at the University of Glasgow, he highlights that foreign applicants have access to vastly more courses than UK students, using precise figures and enrolment data to show how overseas recruitment now underpins institutional strategy.
He returns to the same theme in work on the rise and subsequent decline of international entrants, isolating postgraduate taught programmes as the single degree type responsible for almost all of the sector’s recent losses and setting this in the context of a decade-long recruitment drive.
In pieces that ask what comes after the international boom, he treats universities as businesses as well as civic institutions, connecting tuition-fee dependence, rapid growth in overseas numbers and the risk of sudden contractions into a coherent picture for readers.
Admissions, exams and student pathways
Stell spends significant time on how young people move through the system, from school qualifications to university places.
He co-leads The Herald’s education team coverage around Scotland’s national exam results, offering a mix of in-depth national and local analysis and “stories behind the headlines” that explain what the numbers mean for different communities.
His reporting on Scottish students’ success rates at Oxford and Cambridge examines why applicants from Scotland face the lowest acceptance rates in the UK, drawing on original research and university input to explore how the Scottish qualifications system is perceived by institutions elsewhere.
In Education HQ coverage, he looks at what Scotland might learn from Wales as that country undertakes major reforms to its education system, using comparative examples to show how qualification and assessment changes can alter students’ pathways and options.
University leadership and industrial relations
Beyond admissions and enrolment, Stell reports closely on how decisions by university leaders and staff shape the sector’s stability and culture.
He interviews figures such as Anton Muscatelli about how government buy-in and a landmark sector review are viewed inside universities, tying high-level governance questions back to funding gaps and the prospects for recovery.
His work at Heriot-Watt University covers both staff strike action and leadership change, documenting two days of industrial action alongside a separate piece on the appointment of the institution’s first female principal.
Across these stories he treats strikes, leadership transitions and review processes as part of the same system, showing how staffing decisions and governance structures interact with the financial pressures created by international recruitment and policy shifts.
Classroom practice and comparative policy debates
Stell also reports on what happens inside classrooms and how policy debates around teaching play out in practice.
In commentary on phone-free classrooms, he digs into the practical and financial implications of enforcing device bans, signalling an interest in how behavioural policies are implemented rather than only how they are announced.
Professional profiles describing his work emphasise coverage of teaching methodologies and racial equity in education, pointing to a broader concern with how different groups experience the system and how pedagogy changes over time.
His comparative pieces on Wales’s reform agenda further show a habit of using other systems as mirrors for Scotland, drawing lessons about curriculum, qualifications and classroom practice from policy experiments beyond his immediate beat.
Stell brings a specialist background in education reporting to his current role, having previously covered schools and families and worked as an education reporter at other news organisations before joining The Herald’s education desk.
Across a large volume of stories he favours data, clear numbers and interviews with decision-makers, and he consistently links institutional strategy to the lived experience of students, staff and families.
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Callum Clark
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