This makes me smile every time I pass it.
A leaving speech
I stopped being chair of governors of The Sheffield College at the end of March 2021, after a 45 year connection. Here's the short speech I gave to an online staff meeting.
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The invitation to speak caught me by surprise. It really is an honour. Today is my first day since 2008 without a Sheffield College role. To explain:
In 1976 I did teaching practice here. In 1979 I got a permanent job here. In 2002 the College dismissed me as redundant. In 2008 the College appointed me a governor, on my second attempt. Until yesterday I was chair of governors.
I’m going to talk about how I feel about the College, and then to offer three reflections.
What is a 45 year association with one institution like?
I’ll start with three snapshots:
It is 1979
After teacher-training I’d worked for two years as a part-timer, cadging cars from friends to get between Chesterfield, Cleethorpes, Manchester, Scunthorpe, and Sheffield. I’m being interviewed for my dream job as a Lecturer Grade 1 in Trade Union Studies at Granville College. As a part-timer I had often worn a so-called Chinese rickshaw driver’s jacket. And Doc Martens. Once I’d henna dyed my hair. Anxiously waiting after my interview I was called back by the panel: “We’d like to offer you the job: but only if you agree to smarten yourself up, put on a collar and tie, and wear a decent pair of shoes.” Of course I swallowed my pride and said yes.
Still 1979, it is my first team meeting
I’m wearing my new smart clothes. We are planning the coming term. Unknown to me, something is on the way up the inside of my trouser-leg. I shift my position. My knee sears with pain. I yell. I reflexively start to hit my knee to kill whatever thing has done this to me. Next I tear off my trousers, to make sure that the thing - formerly an Autumn wasp - is dead. Rather anxious laughter ensues. I feel sheepish. My new colleagues look worried. Who exactly have they been landed with?
The 1980s now
It’s the lunch break. A three-course student made and served meal in the subsidised staff restaurant. Over a three-term cycle you could experience most of the culinary curriculum - including lambs’ brains au gratin. Afterwards there’d be coffee in the staff lounge, sort of “at the feet” of the Principal, the aptly-named Arthur Colledge, who was also the Regional Secretary of the lecturer’s union NATFHE. (Think about that for a minute….) Arthur, smoking his pipe, or knocking out the dottle, would converse intimidatingly with whoever was sitting nearby. The trick was to avoid catching his eye, to nod occasionally, but never to get drawn in, else you’d risk being made to feel a fool.
As an aside, don’t do any of it Angela - not the pipe, not the dottle, not the intimidation.
Through these three snapshots I wanted to focus on what FE felt like at the time of my start in it.
But of course there’s a continuous “jostle” of other memories, of widely varying significance. Here are a few of them:
- the annual staff/student summer cricket match on Granville College’s sports ground out towards Fox House - land and pavilion bought by a speculator and even now slowly going to ruin;
- outright and unchallenged homophobia;
- the City Council’s correct 1980s plan to set up a fully tertiary system, fatally weakened from the start by the Secretary of State’s decision to retain school sixth forms in the south west of the City;
- guerrilla action by women staff taking down sexist calendars from male staff rooms;
- the huge changes in Sheffield caused by deindustrialisation;
- the giant, muddled institution that resulted in 1992 from the merger of Sheffield’s six FE colleges to form a Sheffield College nearly twice our current size, with over 100 locations;
- leading a bitter and protracted industrial dispute about our lecturers’ contracts;
- the creeping damage done by austerity over the last decade;
- a full-to-bursting City Hall Ballroom for the union-run (but everyone attended) annual staff Christmas social;
- the pain, anxiety and eventual liberation of being “restructured out” aged 50;
- the long period when “things were just not quite right in the College”, when pride in what the College does had somehow ebbed away;
- my last three years here as chair during which we’ve all been engaged in turning the college around.
And I’ve ignored completely:
- the tough collective experience we are going through with Covid;
- the long term harm the pandemic has done and will do to the fabric of the City;
- and the completely admirable way in which you have responded to the pandemic.
Before I finish, I have three reflections:
Firstly, what makes FE so special? Researcher Beryl Tipton became particularly interested in what she terms “the multi-purpose educational function of FE”. She wrote, in 1973:
“For in the heterogeneity of their educational and occupational backgrounds, its members of staff are probably unlike those of any other type of educational institution in the country”.
She continued
“a college’s staff structure is almost a microcosm of the country’s social divisions featuring, as it does, all of the following: graduates and non-graduates; industrially experienced and non-experienced; craftsmen, white-collar workers, managers, social scientists and artists; men and women; and the relatively young through to the relatively old.”
It was, above all, the heterogeneity, the incredible range in its workforce, that Tipton pinpoints, which made me excitedly feel at home as soon as I stepped into an FE college. It still does.
Secondly, what can make a college great?
Above all it is its climate or culture. The vibe has to be right. The way that all roles are vulnerably interdependent on each other must be always in the background. Nobel prize winner and arms control expert Thomas Schelling put it this way
“Most of what we call civilisation depends on reciprocal vulnerability.”
I believe that what is true for nations is true for organisations and is true for individuals. As chair I have tried to put this value into practice; I think governors have tried to do likewise; and I know that Angela shares this approach too.
Finally, why is change for the better sometimes so hard?
Because we don’t get or give enough time for things to run their course. If you make bread it takes the time it takes. If you lay concrete, you know it takes time to cure. If you grow veg you know that plants take the time they take to fruit. There are things you can do to improve the yield; sometimes you have to act fast - when frost threatens, say; but nature has to take its course. So, to get The Sheffield College back from its 2017 brink onto its current upward trajectory has taken you, has taken us, has taken our students, the time it has taken. Should you be impatient for improvement? Of course. But you must be patient too.
To conclude: I wish The Sheffield College and you its staff, the very best for the future. From the side-lines, I know that I will see the College dealing with whatever challenges come its way; that I will see the College continue to go from strength to strength; that I will see the College, guided by a new strategy adopted yesterday by governors, being the anchor institution that the City of Sheffield needs and deserves.
Thank you.
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FE Area Based Reviews should start by making an assessment of need
[Also on LinkedIn. Header image added 3/10/2015. Small edits made 4/10/2015. Addendum from evidence by Martin Donnelly and Peter Lauener to the 19/10/2015 Public Accounts Committee added 20/10/2015]
Until 2002 I was employed in The Sheffield College. For the last seven years I have been a governor there. The college is a big urban FE college spread across four main sites, with a turnover of over £50m.
In 2000 I was a bit involved in The Sheffield Review, after The Sheffield College was put into Special Measures by the FEFC and the then Education Secretary, David Blunkett. Two Governors were "imposed" (Bob Fryer and FEFC's Dr Terry Melia) and George (now Sir George) Sweeney was parachuted in as Principal.
Here is a link to the executive summary of The Sheffield Review: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/9912/. (I have a hard copy of the full review, but there seem not to be any publicly available digital versions.)
One very striking aspect of the Sheffield Review's method, which seems to differ from what is currently envisaged for ABRs, was that the FEFC's Terry Melia was very hot indeed on working out what the need in Sheffield was, and only then moving on to what provision was required to meet the need.
Of course the funding situation then was not as it is now, and is expected to be even worse after November's Comprehensive Spending Review. So funding will be insufficient to meet needs. And working out need in a LEP area such as Greater Manchester, or Sheffield City Region is a bigger job than "only" in one big local authority area. Nevertheless, ABRs ought, for moral as well as practical reasons, have that baseline assessment of numbers/need at an early stage.
From what I can make out, having attended the introductory meeting for college governors about Area Based Reviews, and having kept my eyes and ears open, it seems that ABRs will look at what there is on the ground by way of supply, and then move on to considering how that supply might be better and/or more cheaply provided. [Note that this approach is not the one that Government Officials described to the Public Accounts Committee on 19/10/2015. See Addendum below.]
The gap between supply and need would thus never be analysed.
This flaw in the ABR process (it is not the only one...) should be fixed.
Addendum - 20/10/2015
Extract from the oral evidence taken on 19/10/2015 by the Public Accounts Committee Inquiry into the financial sustainability in the further education sector. Emphasis added. For the full transcript go to http://goo.gl/w2It35.
Q50 - Chair [Meg Hillier, MP]: It sounds like it could be a bit haphazard. In terms of the future shape of the sector, FE colleges particularly have a capital asset and a physical presence, which constrains who they deliver to, to a degree, but also is an important local provision for people who may not be able to travel in the same way that people might do to university. Does the Department have no strategic oversight of what the general geographical spread should be of these institutions, and do you not have any alarms or worries about how area-based reviews may work or throw up mergers that might not deliver for all residents in a particular area?
Martin Donnelly [Permanent Secretary at BIS]: We are very concerned to ensure that there are available learning opportunities for people throughout England—in this case. Perhaps I could ask Peter to comment in a bit more detail about how we take that into account as we go through the process of supporting colleges and the area review.
Peter Lauener [Chief Executive of the Skills Funding Agency and the Education Funding Agency]: First of all, a bit of context. As Martin said, there has been a long-term process of rationalisation and merger in the further education sector since incorporation in 1993. When a merger happens it does not mean that buildings are necessarily closed, although there is sometimes a separate process of reducing the number of buildings in a particular area, if there are too many; but very often you get distributed leadership and management over a wider area, which produces savings and efficiency, and improvements in effectiveness.
As we go to the area reviews, the big challenge with those is precisely, I think, what you said—to start with what is needed for learners, for communities, for business, and then work back from that to structure. So it is not a sort of “move the deckchairs around”. It is what is needed in this area to provide the best possible service to the three groups—learners, the community and employers—and improve progression through to higher skill levels. It is a quite a challenging agenda.
Posted on 02/10/2015 in News and comment, Nothing to do with online learning | Permalink | Comments (0)
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