David Gallagher, NCFE chief executive, 1980–2026

“David seems to revel in non-conformity,” one of David Gallagher’s college reports read, “but no doubt his natural ability will get him through.”

Gallagher told FE Week in 2021 that he was suspended three times during his A Levels, and could account for only one of them. He had finished the paper with half the time left, decided he had done enough, and walked out of the hall.

He came close to being thrown out of education altogether. Twenty-five years later, he was running one of the country’s oldest awarding organisations.

Gallagher, NCFE’s chief executive since March 2019, died on Sunday, July 5, aged 45, six months after telling the sector he had cancer. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

‘I want to be a decent human being again’

The youngest of six, Gallagher grew up in Middlesbrough with a father working the North Sea rigs and a mother retraining as a social worker. School, when it came, had little to teach him. “I never really felt like I needed teachers,” he said. “I just needed work setting.”

By 14, he had given up on it. Then his mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and afterwards had a stroke, and could not work again.

He turned down university, took a job at BT, was out too often and in debt, and got by with a gift for solving problems. “I was a high-functioning lunatic, really,” he said.

At 24, it caught up with him, in a run of losses that arrived together: his job, a close friend’s father, his girlfriend’s mother, and then his girlfriend dumped him. “I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror,” he said, “and I didn’t like what I saw.”

That was what pushed him towards education and skills. “I thought, I want to be a decent human being again,” he told FE Week. “It wasn’t wildly altruistic.”

The boiler test

He became a personal adviser on New Labour’s welfare to work programme, working with people whose histories of abuse, neglect, prison and care made his own difficulties look small. He took to getting up two hours before work to make sure clients reached their appointments with him.

Petrina Lynn, then the Learning and Skills Council’s head of skills for the north east, hired him. She was the first real leader he had worked for, he said, and “my second mum”.

Senior roles at Working Links and Ingeus followed, through the turbulent arrival of payment-by-results contracting, and later a spell as commercial director at Babington. Colin Scott, who mentored him at Working Links, remembered a young colleague who challenged the status quo “sometimes over zealously”, and who joked years afterwards that he had learned to “nod his head and wag his tail” instead.

Stephen Evans, chief executive of Learning and Work Institute, who knew him from those years, said what stood out was “his commitment to social justice and making sure everyone has a fair chance in life regardless of background”.

Interviewing at Working Links, Gallagher was asked what one thing he would introduce to the sector. Professional recognition for frontline advisers, he said. “I find it baffling people have to have a licence to fix my boiler” when nothing qualified the people who helped someone rebuild a life.

In 2011 he founded the Institute of Employability Professionals, building qualifications from level 2 to level 4 and an apprenticeship standard. He called it the achievement he was proudest of.

Eighteen months to the top

He joined NCFE in September 2018 to run its end-point assessment business. Six months later he was chief executive.

He inherited an organisation he thought had lost its thread, and asked 13 senior leaders why they came to work. “I got six different answers, and seven people who didn’t know.”

He turned NCFE back towards its charitable purpose: half a million pounds into a WorldSkills UK Centre of Excellence, a £1 million assessment innovation fund and backing the Good for Me Good for FE campaign.

NCFE was one of the first two awarding organisations contracted to deliver T Levels, and Gallagher led it through significant Ofqual intervention when early delivery went wrong. He was unusually willing to talk about it, later calling the experience “brutal but necessary” and offering to help others avoid it.

‘A waterfall of mistrust’

At the Federation of Awarding Bodies’ 2023 conference, he described a “waterfall of mistrust” running through the sector, and said the toll of regulatory pressure on professionals’ health was something the sector should resist

He served as FAB’s vice chair for two years and was elected chair last December. He never took up the post, standing down after his diagnosis.

FAB chair Tim Bennett-Hart said Gallagher’s openness about his failures as well as his successes was “refreshing”. “It is a profound shock to know that he will not return to challenge our thinking.”

Rob Nitsch, FAB’s chief executive, said Gallagher “had a bold vision and was tenacious in its pursuit”, and was “always ready to assist others”. Ofqual chief regulator Sir Ian Bauckham, whose organisation Gallagher spent much of his time challenging, called him “an extremely experienced and knowledgeable force in the vocational sector”.

‘He took chances on people’

Philip Le Feuvre, NCFE’s chief operating officer, worked alongside Gallagher for six years and described him as both boss and friend. Gallagher “believed passionately in the potential of people”, he said, giving them opportunities and building their confidence “with his relentless positivity”. When things went wrong, he stood by them.

He was also forever fired up about the next idea. “He used to joke that my job was 90 per cent about reining him in,” Le Feuvre said. And he was uncompromising about where work stopped. Gallagher took calls from the school run and the side of a pitch, but his boys came first, and he expected the same of his staff.

Ben Rowland, chief executive of AELP, said he “was never afraid to speak plainly, challenge constructively or stand up for what he believed was right”. David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, pointed to “a shared commitment and passion for a fairer and better education and skills system”.

Zoe Lewis, principal and CEO of Middlesbrough College, remembered a Boro lad “through and through”, who talked about serious things with “his renowned twinkle in his eye”.

The chef and the essay

Gallagher’s last article for FE Week ran a year ago this week. It attacked the idea that technical education should be made to look academic, and led on a question he thought answered itself: would you hire a chef on the strength of an essay about sauces, or would you taste their cooking?

Then he set the policy argument aside and wrote about his sons. One a natural sportsman, the other having to work at it. One who remembered and regurgitated, one who needed to learn a thing several ways before it stuck. One who followed the rules, one who challenged them without hesitation.

He would never say one was better than the other, he wrote. He loved them for their differences.

‘Look out for each other’

The morning after he told the sector about his diagnosis, Gallagher woke to hundreds of messages and filmed a reply on his phone.

He thanked everyone, said he felt fortunate, and asked for one thing back.

Be kind, he said, and not only to the people closest to you. Let someone out at a junction. Hold a door. Make somebody a cup of tea. Give a colleague credit for a job well done. Send a note to someone you have not spoken to in years.

He knew how it sounded. “I’m not being all sanctimonious,” he said. “I’m often in too much of a rush to be kind.”

He signed off: “Look out for each other, and I’ll see you soon.”