Lee Lucas, CEO, Fashion Retail Academy

The FE fashion school where change is always on trend

If you roll up your sleeves and you get stuck in, you can make it far

Fashion Retail Academy principal Lee Lucas on the impact of 20 years of industry transformation- from physical shops to same-day deliveries, influencers and drone flying

A delicate fragrance lingers in the air as I pass through the grand pillared archway under a stained-glass goddess, and into the home of the Fashion Retail Academy.

The lavish décor of the Ofsted ‘outstanding’ training provider’s new home, Electra House in London’s Moorgate (a former wartime secret operations base), embodies the emphasis on aesthetics that defines the fashion industry.

Five industry players founded the Fashion Retail Academy (FRA) 20 years ago and still play a role in shaping it. But the decimation of the high street means the skills required of its learners are quite different two decades on.

When we meet, principal and chief executive Lee Lucas is looking dapper in his crushed velvet jacket and jeans, as you might expect. But he laments that the CEOs of fashion companies he meets turn up in “really scruffy jumpers and trainers” and “could be selling the Big Issue”.

The entranceway of Electra House Moorgate which the FRA moved into in 2024

Unlike his fashion-loving students, a gaggle of whom are taking selfies in the corridor, Lucas “cannot stand” having his picture taken and jokes that his children (aged 11 and 22) “won’t remember I existed” as there will be “no proof” when he is gone.

Then he tells me about the FRA’s origins, which underlie its purpose as the UK’s only specialist fashion retail institute.

Retail giants Arcadia, Marks & Spencer, Experian, Tesco F&F and Next were “rivals beyond compare” who “would sooner kill each other than do anything together”, but such was their “frustration” with the calibre of graduates joining their industry that they united in 2005 under a “common cause”.

At first, the firms tried to work with the universities, offering to help write a programme of courses tailored to industry needs. None took up their offer, so they pooled £10 million to form the FRA. They started with 50 students on level 2 qualifications. Now, there are 3,500 students and apprentices, ranging from level 2 in fashion retail to a master’s in international fashion marketing.

“The litmus test” of success, both then and now, is how many go on to work in the industry, and Lucas is “really proud” that 94 per cent end up in “positive destinations”.

Lee Lucas CEO of the Fashion Retail Academy

Tracksuited apprentice

Lucas admits that his own academic record makes him a “very bad example” for his students. As a tracksuit-donning teenager growing up near Carshalton, South London, he quit his A-levels and a GNVQ in business because he found them “incredibly dull”.

Instead he did an IT apprenticeship with Kingston University. Apprenticeships then had a “real stigma” attached to them, with “this idea” that those on them “maybe weren’t very clever”. But he loved the hands-on nature of the work.

Lucas progressed quickly into an “exceptionally well-paid” IT manager role for a recruitment company but “hated” it. Three years later, aged 24 and feeling “disillusioned,” he quit to seek a new career path.

He realised the only part of the IT job he had liked was training apprentices. So he retrained in FE as an IT teacher and assessor at Richmond upon Thames College and ended up leading its community outreach programme.

Lucas admits “the work that FE does changes lives”, although the often-used statement is one that “needs to come with a sick bag”.

He adds: “When you find something like that that you can do for a living, it feels far less about doing a job and much more about just who you are.”

Beholding beauty

Lucas’s next move was to the London College of Beauty Therapy (as head of student services), which last year was bought by the FRA’s parent charity, Education for Industry (EFI) Group.

Both providers have a lot in common; Like the FRA, the London College of Beauty Therapy serves one sector so “everyone marches in the same direction”. Lucas believes having that shared purpose is “quite special”, and having the group run both providers gives students access to a broader industry network.

He spent the next seven years, before joining the FRA in 2014, leading the British Academy of Jewellery (then known as Holts Academy), another niche provider operating in the basement of a shop in London’s historic diamond district, Hatton Garden.

He worked with brands to write the first official qualifications in jewellery-making, and helped grow the academy to a multi-site campus with 800 students, which has since moved to Camden.

Lucas believes the key to success with such sector-specific providers lies in working with brands to “capture the sentiment of what their skills needs are”, but “making it as simple and light touch as possible”.

Lee Lucas shortly after joining the Fashion Retail Academy

FRA-bulous times

When he took over at the FRA, the high street was a “very different place”.

Retailers still boasted plenty of town centre stores and were opening outlets in retail parks across the country.

Now, much of retail has moved online, with all the logistical complexities that entails, plus there’s intense competition from the likes of Amazon and Temu.

Lucas is determined to be optimistic, although the brand leaders he works with are “always miserable – I don’t think they ever feel like times are great”, he says.

The FRA prioritises teaching the soft skills that will help students find work, whatever the future has in store.

In all, the FRA works with around 250 brands that help shape its curriculum and provide mentoring and work placements so students “learn about the realities” of life in retail.

This means students are often “not sitting in a classroom just hearing the same teacher who has spent the last 10 years regurgitating; they’re hearing from people doing that job today”.

The fashion retail sector is incredibly diverse, with “no barriers to head office roles based on gender, religion or sexual preference”. Reflecting this, many chief executives of the brands the FRA works with left school with no qualifications and worked their way up.

Lucas muses that “as in a lot of walks of life, there are a lot less big personalities left in retail than there used to be” – which in some cases, he concedes, is not such a bad thing.

The FRA does “first-come, first-served” enrolments; there are no interviews or personal statements (apart from for degrees, as it’s a UCAS requirement).

This means the FRA’s classes have a “wonderful mix” of people from different backgrounds, with no ability streaming of classes (“because that’s not how the workplace works”).

Lucas says: “We probably don’t blow our own trumpet about that enough. It’s one of the few industries that, if you roll up your sleeves and you get stuck in, you can make it far”.

The Fashion Retail Academy advert on London buses

Influencers wanted

Large, eye-catching ads for the FRA, saying ‘influencers wanted; specialist courses for fashion careers’ were recently emblazoned across London’s buses.

Although the FRA does not train young people to be influencers, “the focus of those campaigns is really trying to meet young people where they are”.

“If you’re great at spotting trends and being influential on social media, then you could retrain and get these amazing jobs in the marketing or PR office of brands, where those skills are really in demand,” Lucas tells me.

But the most in-demand skill in the fashion industry is not one on most young fashion connoisseurs’ radars; data analysis.

Although Lucas sees data as “the new asbestos from a GDPR perspective”, analysis skills are “the new gold” for which there is a “massive skills gap”. “It doesn’t matter what job you do, if you can’t interpret data, actually, you can’t do your job that well. And that’s a real challenge.”

Brands “struggle” with the fact that young people are more enamoured by the glamour of online influencing and catwalk shows than the prospect of number-crunching.

“Do you think a 16 to 18 year old wakes up in bed one morning and thinks, ‘I’m going to be a data analyst?’ No. So there’s a limit to what we can do.”

The academy’s most popular FE courses are in visual communications, styling and fashion design, while buying and merchandising and marketing and PR courses attract the most HE students.

Lee Lucas the Fashion Retail Academy

Self-funding research

The FRA funds independent research in partnership with a consultancy firm, assessing retail companies’ job forecasts and what emerging skills are required for different roles.

This helps the brands, which get a sense of what their competition is up to, as well as Lucas in his curriculum planning.

He’s found that retail roles are becoming “broader and more complicated”. “Rather than having a real depth in one specialism, you need a breadth of understanding of the end-to-end impact in retail”, he says. This is partly down to job cuts, with head office staff now spreading themselves across roles.

The research also throws up surprises with the jobs some brands now require, such as drone controllers – which isn’t yet taught at the FRA.

Lee Lucas the Fashion Retail Academy

Apprenticeships journey

Lucas says apprenticeships were “not on the radar” of the brands the FRA works with until the levy came into force and tells me it was an “interesting journey” for the FRA to develop “something meaningful”. This year it will have about 450 apprentices on its books.

At first, “some brands wanted huge volumes of apprenticeships”, which the academy tried to meet – then decided not to.

Lucas explains: “If you were a classic independent training provider, perhaps having 500 apprentices with just one brand is a good business to have.

“For us, it’s not particularly high quality, and there are not the jobs for apprentices to go onto at the end. We could have made more money that way, but it wasn’t in our core values.”

Then along came Covid, which the FRA “weathered well”. “But it was “a real challenge” for their industry. And the public appreciation of retail workers as “key workers” in lockdown did not last long, with “physical and verbal abuse becoming really prevalent”.

Lee Lucas the Fashion Retail Academy

Faster fashion

The FRA’s students learn all about the impact of customer abuse, as well as the rise in shoplifting, demand from consumers for super-fast deliveries and the increase in the rate of returns. They also learn about the complexities brands face in trying to ensure their products are ethically sourced.

One of the biggest challenges retailers face is how they will meet national insurance cost rises in April, which Lucas fears will “alter the mix of head office functions and have a seismic shift in the expectations of skill sets and roles”.

But there are also many exciting opportunities emerging for the sector, for example with experiential shopping, which Lucas believes makes it a “fantastic industry” to work in.

The “wonderful thing” about fashion retail is it “moves at breakneck speed” – more so, Lucas found, than the jewellery and beauty industries.

He says: “The brands’ need for innovation and new products, their need for winning, is really finely tuned.

“Nothing stays still. People in it have to love it because if they didn’t, they’d burn out.”

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