From clawbacks to giving back: David Withey, SGS College

David Withey is a rare example of a senior government official crossing the floor to run a further education college.

He negotiated peace treaties with prime ministers, oversaw funding to local and devolved national governments for the Treasury, led a Covid taskforce in Australia and then sat atop the UK’s education system as chief executive of the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA).

Then when the ESFA disbanded last year he switched direction and became CEO of South Gloucestershire and Stroud (SGS) College, because he believes FE is “the most dynamic, exciting, scalable sector”.

He greets me with a warm smile but appears, alarmingly, to have been punched in the face.

No doubt Withey made enemies due to the unpopular funding clawbacks the ESFA dished out during his three years at the helm. However, he says his black eye was not from a disgruntled accounting officer, but from dropping his mobile phone on his face while checking the time in bed.

His communications team are scrambling to find a make-up artist to conceal the bruise and make Withey look presentable when launching his college’s five-year strategy later in the day.

As a former Treasury deputy director, I expect Withey to exude the aura of a penny-pinching bureaucrat who is obsessed with data. But he is much more interested in discussing people and ideas than numbers and budgets.

“This stuff” (being interviewed) makes him “slightly uncomfortable”, but he comes across as effortlessly personable, nonetheless.

Withey grew up in a Dorset commuter village with lofty dreams of becoming a sports centre manager (his mum was a sports centre receptionist). So it seems fitting that he now leads “one of the country’s best sporting colleges”.

SGS has six campuses, and we meet at SGS Wise, which specialises in sport and arts.

When he started, Withey relinquished the office allocated to him on campus so he could spend as much time as possible “experiencing what it’s like to be here”.

Advice for Blair

Withey’s career trajectory started with rocket boosters attached, as his first job after studying history at the University of Nottingham saw the fresh-faced youngster “in the room, giving advice to prime ministers”.

Withey had followed a cousin into the civil service fast stream and been posted to Belfast to work on constitutional policy.

Following the 2006 St Andrews agreement (which restored power-sharing in Northern Ireland after years of political deadlock), Tony Blair wrote him a thank-you letter that Withey still cherishes.

He later became head of constitutional policy “a brilliant training ground” for communicating policy ideas, and was up until almost sunrise knocking heads during the 2010 Hillsborough Castle Agreement to get devolution back up and running in Northern Ireland.

In 2011, he had to have his “arm twisted” when he was asked to join the Treasury because of its reputation within the civil service for “very ambitious young people stabbing each other to get ahead”.

Although there was a “very strong contingent” of public school-educated Oxbridge graduates, he “never felt in any way disadvantaged” by his state school background.

A place in the sun

He led the Treasury’s local government spending team at a time when austerity loomed over budgets.

One dreary October morning at 1 Horse Guards Road, an email caught Withey’s eye asking if anyone wanted a secondment to Sydney to run the spending team for the New South Wales (NSW) government justice department.

He envisioned a relaxed life down under where civil servants clocked off at 4pm to head for the beach. But the reality was his working day was much the same as it had been in London, although he and his family appreciated the sunshine.

The plan was to stay for a year. The family ended up staying for seven more.

Withey ran NSW’s Covid economic taskforce at the start of the pandemic, which he laments as “six months of my life I’ll never get back”. He then had his first foray into education as chief operating officer for NSW’s Department for Education.

Withey appreciated being “closer to the frontline” in working for a state rather than a national government; At Whitehall, he had felt at times “a lack of proximity to the real world”.

But power was “quite centralised” at state level, making him an “even bigger fan” of more place-based devolution for England.

During the pandemic, Withey’s mum developed a brain tumour, and global travel restrictions made it hard for him to visit. So the Withey family decided to return home, with their kids (now aged 14, 11 and eight) by then “sounding like Crocodile Dundee”.

The family established themselves near the site of Glastonbury Festival, and I am aghast to hear that although he gets free tickets (for living so close), he has never been. “I’m quite happy sitting in my chair at home listening to the sound of music drifting our way”, he says.

Not so wild

When Withey arrived in his next role to run the ESFA in 2022, he was “pleasantly surprised” to find that his perceptions of “appalling behaviour” during the education sector’s “Wild West” days were over.

The agency was facing upheaval as it had been stripped of its policy role and its staff count was subsequently halved. But Withey believes that during his time at the helm, the ESFA did “lots to make sure we were positioning ourselves in central government conversation in a way that enabled us to be the voice of the sector”.

Now that many of his former colleagues have been moved across to the Department for Education, Withey believes the DfE “has got better at thinking about that delivery piece”.

“There are some really good people around now who take delivery really seriously,” he says. “I’m not sure that was always the case.”

Prickly clawbacks

ESFA clawbacks were the thorn in the side of many FE finance teams, but Withey is quick to defend them and is proud of having taken his responsibilities as the accounting officer for £80 billion of public money “very seriously”.

“If people were misusing money there had to be consequences… I’d have got a kick in by Parliament if that hadn’t been done.”

Where a clawback related to activity that had taken place several years earlier, Withey was “really clear” that the process and timeframes had to be managed “in a really supportive way that didn’t totally break the organisations we were talking to”.

He believes that “more often than not” the agency “got the balance right”.

The ESFA was also the funding arm for multi-academy trusts, and Withey worked closer with ministers on the school side, particularly Baroness Barran, than with then-skills minister Robert Halfon.

His biggest regret is not having done more to build “cyclical certainty” into funding allocations.

The FE sector is “still having to be too responsive to late funding allocations”, which is “unhelpful for big organisations trying to plan and manage fairly tight margins,” he says.

Withey wishes he had done more to get “the whole of the government machine” to understand this, but the DfE is “at the mercy of Treasury” which is “at the mercy of ministerial decision making”.

“Too often we’re at the back end, then having to scramble to make decisions,” he says.

Enjoying life

His visits “out in the sector, looking at how the money was being spent” were the element of his job he enjoyed most, but he also “fell into the trap” of believing the FE sector was “more homogenous than it actually is”.

He tells me his “mind has been blown” since arriving at SGS by the “variety of provision and innovation happening at college level”.

Withey arrived with the notion that a fierce sense of competition between education providers could be problematic, and spent his first months in office “trying to get rid of all the sharp-elbowed nonsense” by working in partnership with local colleges and universities.

The City of Bristol College has campuses nearby, which Withey says is “fine” because “in this new world we’re all best mates”.

“The funding system drives some of the natural focus on numbers, but at least until 2030-odd there’s enough [money] to go around to mean that we don’t really need to worry too much, right?”

SGS will be riding the wave of the teenage population surge for the next four years, and after that, “massive housebuilding on our doorstep” in the form of one of the government’s biggest new-town developments of up to 30,000 homes is likely to keep demand high.

Withey suggests one solution to the capacity squeeze on colleges could be expanding timetables rather than teaching space.

He recalls how, when he worked for the education department in New South Wales, plans were put in motion to change school timetables so one pupil cohort started early, and another finished late, meaning buildings could be used for more students each day.

Although the idea ultimately proved too difficult to deliver because of “massive workforce challenges”, Withey believes colleges “need to think a bit more creatively about how we use our space” – either because of financial constraints or population demand increases.

He is in discussion with local partners in the public and third sectors, about allowing them to make use of the college’s “amazing facilities that sit unused for 18 weeks a year”.

SGS has done “lots of work around bringing learner voice into the decision-making process”, with new learner leadership team members each paid a small amount for their role.

SGS has “undoubtedly” seen a spike in young people with mental health concerns, which Withey partly blames on the “constant connectivity” of social media “rewiring people”.

Vaping is another topic of “big debate” at SGS because of the challenges involved in implementing the college’s vaping ban. Instead, Withey is considering allowing vaping in some outside areas.

“I don’t have any interest in setting all of my teachers up to fail in terms of implementing a policy that frankly is not implementable,” he says.

Sporting chances

Withey takes me for a tour of his vast campus, with its two football pitches, 12 five-a-side pitches, a rugby pitch where England’s Red Roses women’s rugby union team trained during last year’s World Cup, an Olympic-size athletics track, an indoor astroturf stadium and sports hall, and the only dedicated fourth-generation American football pitch in Europe.

Withey knows SGS is fortunate to boast such impressive facilities, and acknowledges it would probably be impossible for an FE college to take on such spacious grounds today.

He is “totally committed” to the college’s academy programme, which gives those with a passion for sport the benefits of “elite coaching” without taking a course in a sport-related subject.

Its former students include Manchester City player Antoine Semenyo, but the college is “not trying to sell a false dream”. “We’re saying to our learners, ‘Come to us, do the sport you love, but you’ll also get proper pathways to future careers’,” Withey says.

Our next stop on the tour is the campus gym, to meet men who were previously in prison or receiving treatment for addiction, and are now retraining as fitness instructors and personal trainers.

By the end of this year, this programme, which launched five years ago, will have supported 55 people, including 44 directly from prison. Only one has since returned to jail. This is an impressive result, given that nationally, 29 per cent of people leaving prison are proven to have reoffended within a year.

He modestly admits to being “not the most emotional man in the world”. But the annual awards celebrating these learners’ achievements proved to be a real tearjerker moment for him.

“This is exactly what FE is about – addressing some of the barriers to learning for some of these guys who otherwise would be at risk.”

His words reflect the reasons why he made the move into the FE sector in the first place.

“I care a lot about equality of opportunity,” he says. “I went to a comprehensive school and got lucky. I want everybody to be able to access that quality of teaching and learning that we seek to deliver here.”