Carrying burdens that would crush most mortals, CEO Karen Redhead tells Jessica Hill about debt, leaks and freeing West London College from intervention
Karen Redhead compares her job as CEO and principal of West London College to that of King Sisyphus from Greek mythology, who the gods forced to roll a large boulder up a hill for eternity.
Her metaphorical boulder is made heavier by the challenges of managing a “crippling” loan, a crumbling building and, until 2023, operating under the intense scrutiny of the intervention regime.
It is a job “absolutely not for the faint-hearted”. Her college has come a “huge distance” since she started there in 2018; it was rated ‘good’ by Ofsted in May, and has had a ‘good’ financial health grading for the last four years.
But there is still a huge burden she must carry.
Last big challenge
Redhead was no stranger to tough FE gigs before taking on West London. After stints at Newcastle College, the Learning Skills Council and Stockton Riverside College, she joined South Tyneside College as vice principal in 2006 when it was in “absolute turmoil”. Ofsted had rated the college ‘inadequate’, and she says around £9 million claimed fraudulently by a former staff member was “all being taken back in one go”.
After eight years as principal at Derwentside from 2010 to 2018, Redhead, then aged 57, felt she had “one last big challenge” left in her.
She was under no illusion about how bad West London College’s financial situation was. After her interview with the board, she was “very surprised” to be offered the job, having been “very blunt” about their need for “really tough housekeeping”.
Danger money
She considered the £200,000 salary they offered to be “danger money” for the “career risk” she was taking.
When asked what sort of bonus she wanted, she replied she did not believe in bonuses and said she never wished to be considered for a pay rise.
“I’ve stuck to that,” she says. “I had this feeling that as I was resolving the issues… the risk would reduce, so it was only fair to see the salary flatline over time.”
Just before she was set to start in September 2018,her predecessor, interim Graham Morley, had worked out she would only have enough money left in the bank to pay staff wages for five weeks.
From her boardroom at Derwentside, the pair rang the FE Commissioner together to “press the button” on intervention so Redhead, upon starting, could access an emergency loan from the Education and Skills Funding Agency of £11.6 million (increased to £13.65 million in 2022). She believes it is one of the biggest loans the government has ever made to a college.
West London’s board had approved a budget with a £4 million growth target, at a time when Redhead says the FE Commissioner’s advice was not to approve budgets with 16-18 growth projections. She told them to “start again” with a budget assuming no growth.
As well as the financial black hole the college was in, there was an emotional black hole created three months later by the tragic news of the suicide of its former principal from 2014-2018, Garry Phillips.
Redhead pays “tribute to the significant efforts that were made for over a decade before I arrived, to try to stabilise the college”.
“But unfortunately, the issues the college was facing were significant – this was a long running, intractable problem.”
Although she has tried over the years to “second-guess why certain things happened,” Redhead has “never, ever judged” Phillips. The college’s challenges were “never down to one person”, she says.
A fighter when needs be
It’s hard not to like Redhead, whose proud working-class Geordie roots give her a disarming honesty and warmth, but also a boldness in challenging the establishment (“I’m a fighter when I need to be”).
Starting out with no senior team, Redhead had to “battle” intervention agencies from the outset, feeling “under pressure very early on” to “shrink the college into recovery” and submit a mass redundancy plan. Instead, she vowed to do “everything” she could to “avoid redundancy” and “build the college back up”.
She was moulded by her “very intelligent” father, who, having been compelled by his mother to work down the pits where he lacked “intellectual challenge”, became a union shop steward who “caused mayhem”. He had Redhead selling Socialist Worker magazines on street corners at the age of 12.
She recalls how on his death bed 12 years ago, with his mind “back in the 1970s” he was still muttering about “those managers”.
Redhead told him: “Dad, I’ve got some bad news for you – I am one.”
Made to feel ‘worthless’
West London College had been under a notice to improve for five years before she started, yet Redhead sometimes felt the Department for Education treated her like she “caused the problems” when she was “just trying to solve them”, and was repeatedly asked to submit documents they knew she did not have.
Redhead describes one of her contacts at the DfE as being “the opposite of the man from Del Monte”, as the answer to her requests was “always no”.
“There were lots of instances where the DfE could have helped and didn’t,” she says.
West London had to undergo an independent business review which Redhead says she and then-FE commissioner Richard Atkins “both felt wasn’t needed” because “what we had to do here was pretty clear” in terms of getting “control over the staffing”.
Such reviews were “pinched from the commercial world”, and “normally done when a lender considers an organisation to be a risky prospect”.
They typically take two months. West London’s took two years and “sucked the living daylights” out of Redhead’s finance team in a “constant barrage of requests for stuff that they’d already had”.
The college had already spent its emergency funding, and was not seeking to borrow more money, so she questioned the point of it.
She knows she is not the only principal of a college under intervention to feel under such relentless scrutiny.
“Below the radar” she has been voluntarily mentoring other principals facing or undergoing intervention, so they can “benefit from the experiences I went through”.
During an informal “insolvency and intervention group” that Redhead formed, six to eight principals “check for consistency of treatment” during their monthly conference calls, amid a “lack of guidance and framework” around the intervention process.
“We used to laugh at the title… like, you’d really want to be part of that group!
“But it’s very sad, those principals are being made to feel worthless. They feel tactics are coming out that they feel very undermined and intimidated by”.
Redhead sees this as an injustice, as “more often than not, if the leader of the organisation that has gone pear-shaped were part of the problem, they would have [already] gone very quickly. If they’re still there, they’re generally not part of the problem.”
It is therefore “counterproductive” for the FE Commissioner to “give them a hard time”. “Why not have them feel valued instead?”
Redhead questions why the FE Commissioner cannot use a “coaching approach” towards principals.
“You can still have the heat there, but not throw them in the flames,” she says.
Early on in her time at West London, Redhead spent two years on Atkins’ national team – despite her own college being in intervention – but she believes that in more recent years the FE Commissioner has been less willing to consult with principals at the receiving end of intervention.
She hopes to see the FE Commissioner’s office take a more conciliatory approach under its new leader. Ellen Thinnesen is someone who Redhead has “always admired”.
“I’ve always wished I could have a modicum of Ellen’s people skills.”
Intervention oubliette
As time went on, Redhead found the FE Commissioner’s recommendations on their twice-yearly visits to her college to be “pure distraction”.
Just before an FE Commissioner’s visit in 2023, Redhead’s relationship of over 30 years ended. She considers herself “one of the toughest people I know”. But during the visit, she did something that “nobody who knows me would have believed”; she started crying.
She says she explained her personal circumstances to the FE Commissioner’s team. But in online feedback to the visit, they referred to her “unstable leadership”. Redhead “fundamentally disagreed” with the ensuing report, which she claimed “twisted everything” and “would have been risible if it hadn’t been so tragic”.
There are “parallels”, she believes, in how the FE Commissioner directs criticism at leaders with the way that Ofsted treated Ruth Perry, the headteacher who took her own life.
Redhead subsequently requested a formal assessment from the DfE’s regional team, which concluded that her college had done everything it had been tasked with doing. The college was subsequently removed from intervention – something that Redhead felt should have happened years earlier.
She compares intervention to an “oubliette”; a pit with no doors, in which “you fall into, and it’s bloody difficult to get out of”.
To relieve her stresses, Redhead has always sung – she recalls her son as a child “begging me to stop singing”. These days she sings regularly in the Royal Albert Hall as a “very proud” member of the Royal Choral Society, which is “an absolute tonic”.
The money pit
She gets a lot of job satisfaction knowing that “we definitely support the learners that need the most help”.
“A lot” of West London’s learners receive language support “even if it’s not funded”, as many are unaccompanied migrants in the care of social services or others entering from “outside the school system”.
Redhead’s office is based in Hammersmith and Fulham College, the largest of West London’s three campuses. Its dilapidated building is a “money pit” that has been too big for the number of students ever since it opened in 1980, and it is “way too big now”. This means too much money is wasted on cleaning, securing and heating the immense building.
The campus’s three boilers, all broken during my visit, are “well beyond their shelf life”. The system has no thermostat, and the fact that its metal pipework is encased in concrete means holes must be dug to find leaks.
Buckets are placed in classrooms to catch the water that regularly trickles through the building’s flat roof. “We’ve chucked so much money at trying to find out exactly where the water’s coming through, and none of it’s worked,” says Redhead.
The college has tried without success to bid for various capital funding and sustainability grants, which she describes as “drastically oversubscribed”.
Meanwhile, a previous condition survey “led the DfE to believe that this place was in much better shape than it actually is”.
Condition funding rules prevent colleges from spending their condition grants from the DfE on big capital schemes, but Redhead laments that it would be “much better for the public purse to invest in something that’s going to resolve a problem, rather than putting sticking plasters over it”.
The college is short of £20 million for the capital works needed.
But “really good conversations” are taking place with Hammersmith and Fulham Council over possible future capital investment.
Redhead doubts she will be “cutting any ribbons” herself on a new campus build – she expects to have retired before a “spade hits the ground”. But she hopes to get the project “well underway” for a future principal to finish.
Loan troubles
Another looming finance issue is the contractual transfer of the college’s ESFA loan into a commercial loan with around £7 million outstanding in 2030. Since the loan’s terms were agreed, colleges have returned to the public sector and are now prevented from taking on commercial loans, which Redhead has pointed out means the “facility agreement [will be] null and void”.
The college has twice already had to pay legal fees for loan contract changes, and she is reluctant to pay a third time.
But despite West London’s myriad of challenges, Redhead says “never in a million years” does she regret taking it on. “This college is the absolute love of my life,” she says. “I’ve loved the challenge.”
Before I go, I suggest her dad would have been proud of all she has achieved.
“Well, I hope so,” she says. “I sometimes feel like me dad is sitting on me shoulder, reminding me what I should be doing for the staff”.
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