Rebecca Gater was already preparing for two of the biggest tests of her professional life when the phone rang.
It was 2022, and Solihull College & University Centre’s vice principal for curriculum and quality had a gruelling two-day interview approaching for the top job. She was also preparing to defend years of doctoral research in her viva examination.
Then came the call from Ofsted. The college was about to undergo its first inspection since merging with Stratford-upon-Avon College four years earlier. Gater was its nominee.
“I had the worst, most stressful two weeks ever,” she recalls. “It was super high pressure.”
Yet she emerged from these three formidable challenges with a clean sweep: the college was rated ‘good’, she passed her doctorate and secured the principal and chief executive position.
A new book that Gater has edited, Inspiring Senior Leadership in Further Education: Stories from the front line, brings together similar personal accounts of how 17 college leaders have overcome adversity to thrive in the top jobs.
The book grew from her frustration that so much leadership literature focused on schools and universities, while few explored the people running colleges.
She also wanted to challenge the perception that there is a particular type of person destined for FE senior leadership.
Former Cornwall College principal John Evans traces his emphasis on customer service to growing up in his family’s corner shop.
Capel Manor College deputy principal Heather Marks previously ran a flower shop, while London South East Colleges principal Asfa Sohail moved from Pakistan to join her husband and entered FE after a lecturer asked her to cover an IT class.
Runshaw College principal Clare Russell writes about being a rebellious teenager who married at 17 and was abandoned by her husband three years later while eight-and-a-half months pregnant – giving her “the empathy required to see the real barriers some students face”.
Gater sees common threads running through these apparently disparate lives.
Most leaders came from working-class backgrounds. Few followed a straightforward career trajectory. None imagined themselves becoming college principals when they were young.
Now leading a three-campus college group, Gater has come a long way from when she was a “directionless” young mother teaching for three hours a week.
Gater and her husband with their eldest daughter, Emily, when she was two years old, 25 years ago
Directionless beginnings
Gater is a Midlander through and through. Her Black Country accent gives away her roots in Stourbridge, where she was born, raised and still lives.
Her journey into education began in a crystal glass showroom, where she worked full-time in retail management while attending evening lectures at the University of Wolverhampton.
She was studying human resource management with Spanish, juggling the demands of work and university while saving to build a future with her boyfriend, now her husband.
A month after graduating, aged 22, she gave birth to the first of their four daughters.
The couple were still living with their parents, “saving every penny to start our new life together”.
But Gater felt “directionless, with a young baby and no clear path forward”.
Then Stourbridge College offered her three hours a week teaching business to sports students.
She was hooked. What appealed was the diversity of FE, its sense of purpose and, above all, its capacity to give people another chance.
Her teaching expanded to include evening language classes for adults. Meanwhile, four daughters arrived within six years.
She felt “always in a rush” to get things done, rushing out of the house as her husband returned from work at 5pm. They shared a car, so if he was late, she was late to teach.
“It was challenging, but it’s made me as a person. It’s made us as a family as well, because we’ve done all that growing together,” she says.
Now a grandmother of two, she attended two daughters’ university graduations the day before our interview. Her other daughters also work in education. She is proud of the example she has set.
“It’s important to me as the mum of girls, that they know if they want to do something, they can do it.”
Gater and her husband (Darren) with their two middle daughters, Liv (left) and Anya (right), at their graduation this summer
The pull of FE
Gater then joined a graduate programme to teach in secondary schools, spending two years at a West Bromwich school in special measures.
She was one of 26 new teachers recruited together and progressed to become a head of year, alongside responsibilities including key stage three IT.
The experience offered a sharp contrast with college teaching. Where FE teacher training had to accommodate subjects ranging from engineering to adult languages, she found the school system much more prescriptive.
“There’s a formula in schools that everyone does the same kind of thing, regardless of the subject or type of school,” she says.
She missed the variety of FE and upon becoming pregnant with her fourth child, the daily demands of getting three other children ready each morning became overwhelming.
Part-time working “wasn’t part of the school’s ethos”, whereas she saw FE as more flexible and family-friendly.
She returned to Stourbridge College as a programme manager in business just as its business and IT departments were merging, and took a sideways move into student services.
Her involvement in student disciplinary cases exposed the difficulties learners were navigating outside college.
“It helped me to understand the workings of the wider college much more so than I’d ever done before.”
She then moved to South Staffordshire College as an assistant head of faculty and, through successive restructures, progressed to managing its Cannock campus and a faculty.
She later joined Solihull as vice principal for curriculum and quality, while also becoming an Ofsted inspector.
That combination has given her a perspective on leadership extending well beyond her own institution.
A photo that is particularly special to Gater, taken during Covid period when restrictions had eased enough for people to socialise in their gardens. Her sister, husband and their two children came to the Gater house for a barbecue, and it felt incredibly significant, having not seen family face-to-face for many months. Looking at the photograph reminds Gater not to take precious family moments for granted
The inspector
Gater’s first assignment as a fully-fledged inspector was a difficult one: inspecting a large London college that was downgraded from ‘good’ to ‘requires improvement’.
She was relieved not to know anybody there, making it easier to remain objective.
Inspecting other colleges has since become an important source of professional development.
She can see how other leaders tackle problems and bring ideas back to Solihull.
But knowing exactly how the inspection process works does not make her any less nervous when inspectors arrive at her own college.
“There’s so much to lose, isn’t there? It feels like such high stakes,” she says.
Despite Ofsted’s insistence that its new inspection framework represents a significant change, Gater sees more continuity than disruption.
She acknowledges “a bit of a fear” across the sector about inclusion becoming a standalone judgment. But inclusion, she argues, has always been central to colleges’ work.
“Our philosophy is that there is a place here for everyone. We don’t turn those students away.”
Gater with her four daughters at a baby shower earlier this month. (Left to right Neve, Emily, Liv, Anya)
Stepping into the unknown
Gater had been Solihull’s vice principal for just two years when principal and chief executive John Callaghan died suddenly in October 2021.
Only weeks earlier, he had offered to mentor Gater with a view to her succeeding him when he eventually retired.
His illness progressed so rapidly that the mentoring never happened.
The loss was deeply felt at Solihull. Gater describes a period of “institutional bereavement”, accompanied by “feelings of a lack of stability”.
She applied to become permanent principal “not because I had all the answers, but because I believed in the college and the people within it”.
I put it to her that the personal qualities celebrated in her book seem a long way from the leaders who once appeared more interested in building empires than nurturing institutions.
“People came from being principals to CEOs, and it was that CEO badge that led to some of those behaviours,” she says.
She believes that culture is changing.
“This generation of leaders have a recognition that to be the best leader you can be, you need to be authentic, relatable and build that trust, and not focus on your own gains.”
But does that authenticity extend beyond the college gates?
Many principals are candid in private about government policy and the difficulties facing their institutions, yet reluctant to speak publicly.
Gater acknowledges that tension.
FE leaders are “very aware of our role in protecting the reputations of our organisations and the sector itself”.
Her own greatest challenge is balancing the two sides of her job.
Being principal means looking after students and staff, an approach she describes as “servant leadership”.
Being chief executive involves politics, positioning the college, building its reputation and anticipating what comes next.
“I’m constantly reflecting on, ‘am I focusing on the internal workings too much at the detriment of the external big position?’.”
Leadership development programmes have helped her find that balance.
She is currently one of 28 participants in the Cabinet Office’s public leaders programme, which brings together senior figures from education, local government, the NHS and emergency services.
It has challenged her to look beyond the traditional boundaries of FE.
“We’re breaking down barriers because we’ve all got the same struggles but we don’t necessarily think about going outside our own sector to be part of wider solutions,” Gater says.
That thinking is particularly relevant to SEND reform.
Solihull has around 500 students with education, health and care plans, issued by 17 different local authorities.
Each has its own procedures and approaches, creating considerable administrative complexity. Gater hopes reform will bring greater consistency.
But she is also thinking about how colleges can collaborate more closely with councils and NHS trusts, rather than simply discussing SEND challenges among themselves.
Two regions, two systems
Solihull College’s geography presents another leadership challenge.
Its Blossomfield and Woodlands campuses sit within the West Midlands Combined Authority, while its Stratford-upon-Avon campus falls within Warwickshire.
Gater must navigate two very different systems of skills devolution. The West Midlands has years of experience exercising devolved powers, while the Reform-led Warwickshire County Council only assumed responsibility for adult skills commissioning this summer.
“We’re helping them on their journey to work out what that looks like and how they should set things up,” Gater says.
Employers in the region had complained they were receiving too many approaches from different education providers, leaving them unsure whom to contact.
Gater helped establish Skills West Midlands and Warwickshire as a collective intended to simplify those relationships and translate regional skills priorities into delivery.
Rebecca Gater in 2022
Combination complications
The introduction of V Levels is already creating practical dilemmas. Gater wants the college to offer them, but their intended combination with other qualifications creates complications.
Solihull currently offers a limited number of A Levels at Blossomfield. To make V Level programmes viable, it may have to introduce A Levels at its other campuses. That would represent a significant departure for two relatively specialist sites.
Woodlands, in north Solihull, concentrates heavily on STEM subjects, and Stratford-upon-Avon has traditionally specialised in creative arts and is increasingly expanding its construction provision.
Meanwhile, the college’s experience of T Levels has been mixed.
Digital, engineering and animal care courses are performing strongly, but health and science remain a “real challenge”.
Gater believes damaging publicity surrounding the early problems with health and science T Levels, including an examination fiasco that led to results being recalculated, has “put parents and students off”.
Industrial placements create another difficulty.
Many Solihull students work part-time to support themselves, and sometimes their families. Finding time for a substantial unpaid placement can be extremely challenging.
There are pressures on the staffing side too, with board minutes last year highlighting a “high number of agency staff”.
Demand for construction courses “continues to go through the roof”, but recruiting lecturers with the necessary trade expertise is difficult. When it comes to construction subjects, Gater says “we don’t have the people to teach the growing number of students, and that’s really difficult. We’re competing with industry who can pay a lot more.”
The college’s 16-18 learner numbers rose by 8 per cent in 2023-24 and 4 per cent in 2024-25, prompting temporary classrooms and plans for additional sites.
Gater says Solihull can afford generous teacher salaries compared with its West Midlands counterparts by keeping staffing structures lean elsewhere and benefiting from economies of scale.
Above all, Gater wants staff to “feel valued, connected and know their contribution matters”.
Her book ends with a prediction: that the next generation of senior FE leaders will “not be forged by perfection but by persistence, not by pedigree but by practice”.
“Your difference is not a deficit; it is your advantage. Use it to inspire, to transform and to serve.”