Mark Dale was enjoying a quiet smoke of his pipe in the woodlands surrounding Portland College Group’s Nottinghamshire campus, trying not to set anything on fire, when a vision formed in his head.
He imagined the college’s then mainly wheelchair-using learners having a “whale of a time” abseiling from a tower and racing along a treetop walkway.
That was in 2013. Seven years later, just as Covid lockdown measures came into force, the chief executive’s dream was realised when Portland’s Woodland Adventure Zone opened, complete with climbing tower, 90-metre zipline, adventure trail and archery zone.
It is Dale’s “pride and joy” – and symbolic of his “learning for skills and happiness” educational philosophy.
Portland College’s woodland setting
Epicurean college
Dale’s inspiration is the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus.
Happiness, he explains, does not mean “ice cream on a warm day, as lovely as that is”. It comes from five practices: nurturing relationships, keeping physically active – particularly in nature – helping others, continuing to learn and practising mindfulness.
Nowadays, the college mainly caters for learners with SEND and its more cognitively able learners practise meditation and fundraise for local causes.
But Dale is no misty-eyed idealist. He sees one of the principal jobs of a college leader much more prosaically: to “get money”.
“You can be full of passion and ideas, but if you haven’t actually got the resource to pay people, you’re barking into the wind.”
His happiness curriculum draws “hardly at all” on the teaching and learning theories he encountered during the 18 years he spent working in the University of Nottingham’s education department, before joining Portland as chief executive in 2006. Most of his learning, he says, has instead come from directly observing and participating in teaching.
Underlying it is his conviction that the culture of the mainstream education system itself is “wrong”, because “trying to force all children to be the same doesn’t work”.
He draws from personal experience. His two youngest children spent time out of school because they “couldn’t cope with the demands of mainstream” before moving to special schools. One son is now at Portland.
He is, by his own admission, “never short of a view”. Interviewing him, he jokes, will be “like the longest taxi ride you’ll ever have”. (Indeed, my visit to Portland does overrun by about two hours.)
He is also “far more radical” than the Portland charity itself and stresses that his views are his own.
Mark Dale outside one of the new residential buildings at Portland College
Student days
The youngest of three children, Dale grew up in Birmingham with a post office worker mother and telephone engineer father who were “focused on paying off the mortgage and mowing the lawn”.
Dale was bullied in three different schools for being “academically quite clever”. Teachers did “absolutely nothing” to stop it, and playtime was “torture”.
His striking height and stature made him “more than able” to defend himself, but he remembers well his peers who could not.
It would be easy to frame his life mission as being about helping the more vulnerable members of society. Dale sees it differently: his job is to help people help themselves by “arming them with knowledge, rather than with bats”.
An economic and social history degree at the University of Nottingham sparked his interest in adult education. He volunteered as an adult literacy tutor in a deprived part of the city and later taught at what is now Nottingham College but was then People’s College – a name whose ethos he “loved”.
Unsure what to do with his life amid soaring unemployment, he pursued a doctorate in urban planning. Studying institutional racism in Leicester’s planning system gave him a “crusading sense of wanting to tackle social injustice”.
He became a lecturer in adult education – the “youngest in the country for years on end because it was a dead profession” in universities. A restructure put him in charge of taught education studies, including teaching FE and adult education teachers. One was Portland’s then principal, Mike Syms, whom he took over from 20 years ago this month.
A celebration of Portland College’s history
Reinventing Portland
Portland was conceived in the mid-1930s as a support centre for injured miners on land donated by the Duke of Portland. After opening in 1950, it broadened its reach to war veterans and people with congenital disabilities.
When Dale joined, it had 125 learners. All but five were residential.
Portland was then the largest of nine adult residential providers in England, and Dale had inherited a declining Department for Work and Pensions programme for adults who had “fallen out of work”.
The programme was expensive – around £23,000 per job outcome – but it was “incredibly effective”. At its peak, 85 per cent moved into employment and more than 80 per cent remained in work for over six months.
When it was axed in 2015, Portland made a £500,000 trading loss.
Further DWP contracts followed, but Dale became increasingly frustrated with what he calls their “disastrous” payment-by-results approach. Portland’s wide footprint across the East of England made it challenging to meet the DWP’s stipulated parameters of success.
He remembers travelling to Sheffield on an “uncomfortable minibus” with a colleague with multiple physical disabilities, only to be put on the “naughty step” by six civil servants led by an “idiot with a toothbrush moustache”, who told them how “rubbish” their contract performance was.
Dale “breathed a sigh of relief” when the contract ended.
Another idea was emerging.
At least half of Portland’s DWP referrals had mental health difficulties. Dale became interested in the US-inspired ‘recovery college’ model, offering free courses to improve wellbeing as well as employability.
Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust was already running the model locally with general FE colleges, which Dale says withdrew one by one for cost reasons.
With £15,000-a-year backing from a local company, he established Portland Pathways and opened an office in Mansfield Citizens Advice Bureau to enrol jobseekers. Accessing public funding was less straightforward.
As a specialist college on the government’s approved ‘section 41’ register, Portland is in what Dale calls a “gilded cage” of restrictions on their remit, and the college can only access other funding streams through partnerships with other organisations. By the time he secured adult education funding, Portland was on its fourth such partnership.
Portland still operates the programme, now called Rebuild Your Mental Health and run independently of the healthcare trust.
It resembles the old DWP programmes, but with a “people first” rather than a “work first” approach. Nobody is “kicked off” a programme for failing to follow set rules or interrogated about how many jobs they have applied for.
And participants can benefit from counselling and psychotherapy from supervised master’s students at the University of Derby.
Demand is “skyrocketing”. The programme now supports around 120 people a year into employment, and is soon to be funded through the new East Midlands mayoral strategic authority.
Portland College’s cafeteria, which does around 300 covers each lunchtime
A college transformed
Portland’s main base is more than a college campus. It provides residential respite for families, rents out its hydro pool to Water Babies (infant swimming) classes and allows dog walkers to ramble across its picturesque woodland grounds.
Signs of Portland’s rapid expansion are everywhere. A front garden has become a car park; the former caretaker’s house is an independent-living training facility.
Dale can see therapy donkeys nibbling grass from his office windows.
“I live and breathe this place,” he says, offering me tea and biscuits as he proudly shows off a royal-themed mug a colleague gave him to celebrate his recent MBE.
Portland has substantially expanded its SEND cohort since the Children and Families Act came into force in 2014. Dale was at the time involved in DfE consultations about the changes, as vice-chair of specialist college body Natspec.
Despite commanding cross-party and cross-sector support, he recalls the reforms becoming “adversarial almost immediately”.
He partly blames funding. The £6,000 contribution providers make before local-authority high-needs top-up funding kicks in has remained unchanged for years, and Dale believes it should now be nearer £10,000.
The college now has 290 high-needs FE students, alongside another 30 learners at its independent special school and alternative provision in Mansfield and new complex-needs centres in Nottingham.
Although much of its accommodation has been converted into classrooms, around 30 adults on adult social care live in supported accommodation on campus.
Accommodation for adults on campus
‘Preloaded for a fight’
Being ‘outstanding’ means parental preference is a factor too, and the Ofsted rating has caused a rise in families of young people with fewer needs trying to secure a place at the college.
The tribulations of the SEND system mean the families of the young people the college serves are “used to fighting”, and often arrive “preloaded, ready for a fight”.
“You can see it in the body language,” Dale says.
Disabled people fare worse on health, wellbeing and employment measures, he adds, leaving the college with a “job to do” empowering those students who can help themselves.
Some colleagues, he believes, can display a “subconscious bias”: people with “very kind hearts” who are nevertheless “risk averse” and sometimes think more about learners’ limitations than their abilities.
The same suspicion of paternalism shapes his views on regulation.
Care Quality Commission policy, he says, weighs against supported living on Portland’s campus because it is not considered a community setting.
Yet some long-term care residents would “love” to move into supported living there and already consider the open campus, close to Mansfield and a GP surgery, their community.
“The regulator decides rather than the people. To me, that’s wrong.”
But Dale has a “very productive” relationship with Nottinghamshire Council, which he says acts quickly to resolve disputes with families. He is “surprised” to have been involved in only two tribunal hearings during his time at Portland.
Dale sees “parties of all political hues really trying their best to make it work” locally. Councillors responsible for SEND often have family experience of the system and “skin in the game”, as he does, which “helps with the discussions”.
But he also sees council officers with “lots of positive intent” being “overwhelmed” by demand.
He compares the SEND system to a video game in which players desperately scramble up a ladder to escape a room filling with water – except the water is rising faster than they can climb.
Mark Dale and Portland College curriculum manager David Winter
Rigid templates
Dale supports the principle behind the government’s reforms of making mainstream schools more inclusive.
However, he believes they are “destined to fail”.
The national curriculum, Ofsted’s influence on school improvement and academisation have, he argues, created a rigid template of what education should look like which some children “don’t always fit”.
He also attacks “the government obsession with attendance, and multi-academy trusts’ obsessions with uniform”, pointing to a local school that sent children home during this summer’s heatwave for wearing shorts.
“Whilst ever you have schools displaying almost barbarous inhumanity – isolation rooms, teachers who think it’s acceptable to measure the length of a girl’s skirt, or a boy’s skirt for that matter – even if you have the best skills in the world to understand neurodiversity, if you are working in a template around control and conformity, people are going to keep butting heads.
“Because with neurodivergent profiles, even if they wanted to conform, there’s wiring in them that means they can’t do it all the time.”
Dale also sees parts of the government’s education agenda as an “erosion of parental rights” and “regulation gone bonkers”, particularly increased local-authority oversight of home-educated children.
He experienced social workers visiting his own home to check on his children’s welfare when they were being home-schooled, which he “tried not to take personally”.
But he does not reject the logic of the government’s reform agenda entirely. Funding SEND more generously upfront through education providers is a “potentially sound” idea.
His concern is that young people with “complex presentations” requiring several forms of support could instead be “funnelled down a particular channel” when they need a blended approach.
Dale is “absolutely sure” the reforms will mean fewer EHCPs and, consequently, lower demand for Portland, and admits that worries him.
And health services, he believes, will have to do much more.
Dale recalls an impact report prepared for the local SEND board by an officer from Nottinghamshire’s integrated care board.
It was, he says with a tone of exasperation, merely a list of meetings they had attended.
For a man redesigning a college around the pursuit of happiness, that is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of what he has spent his career railing against: institutions mistaking process for progress.