Becoming a college governor is an intimidating prospect, writes Mark Trinick. Recognising that is the first step to recruiting your college community’s brightest and most committed

Community governors bring real value to a college’s decision making. This much is clear to me now, but I faced some barriers to becoming one, and I’m not uninformed about the sector. I have been a Group Board Governor at London South East Education Colleges for just over a year, but when I was first approached, though humbled, my initial reaction was to decline. If principals and their executive teams are serious about recruiting the untapped talent in their communities, they need to be aware of what keeps it away.

What’s obvious to insiders isn’t always obvious to outsiders. You might know that any and all experience is relevant, from running your own business to helping with a local charity or club, or simply being an interested neighbour, but your interested neighbour may not.

And while we know that a governing body is there to challenge and provide a fresh perspective, for many the idea of challenging an executive board can be intimidating. This is especially true of a sector reputed for its use of jargon.

Lastly, skilled and critical people are in high demand. Nobody wants to take up a position to make a bad job of it or to pull back again because they can’t sustain doing it, and being a governor is very obviously a commitment.

The truth is that a board of governors is broadly equivalent to a board of directors or trustees in commercial or charitable organisations – an important role that provides the checks and balances to ensure good governance of the institution, including spending of public funds. To many, that’s an unimaginable proposition.

People like this aren’t born; they are made

Yet we need ‘critical friends’ to push us forward and keep us grounded. To draw them in, we need to recognise these challenges and be the ones to tackle them. Fundamentally, they boil down to three questions: What could I possibly bring? What do I know about running a college? Will I have time?

To recruit the greatest range of voices then, executive teams should ensure they explicitly state they welcome applications from anyone with an interest, they should do it in the clearest and most open terms possible, and they should offer training upfront. In fact, is your college ‘recruiting a governor’, or is it really offering an excellent training opportunity to a lucky member of its community?

Time commitment may actually be the biggest barrier, and there is really little excuse not to set that out very clearly from the outset. And while every college hopes for a public-spirited volunteer who will give the role more than what is expected as a strict minimum, the truth is that people like this aren’t born; they are made.

From my initial appointment, I have in the space of a year come to sit on two sub-committees. If I’d been asked to do that from the outset, my mind would probably have been made up to decline the role. But I have grown quickly into it as I have received training and, importantly, started to feel part of a team. Other Governors and our clerk to the board were fantastic at helping me to settle in too. Let them be all the advertising you need for the position you need to fill.

And it’s not all about public-spiritedness. With my employer hat on, the role is an unparalleled opportunity to help steer the education of my future workforce, and to understand what influences them. Employers are often quoted pointing out perceived failings of education and you’re giving them the opportunity to do something about it. So don’t be shy about telling potential recruits what they stand to gain.

Education, and especially further education, inspires passion in good people who are willing to devote every waking moment to. But it can’t afford to stop at the college gate. Those who eat, sleep and breathe it need independent governors to remind them about the world they are preparing their students for, and recruiting them is a serious business.

As the role of college governor grows, the need for more support grows too. Help is already at hand, explains Mark Wright

The role of the governor has become hugely more challenging in the past few years. Colleges are growing in size and complexity, and financial pressures mean there is an increasing need for forensic scrutiny of leadership decisions. Effective governance is crucial to the success and sustainability of colleges, but is the sector at risk of asking too much of what remains by and large a voluntary role?

As the Government sets out what new funding is to be made available, including for capital investment, governors will be required to ensure the appropriate investment of public funds. Given these responsibilities, as well as a time commitment that increasingly resembles that of a part-time job, some may say this gives credence to the argument that governors should be remunerated for their efforts.

In fact, some chairs are already being paid. But while broadening this could help with recruiting and retaining governors, there is also a need to consider professionalising the role more broadly.

An essential part of that effort is to offer development opportunities, tailored to the demands of the job, that enable governors to successfully steer their colleges. The Education and Training Foundation (ETF) has been working with the sector to provide this support with a series of DfE-funded initiatives that form part of a drive to create a sector culture in which governor development is the norm.

In the Spring, we will be launching the Governor Development Programme following an extensive development stage during which many governors and clerks will have road-tested each of the 24 modules.

All colleges will be able to sign up to the programme on an annual basis giving their governors access to modules that include online content, podcasts, and face-to-face delivery. Those who have tested it have valued the range and flexibility of the learning opportunities on offer. Governors are time-pressed people too, and being able to listen to a podcast while getting on with other tasks was particularly appreciated.

Governors are time-pressed people too

The programme will be hosted on the ETF’s Foundation Online Learning website, and governors will be able to develop their own personalised learning plans, working through the most appropriate suite of modules for them in terms of content and level of difficulty – from those new to governance right up to experienced governors who need to ensure they stay up to date.

Professionalisation means a certain amount of ongoing management of governors’ development needs. The work of mapping where governors are on their development journey could become the responsibility of the clerk or governance professionals, working in partnership with the chair and board members themselves to determine the development needs of individuals and of the team.

The programme complements the work that has already been done to boost the capacity of chairs of governors, in particular through the Chairs’ Leadership Programme. According to Simon Perryman, Chair of Governors at Barnsley College, this programme provides “powerful insights on the role of boards in setting strategy, maintaining oversight and managing reputation, as well as a valuable opportunity to work with other chairs on the real issues and challenges of the role”.

And our commitment to professionalising governance doesn’t stop there. Efforts to develop a programme aimed specifically at the development of clerks is already underway in partnership with the DfE.

The ‘College of the Future’ has become a common topic of conversation across the sector, and rightly so. This decade will herald new challenges and also importantly new opportunities but some things are timeless. Effective leadership and governance is one of those things, and developing people – be they our students, our staff or our governors – is another. In the end, amongst a multitude of other things, we now need great governance to navigate our way safely to new horizons.

If the sector’s reputation is ever to recover from the damage caused by college and ITP failures, the ESFA needs to be more than just a ‘funding body’, writes Tony Allen

As an ex-deputy director of the SFA, news that Dame Mary Ney’s anticipated report into college finances will highlight serious shortcomings on the part of the organisation has piqued my interest. The report is likely to focus on some of the more technical aspects of college finances.

However, there is one important and easy-to-grasp reason why colleges and independent training providers (ITPs) fail, and I hope Dame Mary will touch on it: the lack of effective contract management and support from the ESFA.

In many respects, Ian Pryce, CEO of Bedford Colleges Group summed it up perfectly when he said “you spot things early when you have strong human relationships”.

From its inception as 47 LSCs in 2001, up until 2015, by which time it had become the SFA, the sector could rely on effective contract management for all providers. Towards the end of this period, colleges were managed by regional teams, and the employers and largest ITPs by a national team. Their role was to get to know the colleges and ITPs, to provide support, protect public investment, and to promote government priorities. Unlike our current reactive way of working, always on the back foot as it responds to problems, the system was proactive in encouraging the ‘right’ behaviour.

Whatever the actual structures involved, having people within the SFA who regularly interacted with senior staff at colleges and providers brought many benefits. We had a much better sense of what was going on. We advised and supported, managed risks, and dealt with issues as they were arising. Face-to-face support by individual and group methods headed off many early problems. The nature of the relationship meant that colleges and providers were much more likely to share their concerns and worries than they are now.

It was believed that risk could be managed by a service desk approach

In 2016, as part of DfE-mandated staffing reductions, the SFA decided that ‘supportive’ contract management as we had known it was no longer needed. It was made clear that giving advice and support to colleges, and especially ITPs, was not part of a ‘funding body’s’ role. Frankly, it was believed that the risk could be managed by a service desk approach, and by analysing data in Coventry. Nobody was interested in the positive side of contract management or the benefits that could accrue, such as promoting apprenticeship growth.

As I was leaving the then-SFA, I pointed out to the senior team the implications of what they were doing, but the value of what we had been doing for many years was effectively dismissed.

Yet there is a clear correlation between the lack of supportive contract management and what has happened since. We have seen a number of high-profile college ‘financial’ failures, not to mention the demise of Positive Outcomes, First4Skills, 3AAAs and Learndirect, to name but a few on the ITP front.

Realistically, even if the ESFA, as it is now called, still had teams in place managing colleges and providers as effectively as in the past, they would not have been able to altogether prevent some of the more recent failures. The sad fact is that a determined individual in any organisation can hide the truth from those above.

However, at worse, the ESFA would have had their finger more closely on the pulse, and would have been aware much earlier of the problems that some colleges and large providers were facing. Even that worse-case scenario would have been better than what we have now.

No other part of the public sector allows an organisation with a contract worth millions of pounds a year to effectively be told to ‘get on with it’, and the only meaningful contact with the regulator being when it looks like things are going wrong.  

Whatever other reforms Dame Mary’s report suggests, until we restore proper, consistent and supportive regulatory oversight based on relationships, we will simply continue to see college and ITP failures. Our sector deserves better than to keep seeing its reputation battered in this way.

The Government’s continued failure to deliver on its own apprenticeship take-up target is, in part, a symptom of its failure to properly inform school leavers of the realities of higher education, warns Lawrence Barton

The Government is failing to achieve its own targets for the take-up of apprenticeships. Meanwhile, the symbolic target of 50 per cent of people going to university was met at the start of this academic year, 20 years after first being announced by the Blair government. Aside from the contrast in political effort to meet these targets, the bias towards university is reinforced by poor information about the relative value of these alternative pathways. In essence, taxpayers and students alike are being misled.

While the number of apprenticeship starts has increased from 2017/18 to 2018/19, figures remain down on those preceding the introduction of the apprenticeship levy in May 2017. In 2018/19, 19 per cent (75,100) of learners started at a higher level compared to 13 per cent the year before. But despite this growth, the take-up of higher apprenticeships is relatively modest.

If we compare the recent trend for apprenticeship growth to that for higher education a different picture emerges. Barring a dip following the introduction of the Government’s tuition fees reform, over the past ten years 18-year-old entry rates have consistently increased. In 2018, the 18-year-old entry rate stood at a record high of 33 per cent.

Yes, even the fanfare about the 50 per cent target is somewhat misleading. The DfE’s figure counts people set to go to university up to the age of 30, not school leaver entrants as might be expected.Contrasting perceptions of apprenticeships and university degrees are a significant driver behind the disparity in uptake. A large proportion of young people and their parents remain wedded to the idea that university is the key to a successful and prosperous future, unaware of other avenues open to them.

Policymakers often herald the ‘graduate premium’. In 2017 university graduates earned on average £10,000 more than the average non-graduate. But this figure is misleading. It makes no account of the institution attended, the subject studied, the degree classification obtained, or the premium relative to other qualifications. It lumps the earnings of a Cambridge educated particle physicist in with those of somebody with an Honours degree in ‘Drawing’ from Falmouth University.

Taxpayers and students alike are being misled

A 2014 independent analysis by the Million Jobs campaign investigated these nuances between graduate and apprenticeship earnings. It estimated that over a third of all graduates (39 per cent) enjoyed lifetime earnings below those of the average higher apprentice. While nearly half (46 per cent) of those from post-1992 universities earned less than higher apprentices.

The study found these differences become amplified when subject studied is examined. For some ‘new’ university courses, such as media studies, as many as three-quarters of graduates earned less than the average higher apprentice.

The study is not conclusive. It relies on various estimates and patches together data sets from different sources to produce its estimates. Nevertheless, it raises significant questions that remain unanswered. The Government and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have taken steps to improve the granular detail in terms of graduate outcomes, but shortcomings make it difficult to determine trends from year to year and to compare these to those of apprentices.

There is also yet to be movement on the publication of loan repayment rates by institution attended. Surely, both the prospective student and the taxpayer are owed a duty as to the likely outcome of their investment?

While attitudes towards apprenticeships are changing, there remains much work to be done. The lack of a coherent, detailed evidence-based case with which to go head-to-head with universities is hampering the industry’s ability to challenge misconceptions that remain prevalent in the minds of many school-leavers, parents and teachers. It is only when these misconceptions are addressed that we will begin to see the uptake of higher-level apprenticeships at the rate that is required for them to make a meaningful contribution to our economy.

This call to action comes at an opportune moment. The Prime Minister’s Chief Adviser, Dominic Cummings, has recently outlined his own ambitions for a more informed, data-driven approach to Government decision making. Accurate and transparent information about the relative outcomes of further and higher education is an excellent place to start.