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Jo Maher, Principal and CEO, Boston College

32-year-old Jo Maher was recently appointed principal and CEO of Lincolnshire’s Boston College, so how is she coping with the pressure of such a high-profile job? FE Week went to find out.

When leading an institution of tens of thousands of students through a massive, systemic overhaul, there are a variety of attitudes one can take.

The stance adopted by the principal of Boston College reminds me of an elite sailor in an ocean race, watching the weather to predict the next squall, bringing her sails to optimal tension at the precise moment it hits.

“If they hold back the proliferation of apprenticeship standards to harmonise the T-levels behind them,” she says, when I suggest the skills minister’s attention might be divided between T-levels and apprenticeships, “then it’s good to have a handle on both. Because the initial concept was this 20-per-cent difference…”

Firing her words fast and with precision – weaving talk of FE college strategy with the language of high-performance – it’s not long before Jo Maher loses me. And since I get the feeling she’s too generous to notice, I help us both out by professing an ardent interest in something more concrete: the trajectory that brought her to be principal of the Lincolnshire FE college, barely 10 years after graduating from university.

I’d like to be judged on my competence, not my age

“I’d like to be judged on my competence, not my age,” she declares. “For me, it’s about building that credibility, based on my actions.”

Ofsted gave her just that opportunity last November: as she was preparing to pack up for the Association of Colleges’ annual conference in Birmingham, she got ‘the call’. But the 32-year-old insists she wasn’t fazed.

“I’m very calm in my style,” she explains. “I’ve been through that many Ofsted inspections now, that having one eight weeks into post… my staff team were confident, calm and controlled.”

The sports psychology graduate has been working in colleges since she was a student, initially as a sessional lecturer at Loughborough College and running their netball academy while studying for her masters at Loughborough University. She applied for a full-time job as she was finishing her degree.

“The day I handed in my thesis, I started my full time contract the next day … I’ve always been busy and had a lot of energy,” she says – aware she isn’t the norm.

In her capacity as a sports psychologist, she has supported Olympic athletes, professional golfers and rugby players, worked with Crewe Alexandra football club and WorldSkills Team UK, all the while working her way up steadily through the ranks of the college world.

“I was very passionate early on in my career that I wanted to go through every single level,” she insists, “so I progressed naturally through.”

Maher attributes her incredible work ethic to this background in sports.

“I think my competitiveness within my career is because I had to retire from sport young,” she admits, recalling an injury sustained at Loughborough, a stress fracture in her back. “I should still be playing football, really. I’m only 32, I should be still playing at the level I retired at.”

The ex-club footballer’s backstory is somehow mundane and remarkable at the same time.

I should still be playing football, really

At the age of seven, she used to jog two and half miles to get a lift to the stables on the weekend to earn herself free horse rides: “I’ve always been fit, I’ve always been into horses, and that was the work ethic; if you can muck out 12 horses at seven in the morning in minus two, you just develop it.”

A love of horses – and animals in general – runs in the family; her mum joined the mounted police immediately after school, and she traces her lifelong obsession back to her grandad’s work with shire horses on the milk floats in Liverpool. Her dad, also from a working class family in the centre of the port city, wasn’t sporty, but she has a fond early memory of him helping her mum prepare for the fitness bleep tests, post-maternity, in a car park.

“He put the cones two metres wider so she thought it was really hard,” she says. “And he knew on the day she’d breeze it.”

After taking her GCSEs at a comprehensive in her home town of Widnes, near Liverpool, Maher took five full A-levels at a local sixth-form college.

Desperate to get the two As and a B required for Loughborough University’s prestigious sports science course, she took PE, “obviously”, biology, which was required for the course, adding English literature and language as her strongest subject, and then to hedge her bets she threw in psychology and general studies, just to increase her chances of getting enough top grades.

She stayed at Loughborough College for nine years after graduation, progressing from sessional lecturer right the way through to head of department, during which time she taught “the whole suite of FE, higher education and apprenticeships”. This was followed by two years as assistant principal at Reaseheath College, a specialist land-based college in Cheshire.

WorldSkills came calling in 2012, because of the work she was doing with an Olympic athlete, and her first global tournament was in Leipzig. Since Maher was the first psychologist used by Team UK at WorldSkills, she found herself building a programme from scratch, including a whole series of boot camps to prepare the competitors both physically and psychologically.

With Peter Lauener and Theo Paphitis at WorldSkills

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a welder or a beauty therapist. We’re looking at high performance, how they cope under pressure.”

While there was plenty that could be transferred from the world of elite sport, some challenges were intense in a different way: “If you’re a 100-metre sprinter, you’re performing five times potentially for 10 seconds. Some of these are 16-hour competitions. It’s brutal.”

Sustaining that over three or four days, psychologically, can be draining, and Maher accompanies the student competitors to the venues and is available for them throughout.

“I’m their 24/7 psychological support. If they ring me at three in the morning in my hotel room because they’re having an anxiety attack, guess who’s there?” she says.

Despite taking the top job at Boston, she still went to WorldSkills in AbuDhabi last October as the team’s practitioner psychologist. As well as an ethical commitment to the mission, she explains that after supporting the team for two years, “to withdraw three weeks before wouldn’t be the right thing”. She has donated the money from WorldSkills to a charitable fund, supporting learners from her college with aspirations – whether they need travel to an international sports competition or simply access to a food bank.

If you’re doing a good job, any auditor, any inspector can come in on any day, because that should be the level that you are performing at

A sports evangelist, she points out that “if physical activity was bottled as a tablet and people just had to take it, it would be bigger than antidepressants”. The trick is getting people to make the lifestyle change before the platform is burning, which is why she’s big on wellbeing initiatives, such as coffee-and-chat breaks, or “getting staff to own physical activity and invite their peers along, because it builds self-efficacy”.

Having attended university with elite athletes and future England football players, Maher doesn’t seem to question the premise that one should aim for excellence in every aspect of life.

“I’ve come out of the world of sport,” she says, “Olympic-standard, where we talk about marginal gains and one-per-cents, and we want reflective practitioners who are always aspiring to get that extra second.”

She applies the same philosophy to her college, which, despite having just received its second ‘good’ Ofsted rating, she insists is “really on that journey to ‘outstanding’”.

It is not uncommon for leaders of educational establishments to admit, when pressed on whether there is really a difference between ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’, that the distinction is moot, inspectors’ judgments are unreliable, there’s unconscious bias, and it’s always going to be something of a fluke whether you get a grade two or one.

But the idea doesn’t seem to compute: “My clear message to the staff is that if we have no external quality-assurance tomorrow, what does excellence and high performance look like for Boston?” she responds. “If you’re doing a good job, any auditor, any inspector can come in on any day, because that should be the level that you are performing at. And I really believe in the staff team to do that.”

It’s a personal thing

Best work trip?

It has to be Turkmenistan. We went with Loughborough University to consult on building their capacity to host the Asian indoor martial arts games. I went in as a sport educationalist to see how they would train their coaches, infrastructure and staff to improve in the world rankings.

Best memory of a sports tour?

Playing netball against the Trinidad and Tobago under-21 national team in Barbados. I dislocated my shoulder, put it back in my socket and carried on, but it was an unbelievable experience. We did yoga on the beach every morning.

Ideal gift?

An experience. Either to a different country – I love travelling – or to a fine dining restaurant, but I don’t really like opening things.

Favourite book?

Sue Grafton’s alphabet crime series. She wrote the books all the way up to Y, then she died this Christmas – I was gutted.

What motto would you like your staff to see every morning?

Wake up every morning with energy, enthusiasm and resilience.

This article was corrected on 05/02/18 to reflect the fact that Maher worked at Loughborough College, not Loughborough University.

Colleges must meet Gatsby career benchmarks or lose money

Colleges have been warned that they could be stripped of funding if they do not comply with the government’s new careers guidelines.

Updated guidance was published this afternoon by the Department for Education following the unveiling of the long-overdue careers strategy in December, which said colleges need to meet eight “Gatsby Benchmarks”.

It states that colleges are expected to begin to work towards these standards, which have been designed over the past three years to ensure they succeed in a post-16 setting, now and meet them by the end of 2020.

The guidance then warns that colleges risk losing their grant funding if the demands are not met in that timescale.

“Colleges are expected to comply with this guidance and this forms part of the conditions of grant funding,” it said.

“In the event of non-compliance it is open to the ESFA to take action in accordance with the provisions of its grant agreement.”

The careers strategy includes £4 million to support every school and college to have a careers leader, and a further £5 million funding to develop 20 careers hubs.

One of the benchmarks is called “encounters with employers and employees”. The DfE said it expects every college to begin to offer every learner at least two “meaningful encounters” with an employer each year and should meet this in full by the end of 2020.

This could, for example, involve students attending careers events, participating in CV workshops and mock interviews, mentoring, employer-delivered employability workshops, or business games and enterprise competitions.

At least one of these “encounters” should be related to learners’ fields of study.

From September 2018, every college should appoint a named person to the role of “careers leader” to lead the programme. Every college should also publish the careers programme on its website.

The DfE said it “recognises” that the work needed to meet all eight Benchmarks will vary for each college, but in any case they should be met by the end of 2020.

An online self-evaluation tool, Compass, will be available in September 2018 for colleges to “assess” how their careers support compares against the Gatsby Benchmarks and the national average.

The Careers and Enterprise Company has also said it will provide external support to colleges.

The eight benchmarks are:

A stable careers programme
Learning from career and labour market information
Addressing the needs of each student
Linking curriculum learning to careers
Encounters with employers and employees
Experiences of workplaces
Encounters with further and higher education
Personal guidance

Invest in Ofsted to guarantee apprenticeship quality

This week the number of providers and employers able to directly tap into an annual £2.5 billion apprenticeship pot exceeded 2,000.

Everyone and anyone is being given a piece of the funding action, from Cambridge University, to Greggs, to one-man-band sole traders.

Regulating the quality of training in this proliferation of actors will be mission impossible for Ofsted.

But however hard monitoring and reporting on the apprenticeship delivery taking place across England is going to be, there needs to be a solid plan with substantial and additional resource.

Against a backdrop of public funding cuts, it is still vital that the Department for Education invests substantially in the inspectorate.

Failure to do so will be to fail to protect the apprenticeship brand along with any of the apprentices participating.

T-level occupational maps must be flexible

Unless there’s the space for young people to transfer the skills they learn onto another route, we risk locking them into careers they no longer want to follow, writes Julie Hyde

With just under a week to go until the Institute for Apprenticeships closes its consultation on the occupational maps for the new T-levels, there are many problems that need to be addressed.

Some are basic errors and easy to fix, but others are larger structural problems requiring thought, which I hope organisations across the sector will highlight in their responses, and decision-makers will recognise.

The maps set out the skilled occupations in the 15 new vocational education routes. Each map has pathways for possible career progression, and clusters that group together occupations with similar training requirements: shared skills, knowledge or behaviours. The core content of T-levels will be based on the chosen route and pathway, with more specialised content based on the specific occupation.

These maps will form the basis for a “coherent curriculum” and are designed to offer clear and credible routes into employment. However, as they stand, they demonstrate a lack of understanding of the occupations they cover, and the realities for young people making decisions about future careers.

How many of us are in exactly the job that we thought we would end up in at 16?

It is vital that the new qualifications have flexibility built in, and are portable. This is particularly evident in our specialist areas: education and childcare, and health and social care. In the current system, many learners start down one of these routes and end up choosing a career in another. Crucially, they can do so without having to start from scratch.

The routes do not divide as neatly in practice as they will in the new system. Occupations in these sectors require many of the same skills and attract similar personalities and learners, who know they want to work in a caring profession, but may not know exactly where their strengths and interests lie.

If the qualifications are not portable from day one, we risk closing options off – and choices made at 16 could limit career options long term. We are in danger of oversimplifying the system and forcing learners to specialise too early on.

This is unlikely to be a recipe for success. How many of us are in exactly the job that we thought we would end up in at 16? Can we really expect a 16-year-old who has an interest in working in the care sector to know confidently that they want to work with adults in a social care setting until they have experienced the work first-hand?

We know that many of our learners currently move freely between childcare, education, health, and adult social care, as their interests and priorities change.

This is important to ensure that they find a career that suits them and gives them job satisfaction – which in turn is vital to delivering the skilled, motivated workforce that these sectors require.

Under the current proposals, the social care route would be apprenticeship only, arguably a mistake.

Many of the qualifications that learners currently take to pursue occupations within the route are delivered successfully in classroom settings and there is no reason that a credible T-level route cannot be created – either as a distinct path or within the health and science route. After all, integrating health and social care is also a government priority, and the workforce is crucial to delivering this shift and will need transferable skills to make it work.

This would also allow learners to choose the mode of learning that suits them best, ensuring that they have a better chance of completing the qualification and succeeding.

If the new system does not work for learners in practice, it will ultimately fail to deliver for employers. It is vital that decision-makers ensure that learners’ needs and experiences are taken into account. We need the system to be flexible enough to allow young people to find the right path, otherwise some will fall through the cracks, and the government’s ambition to create world-class vocational education will flounder.

Julie Hyde is associate director of CACHE

Aspiring makeup artists get experience on new TV comedy series

Two aspiring makeup artists have had work experience on a new comedy series starring Jonny Vegas, Mackenzie Crook and Emma Thompson.

Middlebrough College makeup artistry students Aimie Carr, 19, and Emma Dodds (pictured), 17, spent several days working on the set of the new production, which has not yet been revealed to the public, honing the skills acquired on their level three advanced technical diploma.

The pair also experienced the challenges of makeup continuity and a demanding filming schedule.

Following their placement, Benidorm star Johnny Vegas has requested their skills for another shoot taking place in the north-east.

“It’s very easy for students to get star struck in situations like this, particularly as the crew work, eat lunch and relax with the cast,” said Heather Ferguson, the college’s hair and media makeup course leader who organised the placement. “This didn’t phase Aimie and Emma, and they showed total professionalism at all times.”

Emma added: “It was a fantastic experience to be able to work on a real production, and it’s confirmed to me that a career in media makeup is exciting and rewarding.”

Ghanaian ministers visit UK college to learn about vocational education

Delegates from the Ghanaian Ministry of Education and National Teaching Council visited New City College’s Hackney campus to learn more about vocational education.

The visit was organised by the British Council to aid the Ghanaian government in their drive to develop technical and vocational education in the country.

As part of the trip, the guests toured the campus, observed carpentry and hospitality training sessions, and took part in a round table with college managers, where they discussed how staff were recruited and trained, and the benefit of vocational training to students.

“We were delighted to welcome our visitors to the campus, and to share our experiences with the key people who will be able to impact the development of skills training and education in Ghana,” said Richard Surtees, New City College’s director of international.

“We were impressed with what we have seen and hope that through this visit we can improve technical and vocational educational training in Ghana,” added
Enoch Cobbinah, the director of Ghana’s Ministry of Education.

Former battery hens wear jumpers knitted by learners

Bald hens at Reaseheath College are keeping warm with jumpers knitted for them by learners.

The 12 former battery hens had never been outside before and had poor feathering as a result, so animal behaviour students pulled together to knit the woolly outfits to keep them warm in the cold weather.

Since joining the college, the hens have already started to grow new feathers, and students are closely monitoring their progress and behaviour as they transition to free-range hens at the college’s onsite zoo.

The hens are just over a year old, and were adopted by the college from the British Hen Welfare Trust, a rehoming charity for commercial laying hens destined for slaughter.

“The hens responded very quickly by showing natural behaviour such as perching and scratching the ground, and will hopefully go on to enjoy long and happy lives with us,” said Lauren Lane, head keeper at the college.

“It looks like they’re being thoroughly spoilt which is the kind of life we want for all our ex-battery hens,” added Francesca Taffs, communications officer for the British Hen Welfare Trust. “While the jumpers are not something we would generally recommend for rehomer use, it’s clear these little ladies are being monitored and cared for closely.”

WATCH: The Reaseheath College hens get their jumpers fitted

National College for Motorsport receives national recognition

The National College for Motorsport (NC4M) has been recognised for its services to the motorsport industry, reports Samantha King.

The college, which was established in 2003, was presented the MIA Service to Industry Award at the Motorsport Industry Association’s Business Excellence Awards in January, attended by representatives from across the motor industry, including people from Bentley, British Aerospace and Porsche.

Students get to work on Lewis Hamilton’s car

Categories at the awards included the ‘teamwork award’, ‘technology and innovation award’ and ‘business of the year with annual sales over £5 million award’. Winners in each category were voted for by industry professionals and MIA members.

The NC4M was up against Ginetta, a specialist builder of racing and sports cars, the service charity Mission Motorsport and the Warwick Manufacturing Group in the ‘service to the industry’ category, and was the only educational establishment to receive an award at the event.

The college won for its performance in training, guiding young people into apprenticeships as race mechanics, and its “dedication to the future of motorsport”, a spokesperson for MIA said.

“The MIA represents all aspects of the industry at the highest level so it is especially nice for them to recognise our work,” said Chris Weller, a motorsport apprenticeship assessor at NC4M, who accepted the award on behalf of the college. “The majority of our students go onto to work within the industry, some working in Formula One and in teams based all over the world.

“We provide specialist training and the feedback we receive from the industry is that we get it right – they want to employ our students.”

Based at the Silverstone Circuit, the college is part of Tresham College and the Bedford College Group, and was the first college in the UK to achieve the Motorsport Academy employer recognition scheme charter mark for training race mechanics.

Jungle-themed murals displayed in hospital’s radiography department

New animal murals now festoon the walls of a hospital’s radiography department to help cheer up children who have to go in for X-rays.

Painted by Barnet and Southgate College’s level three art and design students, the two large murals depicting colourful jungle scenes are on display at Barnet Hospital, and formed part of a work experience module to come up with a creative distraction for patients.

The paintings took two weeks to complete, and pupils from nearby Brunswick Park Primary School raised £250 through cake sales and a school tuck shop to pay for paints and other materials.

“It has been a great experience working on the mural,” said 18-year-old student Aoife Drummond, who painted the panda in the mural. “It’s lovely to hear the positive comments from staff and the school children.”

“We are very grateful for their huge commitment,” added Dr Steve Shaw, chief executive of Barnet Hospital. “It will make the experience at hospital a hundred times better for the children who will need to come here for their X-rays.”