We need to learn lessons from Weston debacle before we move on

Is Weston old news? Lots of people in the sector hope that the governance failures at Weston College, which allowed the “concealment” of £2.5 million in undeclared payments to England’s highest-paid former principal Sir Paul Phillips, have been put to rest, but it may not be the case.

There are likely to be more details about the specific case and a renewed focus on the health of colleges in this country.

While Weston undoubtedly damaged the sector’s reputation, it has also prompted a lot of constructive reflection and sector conversations about good governance.

So here are four lessons that I think follow on from Weston.

Weston has driven a new focus on compliance

Conversations around compliance will never be as interesting as conversations around, for example, culture. However, as a board, you should be checking that you are compliant with (not exhaustively) the Association of Colleges’ (AoC’s) FE code of good governance; what the FE Commissioner has recently issued on this subject as well as the Treasury’s guidance on senior pay. All this is reasonably straightforward and incredibly important. Post-Weston you should be getting alongside your director of governance and assuring yourself and your board that you are compliant.

Weston is an outlier. Probably…

A second lesson from Weston is how well I think government worked swiftly with colleges and organisations such as the AoC to calibrate a response. It feels helpful and proportionate… so far. I wrote earlier this year about how I believe FE could, in fact, be a model for good governance practice in other sectors such as schools and universities. I stand by that, despite Weston.  However, the uncomfortable truth remains that we can’t be sure.

I find that anyone well connected in FE is always able to talk about an organisation, maybe even two, that they think are in trouble in some way. Yes, it’s often gossip. Not harder edged evidence like audit, Ofsted or perhaps an external governance review, or even a diagnostic conducted by the Further Education Commissioner (FEC) team. It doesn’t mean the gossip is always wrong though. Who might have known what was going on in Burnley?

This feels very uncomfortable and I suspect it will be exercising the Department for Education (DfE).

For ten years now, children’s social care intervention and improvement out of DfE has focused on the challenge of getting upstream of failure. Officials have tried to systematically gather together their relationships with directors of children’s services to get a fix on those local authority children’s social care services that are “wobbling” and might fail.  They then seek ways of approaching those local authorities to broker in improvement support.

I wonder whether DfE policy and delivery around FE intervention will head in a similar direction.

Weston will drive the further professionalisation of governance. Probably…

On its most narrow reading you could describe Weston as a failure of governance related to senior post holder (SPH) remuneration. It’s right, however, that government and representative organisations have followed up with an emphasis on effective practice beyond just compliance related to senior pay.

For example, I completely support the FEC focus on the importance of the “triumvirate” group of chair, chief executive and director of governance, which I am promoting in a free Rockborn webinar on 9 July – as well as the focus on effective appraisal processes for SPHs, both of which I’ve introduced at Croydon College across the past 18 months.

However, whereas previously government was all over sector operational governance and our (chief) executives, with ever more complex funding regimes and their associated regulatory oversight, you can now feel that government is really beginning to focus on corporate governance as well.

In one sense that’s good for the profile of governance in FE. And it could mean positive change. But it might also entail a lot of new guidance and government activism coming down the line.

This could be a significant undertaking for chairs to get their heads around. I can see that it could begin to stretch the goodwill and credulity of a cadre of largely unpaid volunteers when the reputational and other consequences for failure are so obviously high.

I therefore think the case for the further and continued professionalisation of FE governance post-Weston, including the payment of chairs, has become irresistible.

A wake-up call

I do understand why many people in our sector want Weston in the rearview mirror. It is pretty shocking.

I think the better way to approach Weston, however, is to sit up and really take notice of it on your boards and use it to drive future improvement. To the credit of government and the FEC I think that is exactly how it has been approached on behalf of the sector.

So while Weston may not be old news, surprisingly it may still turn out to be good news!