S05 - E08 Janet Smith

In this episode Janet Smith, CEO and Principal of Nottingham College, joins Nick MacKenzie to discuss what it takes to rebuild a college after years of mergers, low morale, financial pressure and the fallout of Covid-19. 

Janet talks openly about the personal experience that shaped her approach to leadership, and why resilience and humour matter when the challenges don't let up. 

She explains how she arrived at a college with no shared identity, an Ofsted ‘Requires Improvement’ grade and a history of industrial action - and what she did about it. 

The conversation covers how to engage staff at scale in a college with seven campuses and 1,700 employees, from strategy built with people rather than imposed on them, to principal's lunches, roadshows and a five-word mission statement that stuck. 

Janet reflects on the moments when a turnaround starts to feel real, including the collective response to an Ofsted Good outcome and the impact of small acts of recognition. She also addresses workload as a strategic risk, including the decision to reduce teaching hours before the budget was ready for it.

For anyone interested in FE leadership, college improvement or building a staff culture that lasts, there's plenty here worth hearing.

Let us know what you think of this episode - drop us a message and connect via LinkedIn. 

Transcript

Personal loss and resilience

Nick MacKenzie 0:00

Welcome to the latest episode of EdInfluence. I'm Nick MacKenzie from Browne Jacobson, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Janet Smith, CEO and Principal of Nottingham College. Janet, I'd like to start us as I do with all my guests by inviting you to share a story from your life that gives me a picture of who you are.

Janet Smith 0:20

Okay. Right. So I I do know this is a question you ask all your guests, and the very first thing that jumped to mind is a really momentous occasion from my childhood. So when I was only 12, my mum died, and it was just the most horrendous thing that could possibly happen. She was a type 1 diabetic and only 44 years of age. And there was me and my sister who was 11, so she'd had some illness around her diabetes, but her death was completely unexpected. We went to bed one night with a mum and we woke up the next morning and we didn't have her. And it is probably the single event that has most shaped me and who I am, how I respond to different circumstances, even now as an adult in my 60s, but it was truly, truly life-changing. But I think it has definitely made me the person that I am.

Nick MacKenzie 1:26

Thank you. That's that's a very powerful story, Janet. Could you give an example of perhaps where you might have drawn on that in the recent past?

Janet Smith 1:38

Yeah, well, I I think the thing about something as difficult as that happening to you when you're a child is that honestly, nothing can ever be as bad again. It was it was so massive a thing. It felt like a giant hole had opened up in my life. So I think what I got from it was great resilience. And also my sister and I fell in on each other. We supported each other, we cried together, we we slept together actually, you know, as as young sisters, just for the comfort of being together and having each other. So I think it's it's made me super team focused, realizing that you know, whatever you're facing in life, you need people around you. But I think it's also made me realize that there's always a path through that, however difficult things might seem, there is an answer, there is a way to work your way through it, to find your path. And and quite honestly, in further education, there are just calamities galore, it's just one issue after another, challenge here, challenge there, money, quality, finance, endless demands placed on you as a leader, but the college as well. And and I think the thing I say to myself, the thing that's in my head is there's always an answer, there's always a way through, and there is. So if you want me to sort of relate that to something more recent, I would pick actually coming into Nottingham College itself, which at the point I joined four years ago, was just coming out of a period of great difficulty. So it's the product of about 17 years of mergers, lots of colleges in Nottingham, merging and merging till eventually two left, and then in 2017, the the merger of those two was required by the Department for Education. And what that did was it brought together two completely different organizations, different cultures, different leaderships, different goals, competing against each other, and it said, now you're one. So the the culmination of all these mergers created an organization with not really much sense of its own identity, still going through the post-merger process of actually joining all its systems and processes together and creating one organization. And then COVID happened. So it was it was just the perfect, perfect storm. So when the when all of this came to a head, the college had some financial woes, it had quality issues, it had major staff morale issues. And certainly when I applied for the job that and and Googled Nottingham College, what came up were lots of pictures of industrial action, staff on strike, days and days of it. And I I thought this is this is a college that has been through a process of being broken, really. So coming into that college, there were there were you know financial issues to fix, there were quality issues, it had an offstead inspection that had come out requires improvement, it had struggled to get itself up anywhere near a good offstead grade. And I think the biggest thing was that that the culture wasn't there, it had no sense of itself at all. So my huge reserves of resilience and my ability to haul a team together around that and to also start building a very values-led response to it was super important. I certainly know I'd I drew on my own background

Taking on a post merger college

Janet Smith 5:20

at that point.

Nick MacKenzie 5:22

Thank you. Uh listening to you speak in your story, one of my recent guests is uh is Lucy East Hope, who is a leading name writer in the disaster planning and disaster recovery space. So she's seen a lot of pretty challenging situations, and she she talks about living for the gaps, that there's sort of gaps between the crises and the things and the importance of having joy and seeing the joy in the small things in those gaps. Is that something that resonates with you?

Janet Smith 5:58

Oh god, yeah. I think some of this is just me being a northeaster as well, that we are our humour is quite dark. We find lots of things funny, there's a lot of teasing in the north, there's a lot of ribbing each other about absolutely everything. So I can I can find humour in all sorts of things, the illogicality of sometimes policy decisions, I can find humour in asking us to squeeze the pips out of money that isn't really there in the first place. I can I can find humour in an offstead inspection framework that really isn't written brilliantly for a large FE college but might work well in a school. Uh so yeah, I I can find humour in just about anything and and work on the joy of that. And I think you have to laugh as a team as well. If I think about our our executive leadership team meetings, we're often laughing at the absurdities of life in education and certainly life in FE.

Nick MacKenzie 7:02

So on FE, you're a passionate advocate for further education, and I believe you benefited yourself from a college education. What did you experience that you you carry through to today?

Janet Smith 7:17

Okay. If I tell you about my FE education, because it actually came in fits and starts. I've I've been a student of FE a number of times. So I came through what I now know to be a sync comprehensive in the northeast when I was young, and and you know, bearing in mind my age now, uh this was in the mid to late 70s when girls were were not expected to have any aspiration. Certainly, my career's visits were to things like British home stores and the library, that was the extent of it. I was actually blocked from going on a visit to a local engineering company, despite requesting

Finding joy in the absurd

Janet Smith 7:55

a place. That was in case any of the workers at the engineering factory uh swore, as if like growing up on a Northeast council estate, I had been immune to that. I certainly wasn't. So I I had a careers interview at school where they asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I'd like to be a teacher. And the careers guy said, So, which subject do you want to teach? I said, Oh, I'm not really sure. And I wasn't, I just I just really knew that I felt I wanted to teach. It was definitely in me. He just said, Have you thought of anything else? And I said, Well, my mum was a secretary, so that was it. He steered me to a secretarial course at Darlington College of Technology, which to be honest, I absolutely loved. I I excelled at it to this day. The typing skills that I built on that course I have used. I got up to a shorthand speed of 160 words a minute, which is pretty good actually. Not many people get to there, and I use I've used shorthand at different points in my life as well. I've taught it too. So so I went there at 16, 16 to 18, then went to work, and then did then realized actually this was not going to fulfil me for my life. And that's when I turned things around, went back, did a degree, and then then moved into teaching after that. So that was my first brush with FE, but it was a really positive experience. You know, I could see people from absolutely all walks of life in there, lots and lots of vocational training going on, uh, all sorts of different subjects, people building careers and and life opportunities through many, many different practical skills, you know, construction, arts, catering, absolutely all sorts of things, the absolute bedrock of industry today and and life as we live it.

How FE shaped a career

Janet Smith 9:45

Those people come through FE. So anyway, that that that was what started me. And then I went back into FE years later when I became a manager in FE, and I did a diploma in management studies at my own college, which was franchised from the local university, and I did it in the college because it was convenient, but the teaching and learning, even at that sort of level six study, was every bit as good as I would have had in a university, and certainly as good as the degree I'd studied in university by that point. I also did my teaching qualifications in FE, and I and I ended up doing an NVQ level five in management in FE as well, just because it was there and I wanted to see what it what an NVQ was like. And on the back of that, I did actually then go on to assess and internally verify NVQs in management myself as a teacher. So yeah, I have been a product of FE throughout my lifelong learning journey.

Nick MacKenzie 10:49

So something like 40 years. What's kept you in further education all that time?

Janet Smith 11:00

I just love it. I absolutely love it. No two days are alike. It's it's a sector where there's real genuine opportunity if you want to seek that opportunity, because we're always squeezing a lot out of a small amount of money, and there's always constant churn as well. Interestingly, actually, when I did my dissertation for my degree, I knew then I wanted to go into teaching, and I look, I was looking at that time. Technology was starting to come into the workplace, and I my degree was business and computing, so I wanted to look at how IT was coming into business studies, and I I actually went and did some research at a number of local colleges, and I did a survey, and one of one of the things in my survey was a question about what it's like in FE, how how would you sum up teaching in FE? And one of the answers has stuck with me for the length of my own experience in FE, and it was this in FE, our only constant is change, and that is so absolutely true. There's constant policy churn, there are constant funding difficulties, there are constant changes to the regulatory and inspection framework. So I'd have to remind me where the question started because now I've gone wandering off into memory lane.

Nick MacKenzie 12:27

Let's go with that. What do you learn about responding to change then? If that constant is change, what have you what have you learned about dealing with change effectively?

Janet Smith 12:38

Okay, what I've learned is going back again to where we started, the resilience thing, that nothing's impossible, there are always answers, and there always are. FE never falls apart. And so I've now remembered what your question was as well, which was about how how I have built my own opportunities with FE. That that constant change actually gives you the opportunity. And if you're prepared to put your head above the parapet, take on extra work, get involved in projects and so on, you can actually build your opportunities from that. That's all that's all I did. I'm not massively status conscious, I'm not massively driven by money either. They're not my drivers. I have got a very, very low boredom threshold. Life has to be interesting for me, and I don't mind how hard I work to keep life interesting for me. So when different projects have come out, come up throughout my career, I've just opted into them. And FE is an absolutely rich and fertile ground for being able to do that, and and that all comes out of the constant change that we experience in our sector.

Nick MacKenzie 13:49

You you've spent years as a teacher and then curriculum leader and then into broader management and leadership. So could you talk about your experience of letting go and some of those those changes? Because I can imagine, you know, if you you you said you always wanted to be a teacher, and then there's parts of the job, I imagine, of being the principal that that's great, but there's parts of it that take you away from what drew you in.

Using change to create opportunity

Nick MacKenzie 14:20

How have you navigated that in your your career? What have you learnt about letting go? And perhaps what what's been surprising when you perhaps look back in a slightly longer lens of what might have taken you longer to let go of than you thought?

Janet Smith 14:35

Well, I do miss the teaching side of it, and I I wish there was time to do some of that because there's no greater buzz than carrying a whole lecture theatre of 300 students with you. They're laughing along with you, they're clearly engaging with the session you're delivering. I love being in smaller groups as well, and knowing that you're making a difference with individual students and that you're caring about each and every one of them, and you're helping them to build their confidence to learn. Because in FE, that isn't the case for every student that comes in. We we don't cherry pick in FE, that it's not a rigid selection process. There's there's an answer within FE. We're broad and we're deep. We go from entry right up to level six. So it's a very broad education. We in my college especially we deliver A levels and and very academic programs, including some degrees, but we also work with learners with special education needs, those who've really struggled at school who might be joining entry or level one programs. So it's it's it really matters that you care as a teacher. I think the thing that I have never let go of is caring about the students that are in the college I'm in. And there's nowhere I think that it's more important to do that than in an FE college like mine that is situated in an inner city setting, we are now the only college in Nottingham City. So we have to be the answer for the city. If if we are turning students away or getting cross with them because their behaviour's not where it should be, if we're not providing an answer for them and helping them to break a cycle of deprivation, say, no, where else is that coming from? Nobody else is going to do that, so it's really important. So I think for me, where where the teaching part comes in is I still get to stand up in front of groups of people because I talk to staff in the college, big groups, small groups, I lead meetings, I take a roadshow

Letting go without losing care

Janet Smith 16:40

out. We're a very large college, we've got seven campuses. I have no other way of connecting up with that number of staff. There's 1700 people employed in our college every year, and the only way to connect with that sort of number is to offer a roadshow, which I tend to do every June. When I go out and I say, This is this is where I think the college is at. These are some of the challenges I think that are up ahead, some of the things we should celebrate. And most importantly, this is where I think the pay award is likely to go next year. Put that at the end so that they stick with the presentation and the discussion up to that point. So I think I still do, I still utilize all of those, all of those teaching skills, which basically are about connecting with people, caring about people, and supporting them and helping them to take on board new information. And I still do that. I just don't do it in a timetabled way anymore.

Nick MacKenzie 17:39

So taking some themes from what you've just said about connecting with people, and you didn't say this, but the sort of the story you're telling. Getting the message out there, and you said your your context both in the city but actually in the institution, thinking about leaders perhaps spend a lot of time knowing what they think and what they want to share. Perhaps less time asking about whether it's actually landing. What have you learned through through your through your roles and your most recent role about the gap between what you intend to say and what people actually hear? And what's some of the the tricks of the trade you you do to try and make sure that gap is as small as possible?

Janet Smith 18:22

Okay, I I guess the thing you do is you involve people in things. So I arrived at Nottingham College, it had a strategic plan. It was it was designed by a bunch of consultants looking at it, it was in a drawer, nobody mentioned it except to deride

Making strategy through staff voice

Janet Smith 18:40

it. So we set about writing a new strategic plan. And the first thing I did was take everybody off site to contribute. And this was really new. Nobody had consulted with staff before we tried to do this, and I can't get them all in one room, that we don't have a room that fits 1,700 people in even in even in a college as large as ours. So we went to Knotts County Football Club, took over their four banqueting suites, but and we did it four sessions in the morning, four in the afternoon, and I just talked to staff and I asked them what do you think our purpose is? What should we stand for as a college? What should our objectives be? What values should we live by, and where do we want to go? What's the bigger picture? What are we aiming to be? Uh, where do we want to go, you know, as a college in the longer term? And back came, I don't know how many sheets of flip chart paper, but we boiled it all down. We got we pulled out the 10 themes around our mission statement, our purpose statement. We but we pulled out a whole set of different key values that were popping up time and time again, and a vision statement as well, and and some content that would influence the goals. And we put it back to staff to vote on, and we we got the best mission statement in FE out of that, and it is five words long. It is we unlock potential through learning. So it doesn't matter if you come to Nottingham College, whether you're an apprentice, a young student, a full-time student, a special education needs learner, if you're an HE student, a part-time adult out in one of our community centres. Our job is to unlock your potential, and all of us as a college united behind that message, behind that purpose, because we asked people and people voted on it. And it was by far the most popular mission statement out of the key ones that came out of that event. And we keep doing that. So we're we're rewriting our strategy now, three years in, we've got a new strategy coming off the blocks for September 2026, and we've just done a very similar process, lots and lots of engagement with staff. So that that's one example around a really key document that's really going to drive the college and where we're going and the values we want to live by. But in in a similar way, we go out to staff as much as possible. So I take my roadshow out, and it's not just me presenting to staff, there's loads of gaps where I stop and I pause and I say, What do you think about this? And I put a couple of maybe opposing questions up and say, Which way should we go on this? And staff tell me, and and it's usually pretty decisive as well. Once you get people over the barrier of feeling able to talk in a public domain, I always say as well, you can email me afterwards or stop me. People do stop me in the corridors all the time. I get plenty of feedback in that way as well. But we do other things, so we've really we've sweated this thing about contacting and making contact with people and involving them. Because as a large college, that's particularly difficult to do. So I've set up over the last about a year and a half what we've called the principal's lunches. Where they get to come to lunch with me, which sounds really grand, doesn't it? It's not, it's like egg butties. I said, don't expect a candelabra dinner or anything. It's not that. So it's just it's a buffet, and we select 30 people at random from the payroll. I don't, I don't do this, the HR team do this for me. And those people, I just pick a mix from all different types of jobs within the college, and I sit down with them. And it takes it does take a bit to get the conversation flowing, but once it goes, there's proper conversations. We're just sitting around the table. I've had some really brilliant feedback from staff on that. And another thing we do is a formal staff forum where we got staff to nominate representatives for each campus, and they meet with our deputy CEO, he leads that. And again, anyone can sit put anything they want onto that agenda. So anything of concern or often ideally things they want to celebrate as well, but it's nearly always concern. So we're bothered about this, we'd like you to sort that, we don't understand this, and then we properly look at that and attempt to address it. And on that, the the person who inspired me for that was Greg Dyke, who was previously I think the I think the job titles controller of the BBC, he might have been chief exec or whatever he was, but he wrote a really interesting book about his time at the BBC, where he discovered that lots of things, lots of silly things frustrated people. And the example he gave was this really beautiful atrium that no one was allowed to enter because the door was locked, and when he asked for the key, there was no key. So he had the door taken away. And just that one simple thing started shifting the culture and the connection between staff and the leadership at the BBC, and he was one of the most loved senior people that the BBC ever had because he just took the time to connect with people, listen to them, and unstick some of the silly things that build up in any large organisation. And that's what we seek to do here at Nottingham College. We have literally put people at the centre of our strategic plan. So two of the goals, the 10 key goals within our strategic plan, are around recognising and rewarding people. So we needed to put right the fact that there'd been no pay awards, no pay rises in the college for a lot of years when I arrived. So that's about that. And the other is to build a positive, enabling, and supportive culture. And I I have taken the lead on that because I think if you do the right thing by your people as best you can, with limited funding and every everything else that challenges us, then you've started to build the right answer for your organization as a leader. Because so much of what any organization achieves is through that discretionary effort, that buy-in, those shared values, that belief in the organization. And that that's what we've done here. That's what shifted the balance. It's why we don't have financial difficulties now. We're we're graded good by Ofsted. We will probably be inspected in the next year, and quality is absolutely on the up. I can demonstrate it in every every type of metric. Staff satisfaction has gone up now for four years on the trot, hopefully, a fifth year next year. But that's because we've invested the time in listening to talking to people, hearing their views, and answering, answering their concerns as best we can.

Nick MacKenzie 25:39

Perhaps building on some of those themes, but a slightly different question.

The moment a turnaround clicks

Nick MacKenzie 25:45

You you've been senior leader for curriculum and quality in three colleges and now leader and securing, as you just talked about there, securing significant improvement in them. That feels to me like it's a repeatable skill. What do you you now know about the moment when an institution genuinely starts to turn? That you sort of you have to go through it to be able to know and spot and see that moment. What what have you learned through that your your experience of yes, this is this is going the way we need it to go?

Janet Smith 26:19

All right. Uh uh I it's it's quite hard to pin down because it's intangible, but you can feel it happening, and there are certain seminal moments when you realize people are coming with you. So I'll give I'll give you an example from earlier in my career when I was vice principal for curriculum and quality, and it was in a college in Greater Manchester that that had one big campus in one of the campuses, it had two, was in Rochdale. So it was a very, very deprived area. The college had struggled with quality for many years, it had a succession of not great offstead grades. And when I went in, the principal that's there said to me, You've got one job, make this a grade two, make this college a good inspection grade. So that was it, that was my job sheet. One thing, turn the college around. So you start digging in, you start having a look, you start looking with your data, you start talking to leaders and managers, and you quit you. It's actually not that hard when you're experienced in FE to work out what isn't hanging together properly. So there were no central messages, nobody was on the same page, we weren't clear about where we were going or what what we needed to do to get there. So we you start putting all of that lot in. That's the day job. But the minute I realized things were changing in that organization was it was another another occasion actually where I took the group of managers this time off site to do a planning day about how we would haul the key messages together and what we would get focused on. We were sort of doing a risk analysis of where our biggest risks, what were the biggest things we need to put right? All sorts of really quite interesting exercise, fun exercises that day. And I finished, we just it was a point when learning technologies were coming in, and you could actually do online voting. So they hadn't used this technology before, and I got I got them to vote on some key questions, which were just about learning points from the day, really. And as answers were popping up on screen as people were pressing the buttons for the answers, some ridiculous things, you know. So, you know, everyone going for the right answer, and just two people clearly picking the right answer. I'm saying, who who thinks it's that? And we started laughing, and it was that laughing together, that joining together, a sense of we were now, it's that sense of us and we coming together. And and that was that was my first big turnaround college that and it did go on very quickly within 18 months to bag a grade two with Ofsted. It did get its good grade, I'm really pleased to say, but it was when when we made it a collective effort and it started to feel like it was collective, and the same here at Nottingham College because I arrived in July, a bizarre month to start a job in FE, but anyway, that that's what it was. I spoke to staff on Teams online on my very first morning at nine o'clock. I said what who I was, what my aspirations for the college were, what what key goals I thought we needed to get to, and I talked about the values that I would lead the organisation through. So I talked about the importance of integrity and listening to people and various other things. So I laid out my stall early doors, then everyone went away on holiday. Then we came together to start thinking about the strategic plan. So we started connecting through that. Although I have to say the whole event was probably met by quite a bit of suspicion by staff who had felt quite neglected and not listened to at that point. But then, and it was unexpected because I didn't think Ofsted would be in quite so quickly. The the norm is you get, I don't know, 10 months or so to get your feet under the desk as a new principal. But they were in that November. So I'd had July when no one was around, and August when not many people were around, September of enrollment, one month to start looking at Ofsted and where we might go, and then they were in. But in preparation for Ofsted, one of the things I said to staff was we need to stop talking about ourselves as a college with problems, as a college that requires improvement. Because if that's the message we give to Ofsted, if that's how we sell ourselves, it's going to land like that. That's going to be the expectation back, it'll be mirrored back. So I said, from now on, we will never call ourselves the requires improvement college again. This is all done over teams. But you know, I never know how it's landing. It's just me talking to a screen. That from now on, we're going to talk about all the good stuff we're doing because there's loads of good stuff in this college. We are going to feel inspired by what we do because we're changing lives here. By that point, we'd we'd got our mission statement starting to come together. We know our purpose, we know what we're doing, we know how important this is for our city. That's what we're going to show Ofsted when we come in. Anyway, long story short, we had our inspection and and we got our good grade, and that was another seminal moment because I went out on Teams to update everyone after we'd had our grading meeting, albeit, you know, it's provisional until Ofsted published the report. But you can tell your staff the grade at that point. And as I revealed the grade on Teams in my office, I could hear cheers echoing along the corridor. People were watching this in rooms, in groups, and I thought then, wow, what we'd done this together, and we were celebrating as a college, the sense of togetherness. And then there was another thing that happened really quickly after I got here, and it was it was our Christmas do. So I landed at the college, as I say, in July. By September, I was saying, what do we normally do at Christmas? How do we come together in a college of this scale? And the answer was, Well, we don't. We don't have any Christmas parties. I don't think the predecessor colleges did a lot either. So I said, Well, we we have to. We have to we have to become us, and this is part of becoming us. So we set up something, we actually called it a festive fusion because we were a very diverse body of staff and students. So labelling it a Christmas event wasn't altogether appropriate. So it became the festive fusion, and we advertised it out, we asked people to sign up and get tickets, and about I think it was probably about 600 staff, so maybe maybe half of the then body of staff came along, and they didn't know what to expect, expect. But we we literally went bananas, we put all sorts of different interesting activities on. But the thing that I did at that event, and we also mirrored it in a letter that went out live to people's email boxes, was we announced a a cash bonus for everybody as a thank you for the work we'd done together at as Ofsted, you know, for for our Ofsted inspection, and and also for the all the work on the strategic plan. The fact that we're starting to move forward now as a college, and it was only £250, and although that costs a lot to do across that point, it was £1,200 staff we had, but we managed to scrabble the money together, and I said it's really important we do this, that we show people we're serious about recognizing and rewarding them. We're writing it into the strategic plan. And when I did that announcement, the the cheer that went up in the atrium where we did the announcement was absolutely immense. It was more than I was expecting. And as I walked around afterwards, people were crying, Nick, that no one had ever done something as simple as that for them before. I mean, we we had to put up a second one as well, to be honest. There might have been a bit of emotional input from that as well. But but people were saying nobody's cared about us before. And so you really start to you start to realise as a leader that it's that it's not the big gestures, the big grand things, it's the small stuff, it's caring about the people in your organisation without being silly and and and making it all about them because you still have to meet standards, you still have to be highly pro professional in what you do. But if you listen to and care about and recognise and reward your people, then an awful lot of goodwill comes off the back of that. And that was another seminal moment where that sense of us in the room and that that uplifting of spirit and mood really was tangible, and we've gone upwards from there. It's just been uphill, up I say uphill, it's not uphill, it's been a it's been a delight to do, but but the winds have just been clocking up one after the other since that point, since those first few months.

Nick MacKenzie 35:18

That really comes across that sense of us sort of summarizing, I think, a lot of what you've just shared then.

Workload signals and real trade-offs

Nick MacKenzie 35:25

You've also said life isn't as simple as you get the trajectory going up and it just carries on in this nice little improvement curve. What have what have you learned about where your spider senses might tingle a bit, where you you're sort of you're going in the right direction, but you're oh your little tells or your watch helps where you think, oh, I need to go and have a look here and think about this a bit more. It's not quite right.

Janet Smith 35:48

Yeah.

Nick MacKenzie 35:48

What have you learned in that respect, Janet?

Janet Smith 35:52

I think I think you you can pick up the signals if you're connected out to your staff. There's there's lots of things that you keep hearing the same words, the same concerns. We've got three good unions here at the college that we recognize, we meet with them, and and certain themes do keep coming up, and they come up nationally as well. So there's often things that are happening nationally that you can pick up. One of them was around staff workload, and one of the products of austerity and public sector cuts, well, there's several products actually, you get more efficient, so there's good things come out of it. I won't say it's all bad, it certainly isn't. You start being much more focused and targeted in what you're doing and how you're doing it because you can't afford the extraneous stuff. But eventually, and we went through 12 years of austerity in FE, where there was no money at all for pay awards, no money for maintenance or painting or mending a broken window, absolutely nothing for any of that. We had to bid for anything over and above, and and things got very, very difficult in FE and staff workloads went up as a result because you're there's only two ways to do it. You can cut and take stuff out and stop doing certain things, or you can require people to work harder, and it ends up being a mix of that, especially if you're going on past three or four years of this, and we were it got it got very gritty indeed towards the end. So definitely staff workload had gone up, and at the same time, there was no let up from the government in terms of what they expected in quality. In fact, demands went up and up on that side as well, so it was the perfect storm. So workload has kept coming back, so you can you start picking up the messages on that, and it's really important that you listen to it and that you act as far as you can. So we did we did two things. One thing that that didn't cost very much at all, but has been really well received by staff, and that is to build in as much flexibility as we possibly can to people's jobs. So we're not a presenteism organization. If people want to go and mark their students' work at home rather than sitting in a staff room, fine by me. So long as the work's done and it's done to a good standard and deadlines are met. I don't mind how people manage that. I don't mind whether they go home and pick their kids up from school at four o'clock in the afternoon or half three, get the tea, and then sit down and do it. It doesn't matter, whatever works best for them. So, and we do that with as many jobs as we can. So, some of the back office staff and the support functions, the professional services of the college, unless you have to be in college to do it. You can't be a college cleaner and be at home doing it, and you you can't be a learning support assistant and be at home doing you with the students in a room. If your job allows it, you can have as much flexibility as you want. Where we can add extra days of holidays, say around Christmas and New Year, the the December break, we will try and add on an extra day at the end of after New Year if it fits with the way the weekends fall, or extra days just before Christmas, to give something back to people and thank them and give them that give them a proper break. So that that sort of stuff is really good to do, and and you do there is some cost because if staff are on term time only contracts, then you have to compensate them in pay because they're off anyway at that point, but it but it's not it's not a full big cost. So you do that sort of thing. But then the other thing we did was we properly looked at at what we could do to take actual teaching workload down and what we might do for people who weren't frontline teachers but other other 60% of staff in our organization, and we worked out that the cost of taking one hour of teaching a week off each teacher on our payroll was going to be one million pounds a year. So we just decided to do it. We didn't really have the money for it, we just said this is really important, the the messages are coming out really loud and clear, we've got to act. So we did, and then we worked out how to afford it, having made the decision to do it. So sometimes you have to be led by what is absolutely right to do. So we did it, and and even though I think we staff still work really hard here, they still teach 23 hours a week, which is a lot of time in front of students when you add in the preparation and marking, all of the administration that teaching staff do in FE, the open evenings, the extra events, all that discretionary effort. Some people are working very long days and into weekends during the teaching part of the year. We have, I can now say hand on heart, we've we've done something really big that has made a stab at workloads. I've had a few people say, Well, it's only an hour a week, and I can barely detect it. I said, Well, you detect it if I put it back on, or if I added another hour on, he would have felt that. So we'll take that as a win. So, yeah, it's but it has been pretty well received, to be fair.

Nick MacKenzie 41:21

Unfortunately, we're we're really running out of time very quickly, Janet. So I wanted to ask one

Creativity and hope in learners

Nick MacKenzie 41:30

last question, and it was thinking about young people and learners, really. What quality do you see in young people either coming through the college or or more generally that you wish you had or perhaps had more of?

Janet Smith 41:44

Oh, I I think the thing I don't have is massive creativity. I'm not a blue skysinker at all, and I see all these young people full of aspiration and hope who will find different sorts of solutions to the ones I might have come up with as a young person because life is very, very different from them. They're very tech connected, aren't they? They can, I mean, I might my background is computing. When I was teaching, that that's definitely one of the subjects that I taught, but I'm not as connected as they are, so they're miles ahead of me at that, and I think it's helped them to be more creative, see the art of the possible in ways that I absolutely couldn't. I I see them still though, full of hope, full of wishes for the future, aspiration, and and I think further education is there to nurture that and build that in them. And I hope that we do that for them and that we're we're part of what takes them forward in their lives and resets things for them in the most positive of ways. I see positivity in them too.

Nick MacKenzie 42:52

I think that's a lovely place to end our discussion. So, Janet, thank you so much for joining me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed our discussion, and I do hope our listeners have as well.

Janet Smith 43:02

Thank you very much.