 I'm glad to be, everyone. I've played around with this. I've managed to get here in time for Donald's presentation this morning. I thought I'd respond to some of the stuff around teaching and learning that came up there. As a teacher, although in FE we call people lecturers, I'm a teacher. Almost all my people are teachers. I was trained as a teacher. I want to tell you the story of the success of the college. It is about culture. Here it's the culture, stupid. It's about developing a culture of teaching and learning. Unlike Donald, you say you don't tell him what you're going to say. I always believe you tell people what you're going to tell them, then you tell them it, then you tell them what you've just told you. I'm going to tell you it's about how you develop teachers and how you develop learners and how the technology then supports that process of teaching and learning. Something about further education, first of all, unfortunately, and I'll try and do something about it, Seb, very, very few further education people here. In fact, so few that I know every one of them having seen them around the place. We've often said that further education is the Cinderella service, the neglected middle child, all that kind of stuff, which is kind of true, but there are more young people studying in further education than there are in school six forms. One eighth of all students following degree programmes are in FE colleges and so on. It's a big sector and actually it's increasingly recognised. But back in 93, when we were incorporated, when we were cut away from local authority control, no really important moment for us, it probably was a much denigrated sector and it needed to be, and that was a quote from the Audit Commission, an Audit Commission report called Unfinished Business, and the Unfinished Business being Education Further Education Colleges, levels of non-completion in the FE sector are a substantial waste of national resource. We got severely beaten off the back of that and ended up with the most unbelievably complex funding mechanism to make sure that we didn't continue to waste resource. And although that was a really hard journey, I think it was one that ultimately really benefited our learners. And I'll just demonstrate this. So success rates, again I think they're a beast of the further education sector, they're kind of coming into schools over the last while. So just to tell you how much the pitch has turned round and it's turned round for my college and it's turned round for almost all colleges, success rates are pass rates multiplied out by retention rates. So if you've got a pass rate of 90% and a retention rate of 90%, you've got a success rate of 81%. Now that is a phenomenal achievement. I think retention rates in the FE sector in 1993 were about 40%. And you know that some retention rates in the higher education sector are worryingly low. So we're doing something right here, not only about students staying in the course, but about students achieving their qualifications at the end of the day. And the other bit, and this isn't just for me showing off on behalf of the college, although I'm delighted to do that, we are inspected under OFSTED and we were considered to be outstanding across all of these measures. Now for me who's been actually, I've been in City and Islington College since before 1993, I've actually been there since 1981 in some form or other. I think it's a huge achievement for large further education colleges to get those kinds of grades. And just to give you a sense of the size of the college, we're around 5,700 full-time students of whom this year more than 4,000 will be full-time 16- to 18-year-old students. A part-time adult students frankly is a movable feast. It depends how much money government gives us on a year-on-year basis. That was 20,000 part-time students at one time, it's 10,000 students at the other. Male, female, 70% black and ethnic minority students, which again is typical for inner London colleges, and many of our students are very poor. So 65% of our students receive Educational Maintenance Awards, and believe me, you really have to be a poor person to receive the Educational Maintenance Award. I'm delighted to say that actually both the Tories and the Lib Dans had the cutting of the Educational Maintenance Award mooted in their manifestos, and they both at the moment dropped it. It would be a disaster for us if Educational Maintenance Awards went away, because these poor young people can no longer afford to come to college. One of the downsides of FE, I don't know if that figure is quite accurate anymore, but it gives you a sense. At one point we had the best part of 2,000 courses and more than 400 qualifications. It is no great surprise that not many people understand it when you've got so many qualifications that we run. Well, it reflects on Donald's thing. Donald had that picture of which all of us have seen many times from the 14th century of the lecturer and the guy asleep in the back. That's pretty much a picture of the school I went to, a Catholic primary school in the late 50s, early 60s, and if I'd have slept in the back, that woman in the robes would have smashed me around the back of the head with a ruler. So I think that you could argue on one level things have gone backwards from that point. Therefore, when I came into the sector in that year, 1979, the first year of the Thatcher government, I'd been to, I'd let's call it 15, worked, done lots of different stuff, eventually went to university and then did a very, very poor FE teacher training qualification, really poor. So when I came to teach and I saw one of these things, I thought I'd say something about technology as it's an ART conference here, when I saw a band of machine for the first time, I thought it was a kind of a revolutionary piece of kit. I'd never seen one at university, I'd never seen one at school, and for me it kind of changed my life. But much more importantly was this, and I think this has a resonance. I've taught in university as well. That classroom that I was in was a no-go area. That was my space. Nobody went into that space other than the students and myself. All the viewing panels were sealed, senior lecturers, principal lecturers, heads of departments, none of them came into my space. And I think that was the case for FE for a very long time, and I think is still the case in large parts of higher education. And my contention to you is very few people are just naturally good teachers. I thought I was a naturally good teacher and it was only eventually when I had somebody have a look at it realised I was a pretty averagey kind of teacher who needed a lot of help. And one of the issues is teachers aren't born. The best teachers are made. They're coached. And teaching is a profession that needs constant upskilling. And when you've got the no entry and nobody coming into the classroom, it's impossible to build practice. And I was very active in the trade union and I defended our right absolutely for nobody ever to cross the threshold of my classroom. The results came out at the end of the year and in the worst colleges in truth nobody particularly looked at them. So it wasn't even the judgement was there at the year end whether you were doing well or badly. You just carried on with it the next year. Now I want to leap forward to 1993. Actually I was just thinking 1993 seems a long time ago. Actually 1993 seems no time ago to me. So Clinton and major at Maastricht so just a place 1993. 1993 was when we were cut away from local authorities. Another slide off news is that we began a journey without a compass or a map which was also true. We were teachers suddenly responsible for everything. Not just spending the money but the income, for the HR, for the IET, for the MIS, everything. The technology had moved on. The photocopier was at the heart certainly of the FE colleges I taught in. And the other bits of kit then were whiteboard which seems pretty revolutionary to me. But the thing that I just want to touch on now in terms of the technology was actually John Gray who's a retired college principal, one of the leading lights in our sector over time. John spoke at a conference back in about 1934 and John put up this slide about the MIT slide about transformation and the impact of technology. I went there as a middle manager to that conference and I thought we were absolutely nowhere in my own organisation. I had a PC back on my desk. Frankly, I didn't know what to do with it. I turned it on, somebody gave me a typing programme and I kind of tried to learn a type every night again and turned it off again. And in terms of where we were, the use of technology in my college at that time was absolutely localised. It was an individual with their PC. I know it was much more developed in higher education at that time. I think it's very interesting then to look how things have moved on and how quickly then they've moved on. And I think there's been a dramatic change. So if you take the lecture from 1350 through to the 1970s, little had changed over that hundreds of years. I think things have changed enormously in the last 20 years. So if you look at where we are on this, where you'd plot your own organisation on this scale now, I would say we're definitely all in education in and around the transformative embedded. So I would say business processes have been redesigned, business networks have been redesigned. I don't think the scope of our business has been redefined. So I don't think yet the much-heralded paradigm shift has happened. I think it's happening, but it's not there at the moment. Am I doing the time? Fine. So in terms of the transformation of the business systems, these are just some of the things, and actually I was just reading some of the abstracts in the paperwork for here. I think the stuff that electronically tracks a student from their first point of contact with an organisation through to the point at which they depart it, one, three, four, five years on, I think is there in almost all of our organisations now. So online application and enrolment, e-time-tabling, e-registers. E-registers have been incredibly important for us because we're paid pretty much in real time in further education. I remember one wag of an MIS manager saying to me years ago, do you really want to know about real-time attendance of students? Well, actually, I think the answer is yes, really. If we're here for the students, we do need to know that, and I'll come back to the implications of that. We've got self-service HR systems, all the e-management reporting, finance and electronic communication. So I would say on that business side and back to John's presentation in 1993, it is absolutely transformed, unrecognisable from the business systems that we ran back in the early 1990s. I don't think teaching and learning is transformed in the same way at all. However, and this is the critical bit, and which is why I had some issue with the conversation about lecturers being described as teachers today. I don't think an untrained lecturer is a teacher. I think they're a lecturer because teachers check learning. So this is something that came in a McKinsey report that I picked up a little while ago, and I think it's absolutely right. The qualification of an education system, schools mainly, cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. It kind of rings as a truism, but I think it is true on the school side. You may not argue the same in the HE sector, and if it's not the same in the HE sector, I'd say it's possibly because in some parts of the HE sector, the primary purpose is not teaching and learning its research, and in my organisation, the primary purpose of the organisation is teaching and learning. So what this slide, so in terms of what we've done in my college in the last 17 years, and I've been a member of the senior management team very much all that time, and the principal for nine or 10 years of those, is that we've developed an explicit culture where we talk to all of our staff about the core practice of teaching and learning, something that frankly never happened in the first 10 or 15 years of my career, and it's something we talk about how we develop our teachers and take them on a journey, and I won't go through that, but critically for me, it's got to be about values, it's got to be about what you believe in as an organisation. It's got to be here, this stuff on the right-hand side about intellectual engagement. We've got a graduate workforce in education, primary, secondary, clearly in higher education, they've got to be intellectually engaged with the project. But most importantly for me then, you've got to have processes which drive out performance. So pressing on on that, this is quite, I should have just read it in the server a couple of weeks ago, would it be much stronger this slide a few years ago, cos Arsenal aren't doing absolutely brilliantly well at the moment, but this player, Cess Fabragas, for people who don't know, was a young boy who was brought over from Spain, a very good player, and what Wenger is saying here is very much what I believe about developing teachers, that if you first thing you do to develop a player is to put them beside other good players, and what we do with new teachers is we put them beside other good and experienced teachers to learn from them, cos you don't magically develop it on your own in the classroom, and I could regale you with anecdotes about, which are shocking when I look back, about how little I check learning, and it wasn't only at the year end I realised it was a pretty disaster some of the stuff I'd done. So, what we've done is, and again there was some trade union resistance around that, because I think we've had an issue in our trade unions in further and higher education, where often they switch between, I was very active for many years, between being professional people and being blue collar workers, and I want to develop a union which has a professional dialogue around, so here are the things you've seen, lesson observation took us a long time to establish in the college, and we established initially by making it peer lesson observation. But we now have, we observe everyone every year, we record all that stuff, we monitor it if people are underperforming, we put support in to help them. Self-assessment, which I think is critical to any professional person, all of our staff write self-assessment reports, which then come up in a granular fashion to a whole college self-assessment report. We don't talk about quality much in teaching in the Soviet citizens in college, because I found that people found the term quality to be quite alienating. They didn't quite know what it meant. When you said to them, do you know what good teaching and learning is? I think people could kind of engage in that. We share best practice, and this is my point. If you focus on the practice of teaching and learning, the e-stuff, the learning technology will necessarily get folded in, because the best teachers use the best available resources that are there, and they tell other people about it. And when we took the wrong pathway for a number of years, or we had ambassadors for e-learning and IOT, who frankly were, you've got to be careful here, kind of geeky, nerdy people who were kind of interested in bells and whistles who weren't at all interested in teaching and learning. Once you turn that on its head, and you've got people talking about teaching and learning, then the e-stuff comes. One-to-one coaching, back to the football analogy. You'll know that big football clubs have got coaches for every position. Even if they recruit the best players in the world, they have coaches for every position. Training on learning styles, training on innovation, and Donald mentioned the revolutionary idea of learner feedback. Learner feedback is at the heart of what we do in further education. Last couple of slides. So this is our... ...our student portal, which we call MyCandy. Candy Assistant isn't in college. And some of this stuff, frankly, is just feeding back the business information we've captured earlier on. But the key for me here is, the shift is, I think we're doing great work with developing teachers, and I think we've got some fantastically skilled teachers. Who work inside my colleges and share that practice with other people. The bit that was missing for me was the shift for the learner. And I think now, by having really advanced and developed student portals with active data there that they can use, the power shift is beginning to move. And we're beginning to see learners now. Some of this stuff is just straightforward, the links to Moodle. Attendance and punctuality are really important for this dialogue with the learner. Message boards, none of that. I just want to go to this last. All the course information, all that stuff. I think there's nothing revolutionary about that. Although interestingly, my daughter went... Anybody from Leeds University here? Okay. My daughter went to Leeds University 30 years after I finished at Leeds University and did the same course, and frankly, nothing much had changed. And I mean it, nothing much had changed. No use of the technology. She did philosophy. Nothing, no use of the technology. And yet there were lots of opportunities to do that. So I think we've tried to do as much as we can of having a kind of a static interface for students. But the bit that's shifting it is this last side, which is an individual's personal learning plan. So this is a plan that they negotiate with their tutors. It's all online which they monitor together and it's the focus of the tutorial discussion. So what is tutorial is about? Teachers for years say tutorial is pretty much a waste of time. This is the basis on which you have a focus tutorial based around evidence and data and information. So on that personal learning plan, you've got information about their attendance, their personal goals, targets which you monitor, assignment deadlines, progress, self-assessment and all that. So you suddenly got a shift. Suddenly the student is chasing the tutor back. One minute. I won't go through the rest of that. The slides will be available afterwards. As it worked, I think it's worked brilliantly well both in terms of the student satisfaction feedback, but I was delighted to see in our staff survey 80% of our staff agree that continuous improvement is part of the college culture. And finally, my reflections. It's about a culture, a culture of teaching and learning. I've set a really high expectation vision for the college. So although my staff sometimes think I'm a bit tedious and go on about it at length, largely they're joined up. The right tools in place for take-off. You've got to give the power away. Invest in teacher development. That should say not teaching development. And watch out for the bells and whistles. We spent loads of money on bells and whistles over time as a college and as a sector that have had very little return. Okay, that's me. Very much indeed for that overview. I'm sorry to have cut you short, but I wanted to leave time for questions. There are two roving mics, and so if you have a question to ask, could you raise your hand please? Whilst you're collecting your thoughts, I've just got one to start off. You've outlined very clearly the journey your college has taken and some of the challenges it's facing. I'd be very interested to know what you think is going to happen in the next couple of years. Ooh. So would I. I think there's two bits really. I work with 16 to 18-year-old students and obviously we're all looking now at the comprehensive spending review and how that will impact on us. And where people are in terms of their journey, it will impact QG on them. We know we're going to get very serious cutbacks in the unit of our funding. We as a college have got a fantastic estate which we've already invested in. My take is we're going to, as some colleges will go down over the next period of time. There's no doubt about that. Some colleges, as in last week's Times Education Supplement, have taken out very significant borrowing to pay redundancy. That is a slippery slope the following year you've hit in your revenue curve. I think the stronger colleges will survive, although in a very different shape and they will be smaller. And I think smaller colleges and the skills funding agency will say they'll let that happen. It will be difficult, a few years. On the optimistic side, this government, I have to say, has recognized further education in a way that we've never had before. They've spoken about it being a priority for them. And I think the space that the polytechnics left around advanced vocation qualifications is one that colleges like mine will very much want to fill. We've got about 800 full-time foundation degree students. We've got a whole programme of HNC work that we've grown from this work. I see the growth of HNC, HNDs very much over the next period. Thank you. Questions on the floor, please. Could we start down at the front? There's one right in the middle. Where are we going, Mike? He's got it. Frank, my name is Bob Harrison. I'm Vice-Chair of Governors of a College in Yorkshire and Education Advisor for Toshiba. I'm really disappointed with the low numbers of turnouts. I've just gone through the delegate list. I think it's less than six people with an FE battery. What would you put that down to? Donald mentioned earlier about people in the poor mouth on things. Things are difficult and they can't get by. I don't know if I'm really honest that the sector has not engaged as a whole sector with learning technology over time. It was spoken about being part of the inspection process. It didn't come. At the moment where colleges are feeling beleaguered, my real concern is that colleges are deciding not to invest time or energy in this kind of work. I think the sector, parts of the sector, could go backwards extremely quickly if that's the case. The FE sector has been a really good news story and I think that parts has been world-class, but there's lots of countries now building up their FE. I think it's not proper engaged but it's something I want to take away. I'm chair of a national group of colleges and I think it's something we need to be. We no longer have, correct me if I'm wrong John, a sector-wide conference around learning technologies at all. The thing that was NILTA. The organisation that you were talking about, NILTA, was incorporated in the association of colleges and there is a so-called technology panel which is overseeing developments. But I think I concur with your last assertion really that the sector has been so stressed in so many ways recently that it's lost sight of the potential gains from really going for these kinds of developments. Question from over here. It was just really a follow-on from that that obviously John and Frank will be aware that the back to conferences that have traditionally happened there will be something in February focusing on technology for the FE and skills arena across the FE and wider skills but I think publicity hasn't yet gone out. But certainly there is something and we're certainly looking at from our perspective at just TechList we're looking at how to look at things like safeguarding. Safeguarding a massive agenda where the E part of it is quite frightening for a lot of colleges how we'll put some of those things in place. So there will be a sector-wide initiative that we need to pick up on and I know Seb will be very well tuned into that from an alt's perspective because it's absolutely key that we start to which is why I hope Donald will pick up on the point this morning. We must start and look at what goes on in schools, what's going on in FE and what's going on in universities and actually bring the best of that together to make some voices there. One moment. Very quickly please. Just to say this is an invaluable opportunity. There's a world of difference between a vector or any other agency stimulated activity and activity that comes from the sector. I agree with that. Let me take the opportunity to say alt I think could do a great deal in a way that vector and other agencies of that kind can't to really try and support it. Could we take a question down the front please then we'll have one remotely. Nigel Ecclesfield another one of the disappearing vector staff and like Frank started in Further Education in 1978 so I've been through the same changes. I think in terms of your characterisation that's relatively lacking in optimism about technology in the sector through our national surveys over the last few years there are a number of things that are coming out that show that there's some very healthy things going on in the sector for instance there's a very strong correlation between the responses we get from managers in colleges and staff to separate surveys people answering the questions independently there seems to be a great sharing of views about the role and the value of technology for learning in the future and FE is a sector that in 1996 where 5% of colleges had Moodle as their learning platform in the last survey which was completed this year in April over 98% of colleges have moved from reliance on external providers of learning platforms mostly Blackboard and WebCT to developing implementing and utilising Moodle as their learning platform and I'd say that that was a very great success one of the problems we've had if you like is that there are three national there were three national agencies for technology in further education there was NILTA when it was by itself then it joined with AOC there's JISC who have substantial responsibilities through the regional support centres for the work and there was BECTA that moved from being an institution and practitioner based role in 2006 to being involved in strategy there is a need to pull all of this together but the picture isn't entirely gloomy and one of the things that may help colleges through the difficult years over the next three or four years will be the skills and ability to work with technology that exists in the sector it's just not pulled together I'm an optimist by nature and I'm optimistic about this stuff where I concur with John is one of the upsides about the removal and I'm very sad to see it back to go is that we need more peer to peer work what I think was impressive about this conference is it's largely a peer network and I think there is a role for Elf but I think that into the future there's great practice in our sector we're not sharing it with each other enough sometimes it's intermediated and I think the time for intermediation is gone for us now for financial reasons so I think there's a space, a big space for Elf and we'll go back seven and have a look at that over the time I think Excellent and we've got a number of people who are listening in remotely and I'd like to just take one question from a remote listener who's got time So this question is from something called Bix and it is how do you stop the bells and whistles being brought into the institution wasting money and time Well I think that's going to be sorted out for us by somebody else actually there isn't going to be much money around but I think the key bit is by focusing on what for me it's always about when we stop talking about the add-ons and really focused on what good teaching and learning was that sorted it out for us, that was the sift so that would be my advice on that Okay on that note about good teaching and learning I'd like to thank you very much for that excellent session