In the run up to Christmas I thought I would try to showcase some our business development team, assuming they will let me take pictures of them…… First up is Fay Holmes our Centre Manager in Spalding. Fay is pictured with someone she says is the “fertility chicken” I daren’t even ask about that. Fay and her team have done a fantastic job during the trials and tribulations of setting up a new centre. You can contact the centre on: 01775 715988

This week looks a little quieter, which is welcome after the last few weeks. Staff meetings today then across to Manby to meet the Acting Chief Executive at East Lindsey District Council tomorrow. Wednesday I will be at our Spalding Centre all day, Thursday we have a learner representatives meeting and Friday a College Management Team.

This week I will mostly be………. Attending a national meeting of regional representatives of college business development managers in London, meeting with a partner organisation, attending our College in Action event at the Red Lion Quarter in Spalding, visiting City College Norwich with our Principal, speed networking on Thursday night in Spalding, and conducting a partner file audit on Friday and attending a Senior Leadership Team meeting. Aside from all of that I am working on some economic benefit data and a draft of a revised employer engagement strategy. So that should keep me out of trouble!

Very pleased to see people of the United States making (what I think) is the right choice of president, you had us all worried for a while!

Apologies for the picture I just liked it so much! A lot going on at the moment so I am struggling to get on the blog.

I usually steer clear of politics but feel I should be safe enough talking about the US, and I know from the website stats we get a lot visitors from there. Just one question, are 47% of you really going to vote for Mitt Romney when you could vote for Barack Obama? Looking at it from this side of the Atlantic it’s hard to say much in favour of Romney, I suppose he looks clean and tidy, but that’s about it…… I know we haven’t always made the best political decisions in the UK, but that’s usually been because we didn’t have much of choice anyway.

Anyway, the week ahead? Tomorrow I will be attending an RAF event for suppliers, Wednesday sees a meeting with members of the Public Sector Compact and National Apprenticeship Service, followed by an evening development session with governors. Thursday I am in Skegness for a business breakfast and a meeting of the Skegness Partnership, followed by Skegness Tourism and Marketing Partnership, and Friday I will be spending the day in Spalding at our new centre.

I was very pleased to hear about two former students who have done very well in their chosen careers.

I know from the experience I had with my own children that considerable pressure can be put on young people to remain at school when they reach 16. For some this is the right thing for them to do but for many others they need the more adult environment that a college can provide, so very often the learner will leave mid-year without a qualification and with a real sense of failure. If you think you or a family member have made the wrong choice it’s not too late to talk to Boston College we still have a few places in most areas. You can find out more here.

We were very pleased to welcome John Cridland CBE Director General of the CBI (pictured centre) to the College this morning. In an hour-long meeting with sixty members of our Strategic Business Network John talked about his family links to the Boston area, which go back over many years, and his work with businesses and government. John will be attending a cabinet meeting tomorrow at Downing Street and agreed to take forward some of the issues the network raised with him. John made the point that colleges, Boston in particular, were well placed to bridge the gap between the needs of employers and the current qualification framework.

Well its just about a year since I launched my blog which was my attempt to e-lead from the front. Its been quite hard work and some weeks have not seen many posts but I am very pleased with the statistics:

• 4,136 visits to the blog
• 148 posts by me
• 63 comments by visitors
• 123 followers
• Visitors from 20 different countries

I am not convinced the standard of my posts have improved dramatically but perhaps I have got a little faster at producing them, I do read other blogs and sometimes feel they are more interesting than the things I am writing about, thats life I guess. Over the next year I hope to get back to doing more updates on my working week and possibly some features and pictures of team members.

Thanks for following

Paul

Good luck to Skegness and other Lincolnshire towns and villages when they are visited tomorrow by the Britain in Bloom judges. It is very hard for local authorities to maintain good gardens in these times of austerity and along with the participating private enterprises it is to be hoped their efforts are rewarded. I remember when I started my horticultural apprenticeship on the seafront at Skegness around 35 gardeners were employed by the local authority in the Skegness area and I think it is probably less than 5 now. One local authority run garden I would definitely recommend visiting is the one at Ayscoughfee Hall in Spalding (see above). South Holland District Council are to be commended for the way these gardens have been maintained they are very nice indeed. An ideal time to visit would be during the South Holland Food Festival over the weekend of 11th\12th August.

I think I must be getting old the years just seem to fly past, I can’t believe that all the full-time learners have finished and we are into another staff development week, it only seems like yesterday they all arrived. Many of those new arrivals were nervous, a lot of them lacked confidence and one or two didn’t really know how to behave in the adult environment that college provides, but I am pleased to say that, on the evidence that I have seen, they have all grown and changed for the better, I think that’s what I love about FE.

When I first joined the college, 10 years ago now, the summer period was a bit quieter than term time, I could generally spend some time tidying the office up and dealing with any paperwork that had backed up, this isn’t true anymore and often the summer seems even busier, in particular relating to the in-depth planning we do and our work with employers. Not complaining too much though as most of us (including me) will get to take some leave.

Sad to see the latest report from the British Education Research Association which suggests that pupils coming from a poor background are still struggling at school compared to richer peers. Rightly enough the report points towards the need for a joined up approach across health, housing, education and employment to tackle this, but there seems little chance of this happening. The last government meant well with its introduction of Sure Start and local children’s centre’s, and the current government correctly identified that the delivery wasn’t focused enough on the needy. But unfortunately I think the reductions in funding across the public sector are likely to make any further progress on this unlikely, we could stick with the idea that “efficiency savings” will deliver the savings required and protect frontline services from harm, but does anyone really believe that?

Great to see such a warm welcome for the Olympic torch in Skegness with estimates of a crowd nearing 50,000. Unfortunately I was too busy to get out and see it when it came through Boston, although possibly I did a little better than a colleague who went to watch and missed it because of the crowds!

Very inspiring stories from some of the torch bearers, in particular those who have battled illness or war wounds, I can see very well why some of them were chosen.

Well I suppose it`s my own fault for taking some leave, but this week is particularly busy. I will be taking part in eight performance monitoring reviews, interviewing for an economics lecturer, meeting with the East Coast Destination Management Organisation at Butlins, attending groups looking at higher education and innovation, having discussions with two of our partners, chairing a Public Sector Compact meeting, attending a college management team and senior leadership team meeting and having six more planned meetings with staff. I must admit though that I did have a very relaxing break (see picture above) in the Almeria area of Spain. New experience of the week was accidentally wandering on to a nudist beach! Hopefully I can write something more detailed later on in the week, in the meantime I am very pleased to see that my blog has had more than 3,000 visitors, perhaps I should go on leave more often?

Paul

Good news for Skegness as a recent study presented to the British Psychological Society shows that whilst being outdoors anywhere has positive benefits for people the most positive come from being at the seaside. I spent many days, in my youth, playing on the beach and even now any area of water has a strong attraction for me so I can well understand this. The report says that people have an “innate preference” for the sights and sounds of water, a good job I suppose as we are an island nation.

My longer suffering blog readers will remember when I wrote about the Priory Academy in Lincoln, which had (at that time) caused some controversy by purchasing a £1.9m château in France for, er, educational visits……  At the time I said that I thought academies and free schools would continue to dominate the news, but I didn’t think it would be the same one. Its seems that following a Department for Education investigation into financial management the Chief Executive of the Priory Federation has resigned, unfortunately there are no current plans to release the report on the investigation into the public domain, which I think is a shame. Another article claims that the Chief Executive was being paid more than £200k a year, surely making him one of the highest paid public sector employees in Lincolnshire, if not the highest paid. I can’t actually think of an organisation that would be paying more than that, can you?

If you are able to have some time off over Easter I do hope you find it relaxing. I will be taking some leave so that will limit my blogging opportunities. This week has been very busy and I have been undertaking numerous college planning activities although on Thursday I did get out to the Spalding Business Network, and to meet a valued colleague in Skegness.

I was very interested to read that universities are to be asked to design new A Levels, I have to say if I was given the choice now between doing a couple of A Levels or a degree I would see the degree as the easier option, just because it doesn’t have an exam at the end, so I am not sure if universities are best placed to do this.  Unfortunately once again it also reinforces the idea that A Levels are the prefered route to university potentially undermining the vocational pathway. I suppose we should be relieved that the universities have not been asked to redesign apprenticeships, I’m not sure how well an apprenticeship in philosophy or The Beatles would go down with employers!

Very interesting story today on the BBC news website. A recent report suggests that the UK is leading the way in internet based commerce with it now contributing 8.3% to our economy, the highest amount of any of the G20 countries. With 13.5% of all purchases being conducted over the internet (expected to rise to 23% by 2016) it is easy to see why our traditional high street based retailers are suffering. Researchers are predicting even faster growth in our web-based economy than those of the US and China. Clearly these findings have implications for retailers but they also matter to those of who have to plan and deliver education and training. Colleges saw a number of boom years in the delivery of basic IT based training and this has now fallen away, over the coming years it is likely demand will increase again, but the courses will be linked to E-commerce and of a more specialist nature.

It been a very interesting week in the news around the involvement of the private sector in the delivery of support and training for the unemployed. First up we had a story about demonstrations at a Tesco store linked to its involvement in a government scheme to help unemployed young people, which some protestors described as “slave labour”. This led to Tesco and a number of other companies expressing doubts about the scheme, and some pulling out. This was followed by the news that four former employees at A4E, who deliver the governments welfare to work programme, have been arrested as part of a fraud enquiry.

I make no judgements about any of the above, but I think the drive to achieve targets at any cost, and the beliefs that bigger is always best and the private sector has all the answers will always cause problems for government. At the college we are fortunate to have some excellent and successful private sector partners, and I feel the key to that success is local control which lies within the public sector. The public sector is some way from being perfect, but it has services to provide, not shareholders to please. It is reported that Emma Harrison, the owner of A4E paid herself £8.6 million in the last year, that is from public money that was meant to support getting people back into work.

I was lucky enough to attend a briefing yesterday for this years East Lindsey SO Festival. The festival, due to begin on June 22nd is an exciting extravaganza of cutting edge arts related events. More details can be found here. Another video below:

Bit of a milestone this weekend as we clocked up over a thousand views of the blog. The stats show that most of these come from google searches, so I suspect they are coming from outside the college. I have only publicised the blog once to college staff so whilst I hope we are getting some visits from staff I don’t think they are a significant number. The busiest day for total visits was September 16th with 44 views and we have had a  couple of days with none at all. I have published 75 posts and received 19 comments, some comments have come from around the world, but mostly from the UK. It had been my aim to post every working day, but with hindsight that was always going to be a challenge, and I now post 2-3 times a week. I still think that I need to spend more time on the quality of posts, rather than just ensuring there is a post and I must admit some of the other blogs that I have read appeared, at least to me, to be more interesting than mine, that said, I have received some favourable comments about the blog from external contacts and that has been very pleasing. On the wider topic of e-marketing the college has also gained some work through my use of LinkedIn, which you may recall I was quite dubious about. So the experiment continues………..