At 16 I left school and began following in my father's footsteps, rearing cattle. But I was soon keen to pursue other options, so at 18 I took a place at my local college, East Tyrone Technical College. I did a business course and that took me on to a law degree at Newcastle University. I never practised law. Instead I went straight into teaching company and industrial law at Central London Polytechnic. Six years later I moved into further education, advising colleges across the country on their relationship with clients as part of the responsive college programme at a college in Bristol.
Professor Julian Birkinshaw, from the London Business School, sparked my interest in entrepreneurship in colleges. He was speaking at a course I was on for aspiring principals, and made some very interesting points on the differences in culture at Enron and BT. He talked about how Enron lost its way because it became about making money for money's sake, whereas BT had a very strong culture of collaboration.
That fascinated me because, without working with acceptable loss and risk, it's going to be very difficult for the further education sector to truly innovate in a global market. In a constrained environment, where public funding inevitably continues to contract, it has always been my contention that leaders will need the skills to create wealth and seek resources, rather than simply spend public money. We need to enable leaders of colleges to take more risk, albeit managed risk.
I secured a research grant from the Learning and Skills Improvement Service to look at the role of entrepreneurship in further education. That took me to the United States and allowed me to see what worked. More and more, it convinced me that changing the way students learn would serve their needs – and those of the economy – better. The great news for me was that a number of other principals joined forces with me to embrace that reform and invest in it. The creation of Gazelle was essentially a dynamic statement about change. It then really accelerated as many more principals joined.
The pace and explosive nature of entrepreneurial colleges has been driven by the recognition that the employment sector was not going to pick up the aspirations of graduates from colleges in anything like the same degree that it might have done a decade earlier. As the global need for self-reliance, wealth creation and for students to create value for themselves, grows, the Gazelle agenda has been embraced by more organisations.
The single most significant factor over the past couple of years with Gazelle is the combined resources of the colleges. It's enabled us to produce the Future Possible report, which has gained global recognition as a strong statement on the need for entrepreneurial colleges to be part of the further education landscape.
Without investment I don't think we would have progressed the way we have. Now we're working with 21 entrepreneurs, including people like Peter Jones, founder of the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy.
This year I relinquished my chief executive role at North Hertfordshire College so I could become full time at Gazelle. We now have an organisation that is investing in leadership, in curriculum change, in student opportunity. Our impact report - albeit only one year in - demonstrates just how many students have been touched by that agenda.
My idea of entrepreneurship is not about grand scale Richard Branson role models. It's about saying to a young person, if you can get to the place where you can earn £1,000 a month through having your own landscaping business, then that's a route to being economically active in society. And from my experience, there are very few students who wouldn't prefer to learn in a more active environment.
