It’s 8am on Monday and the college principal is just sitting down at her desk. Staring out of the window at the car park she’s looked at for more than a decade, everything looks the same: cars and bikes pull in, lecturers get out. They wave hello to each other and discuss what they got up to over the weekend. Yes, everything looks the same, but the reality is that things are very different.

On Friday, the principal left the building as the leader of one college. Today, she entered the building as the leader of three after a merger with two further education providers in the local area was finalised.

It’s been a long journey, years in the making, amid rigorous consultation.

But, despite this lengthy process, the principal is anxious. There’s still a long way to go in terms of the three providers truly feeling as one. Luckily, there are lots of leaders in the sector that this principal can turn to for advice.

According to combined data from the Department for Education and the Association of Colleges, 189 college-to-college mergers have taken place in England since 1993 (see box, opposite). The reasons for merging vary. It may be that two colleges within a similar geographical area decide that they can better serve the local community together. In other cases, a more successful college may merge with a struggling or failing college to secure its future.

The process is hugely complex: different pay and conditions between staff members can cause issues, as can competing provision at the merging institutions, and differences in culture and leadership.

The key to a successful college merger

So, what can make or break a college merger? What pitfalls should leaders avoid? And what should they absolutely ensure they do?

Audrey Cumberford is the principal of Edinburgh College. A decade ago, she oversaw the merger of three FE colleges in the West of Scotland - Reid Kerr College, Clydebank College and the Inverclyde campuses of James Watt College - to form West College Scotland.

It was one merger of many across the country at a time when Scottish government policy saw 40 colleges shrink to 26.

Cumberford says that when it comes to mergers, leaders should focus on three key areas: people, culture and communication.

“The consultation and communication around [the merger] was right up there as the number one priority for me: you cannot do enough of it,” she says.

“Constant communication at every single stage, even if you don’t know what is happening, is vital.

“I know there’s also the operational mechanics, which are really, really hard to work through, but you know that it can be done, whereas the people, the culture and the communication are what makes it a success or not.”

In Guernsey, three post-16 education providers - Guernsey College of Further Education, GTA University Centre and the Institute of Health and Social Care Services - are currently merging to form the Guernsey Institute. Louise Misselke, principal of Guernsey College, agrees with Cumberford that culture and people need to be at the heart of merger plans.

“We’ve got a very large organisation in the college of further education, then two much smaller parts, and what is really important is that they don’t feel like it was a massive takeover,” she says.

“We want everyone to feel that it’s three organisations coming together as one to develop a new culture, new ways of working, and we are equal partners, collaborating together to make sure the new Guernsey Institute works really well.”

The institute has had a strong brand from day one, hosting frequent “Together as One” sessions for the staff to begin fostering a sense of community.

The merger is also being supported by the charity Career Colleges Trust, which has helped to facilitate shared projects with a mixture of staff. Learning resources teams have come together to plan what the new library will look like, for example, along with curriculum teams shaping future courses together and digital teams looking at a blended learning offer.

Jacki Hughes, the institute’s executive principal, says that working with staff to create a shared culture is vital for retention during the inevitable upheaval that mergers bring. “Culture evolves, and we use phrases like ‘evolution and not revolution’, so that staff feel secure and confident about this merger,” she says.

“Our staff are such a precious resource to us. If we lose a principal or an engineering lecturer, we can’t just get another one, because we’re on a small island, so the investment in collaboration and looking after staff’s wellbeing has been crucial.”

Buy-in from the community as well as staff is absolutely vital, says Hughes. To ensure the community welcomes the new institute, she and her team are currently putting a lot of resources into outreach projects.

“We are a very connected community so we’ve made sure to really engage with our wider stakeholders.

“We’ve done simple things: we opened a shop in town, and invited members of the community to come in and get information on what the new institute means for them; we’ve got a few events in the summer to promote the transformation we’re going through; and when we do open the new campus, we will carry on with stakeholder, student, parental and employer engagement.

“It is a neverending conversation with the local community,” she explains.

A fine line

However, Cumberford points out that there is also a fine line to tread when it comes to efforts to win people around.

On reflection, she believes that her determination to get staff on board, no matter what, may not have been the best approach.

“From the beginning, I took the decision that it was really important to win the hearts and minds of the staff, and to take the staff with me and with us,” she says.

“To do that takes longer and some of the other college mergers took a different approach. [The leaders] said: ‘This is what’s going to happen and it’s going to happen now’. They went through the change very quickly in a command-and-control approach.

“They got through the pain more quickly but I probably drew the pain out because I really just felt so strongly that, whenever we could, we had to try to take staff with us.”

Reassuring staff can be tough, agrees Misselke, as people are understandably anxious about what the merger will mean for them - and this is something that leaders will need to bear in mind.

“With any kind of change in any organisation, there are going to be some people who are really nervous,” she says. Taking the time to sensitively address these concerns will be a crucial step, then.

Part of that process of offering reassurance should be to clearly set out the benefits of the merger, Cumberford suggests.

Making the benefits explicit to all stakeholders is a step that can often be overlooked but is key to success. And those benefits can be significant, she adds.

“Creating colleges that have not only considerable size but scale and scope, and reach and influence, is really important and would have been almost impossible to achieve as 40 smaller institutions [in Scotland],” she says.

College mergers lead to bigger college groups, which means more students and more staff. In most cases, an increase in funding then follows, as well as - arguably - an increased influence over government policy.

And when the group covers a larger geographical area, this allows for collaboration with a broader range of employers, increasing the scope of opportunities for students.

Misselke agrees that the benefits of a merger ultimately outweigh the challenges, at least in her context.

As well as bringing Guernsey’s colleges in line with the government’s ambitions for further education, she hopes the merger will make it easier to align provision with the needs of the local community.

“When you look at the Skills for Jobs White Paper, there is a lot of stuff around making sure qualifications are legitimised by local employers - that’s very important to our local context,” she says.

“We are a small island. It is very difficult to go anywhere else for qualifications and training, so we need to be able to work really closely with our local industry sectors and our employers.

“Bringing together the three providers means we are able to offer all of that to everyone on the island, now and going forward to what will be the future demand of technical and vocational skills,” adds Misselke. “The merger means that we’re a much better match for our local industries, our local employers and, most importantly, our learners.”

Kate Parker is an FE reporter at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 9 July 2021 issue under the headline “United we stand”