“What kind of a leader am I? What a horrible question,” laughs Jim Metcalfe, chief executive of the College Development Network.
“I think my colleagues would say I’m pretty calm. I try to be quite relaxed and informal…This all sounds a bit clichéd, doesn’t it? But it’s true: I don’t do standing in front of people and shouting, I just think there’s no real point to it. I do like informality.
“It’s important to me that people are working in project teams, and around tasks they are actually interested in and not just sort of doing rinse-and-repeat work. I think it leads to a small team approach and clearer focus on outcomes.”
CDN may be a small team, and Metcalfe may be a relaxed leader, but in Scotland, his organisation packs a punch. It plays a crucial role in supporting colleges with leadership and staff training, the development of sector-led research and bringing stakeholders together to collectively tackle challenges facing the post-16 sector.
These challenges are mounting up - and gaining pace. From the climate emergency to mental health, and from poverty to systems leadership, a lot of work must be done. And, being at the helm of CDN, Metcalfe is determined to act.
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Metcalfe was born in Grimsby, before the family moved to Nottingham when he was young. Both his parents were probation officers, and as a result, he had an early exposure to social transformation.
He remembers playing pool with other boys in the local community centre where his parents worked with clients on probation orders - and once even visited a prison with his dad before it officially opened. Looking back, he says it all felt “perfectly normal”, and he never encountered anything unusual or violent.
Both of Metcalfe’s parents were engaged in their trade unions, and his mum in particular was a real activist. The notion of social justice, he says, was a major part of his upbringing. At school, Metcalfe describes himself as a “loner” to begin with, and says he enjoyed English, languages and history.
Metcalfe’s love of history led to his going on to study the subject at the University of Oxford - an experience that, he says, was quite different from his life in Nottingham.
“I was completely unprepared for it; it was a very big change,” he says. “I went to college with people who were Old Etonians and people who were in the Royal this and that. It was quite unusual. I picked my college based on the fact it was called Lincoln College and I came from the East Midlands. It was friendly and pretty, and my nan liked the picture of the courtyard. That was the sum of expert decision making that went into where I chose to go.”
At university, he says he had more student life than studying history, and was active with the Labour club and the student union.
His extracurricular activities sparked a desire to work in politics, and upon graduating, Metcalfe went to work for South Yorkshire MP John Healey (who was also the adult skills minister at the time) as a constituency caseworker. It was a “pit community”, which, having come from Nottinghamshire, Metcalfe felt comfortable in. In Healey’s office, he worked with a lot of mineworkers, as well as on adult education policy.
Three years working as a Labour Party organiser followed, and he campaigned in the 2005 election. It’s a time about which Metcalfe describes himself as being “a dreadful friend”.
“It was all-consuming. I had and still have a really nice group of friends from university, but I was a dreadful friend in my twenties because I missed everything. I was never there at people’s engagement parties, because I was always working all the weekends and all over the country and doing by-elections,” he says. “It was a lot of fun, but it was consuming. And people who work in it don’t see anything outside it. It’s a completely sealed life.”
It was while working for the Labour Party that Metcalfe met his wife - “we sat next to each other during a by-election in Leicester” - and it was her career move, as the director of the Scottish Labour Party’s office, that led the family to move to Scotland. “She is great. She’s a Glaswegian and she manages to do millions of things at once,” he laughs.
Metcalfe got a job running the consistency office for Gordon Brown while he was prime minister. Brown left a lasting impression on Metcalfe, who says he doesn’t have “any horror stories” from their time working together.
“He was always somebody whom I really admired from a distance. I think his motivations and values are ones I share. He was a great person to work for,” he says.
In 2011, Metcalfe left politics and went to work for the Carnegie Trust as senior policy officer. He worked his way up to head of development, and still speaks about the trust with passion. He says he loved the project-based approaches to policy, and highlights Enterprising Minds, which puts students at the heart of businesses. It was during the project that he really got to know colleges for the first time, and says he was struck by how friendly and positive everyone in the sector was - and how eager they were to get involved with national projects.
And indeed, with the help of colleges and local authorities, Metcalfe set up a UK-wide set of skills competitions which allowed young people to have shop space in town centres to test business ideas.
Leaving the Carnegie Trust to go and work for the College Development Network was difficult, he admits. “It was one of those places where you’re always six months away from doing something else exciting. So you can never quite see yourself leaving, because there’s always a big thing around the corner,” he says.
But he wanted to challenge himself, to see if he could take a chief executive role - and CDN was a perfect fit. Metcalfe moved there in 2017. He says it was “pretty terrifying”, and praises his board and the chair, for taking on an “apprentice” as a leader.
There was a lot of work to be done, which Metcalfe says he was thankful for. In the first three years, he was keen to firmly establish who the organisation was for, who it served. So, who is that? Everyone working in a Scottish college, he says: there is training and support for all staff, whether you’re a chief executive, lecturer or support staff member. Now, CDN has entered the second stage of his plan: where the organisation shouts out about the work they do, why they do it, and the issues they want to tackle.
One of the major challenges Metcalfe has set his sights on is developing systems leadership. He says as the post-school system in Scotland becomes more integrated, institutions will need to work more collaboratively with each other - and leaders will need to develop a new skill set.
“It will require people who are involved in leading organisations in the college system having a more advanced set of collaborative skills, about how to find your place in the project or your bit of the end result. It’s quite a challenge, and also how to contribute your resources as a piece in a wider jigsaw,” he says.
Metcalfe also highlights a need for more training around blended learning, and says that while college staff have been amazing at upskilling digitally, it’s not the same as having the skills to plan a long-lasting blended-learning curriculum. Another key area for staff development is around mental health provision, he says.
“We’ve got an absolute mountain to climb on mental health support and services as a country, and as an education system, we’ve only just begun the journey,” he says. “It’s going to involve staff all over colleges, student associations, students themselves working together: it’s going to be a skills challenge, it’s going to be about competence and awareness, about infrastructure and design of learning environments, whether they’re online or physical. It’s going to be enormous.”
And of course, there’s the climate emergency, too. But Metcalfe isn’t despondent: in fact, he’s the opposite, and is absolutely determined it’s those working in the Scottish college sector who can be the solution to these challenges.
“I went to a posh university, and I recently saw an article by some academic who says the reason kids go from private schools to top universities is because they’re brighter. I can tell you it’s a load of rubbish,” he says.
“I was at college at the same time as plenty of government leaders and so on. Are they profoundly more intelligent than the students I’ve met, and the people I’ve met teaching, in Scottish colleges? No, absolutely not, it’s nonsense.
“Like many other people, I’m personally quite frustrated by the Cinderella sector narrative, the second tier, we are a feeder system - I just don’t buy it. This perception of the college sector in the UK just does not accord with my experience of it. It’s not what I see, and I want to try and help change it.
“There’s a lot of good stuff going on around the whole of the UK now about doing this. As well as doing our core work of helping to train staff and enhance parts of the system, and pass on knowledge more quickly, a big role for CDN is to make sure people outside the system know colleges are an integral part of building outstanding education for all.”
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