When Stuart Rimmer got a scholarship to grammar school aged 11, he found himself caught between two worlds. He was from the “poor end of town” and his mates from the estate gave him stick for going to the posh school, while the “posh kids” didn’t accept him as one of their own.

As he progressed through secondary education, he found a group of boys who were in the same boat as him, and together they formed a rock band, Overdrive.

“I always say, I held a guitar, I never played it. I always thought it made me look cool, and I was the singer in the band as well, so I was a natural frontman,” he laughs. 

“We all dreamed of making it big, but dreams are dangerous things, aren’t they? Because they don’t always come true, and the reality of life takes over. We were never quite good enough.”

Rimmer may not have made it as the frontman of Overdrive, but he now is a frontman, nonetheless, as chief executive and principal of East Coast College. And as for not being good enough - Rimmer’s recent MBE for services to education and the community in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, during the Covid-19 pandemic and his Tes award for FE leader of the year prove otherwise. 

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Rimmer was born in Lancaster, and has an older brother. The family lived in holiday flats, which his mum ran, and his dad worked in an office.

Growing up in a block of holiday flats opened Rimmer’s eyes to the world around him: “The house was always full of really interesting folks, and we used to chat to them and learn about all sorts of different jobs,” he says. The need to live by the coast has stayed with him throughout his life - there’s “something unique” about seaside towns that go through a cycle of good and bad times, Rimmer says. 

‘A product of the FE college system’ 

He went to a small Catholic school, and says he was always interested in school and learning - “I was always picking books up and learning things, and I wasn’t really bothered what it was - I just loved to read” - but by the time he’d progressed through a grammar school education, and reached A levels, things had changed. He was asked to leave the school’s sixth form because he was “an angry young man who didn’t like authority”. 

Rimmer went to work for a textile factory as a van driver - but he still believed in the power of education, and while at the factory, he negotiated with his boss to be able to go to Lancaster and Morecambe College one day a week on an access course.

“I’m genuinely a product of the FE system. It gave me an opportunity where the traditional system didn’t. So every year, with the student award ceremonies, it’s the access ones I’ll never miss,” he explains. “I hate the second chance narrative sometimes, because I think it puts FE into a really weird place. But it’s about creating opportunities that are better fitted. I didn’t fit this kind of neat box the world wanted me in.

“In FE, I remember going into an English classroom one day and there was a punk in one corner and a granny in another, and there’s something just lovely about everyone coming together to learn.”

Rimmer continued to work at the factory while at college, and worked his way up to a management position. He calls his time at the factory a “real baptism on fire”, but a great apprenticeship in leadership. “When I’d go to the managing director with a problem, he would say to me, ‘Will it save me money or make sales go up?’ And I probably still use a version of it today,” he says.

After a few years, Rimmer began to look around for other jobs, keen to earn more money and progress. But on every application form, they asked for a degree - and so he returned to education again, going to Teesside University to study philosophy and English. 

He treated university like a job - studying nine to five Monday to Friday, and then having the weekends off. He went on to do a master’s in enterprise, and worked at a local nightclub as a bouncer to pay his way through the course. There, he says, was part two of his apprenticeship in leadership. 

“You learn conflict, you see people who can’t manage their emotions, you learn when to step forward and when to step back. You learn about when to apply some grace, and then when to apply some grunt,” he says. “I learned just as much about leadership there as I learned anywhere else, stood on the door of a nightclub at two o’clock in the morning.”

From university, Rimmer went to work in insurance, but calls the whole experience “soulless” and quickly changed path to teacher training. He got his PGCE in secondary education at Sunderland University, but was determined to teach business to adults, and took his first teaching post at Newcastle College. 

Going home to further education

At the time, the college was led by Jackie Fisher, who Rimmer describes as “the most inspirational, voracious leader of the current FE generation”. “It was like going to play for a Premiership football club without knowing you were doing it,” he says. “Automatically, I had this amazing training of how to be a great FE manager and leader.” He says Fisher taught him to have an “unrelenting pursuit of excellence”, and the importance of a visionary goal for your college, and for FE. 

Rimmer went on to lead the business and psychology department, and after three years moved across to where it all started, Lancaster and Morecambe College, as the quality and improvement manager. 

“I spent seven years taking them from a fairly low position in the league tables to Ofsted good and to a top-10 position in league tables. I got to work alongside a couple of teachers who taught me A-level philosophy and started me off on my journey. It was like coming home,” he remembers. “I understood the place, how to work there and the narrative of the young people who came to study with us, because I’d done it myself.”

In 2014, aged 39, Rimmer became principal of Great Yarmouth College. Under his leadership, the merger of Great Yarmouth FE College with Lowestoft FE College and Lowestoft Sixth Form College to create East Coast College was viewed as hugely successful: in 2020, Ofsted graded the group as “good” - before this, Lowestoft College had not been rated “good” by Ofsted for more than 30 years.

The merger was tough, Rimmer admits, and it left him exhausted. But he believes that if the purpose for merging is right, then it’s worth it. 

“It all goes back to: what’s the reason for doing it? If the only reason is because somebody in Whitehall is pointing a finger, it’s not good enough. You’ve got to genuinely believe the thing is better as a result of it, and I always believed that with our mergers,” he says. “I believed that culturally we’d be in a better place, and we are. I believed that financially we’d be in a better place, and we are, and I really thought quality would get significantly better, and we’ve now got some really good provision, which is exciting.”

Key to Rimmer’s success as a leader is his black labrador, Murphy, he believes. “Murphy is who keeps me sane. He comes to college with me, and I’ve found he really humanises me as a leader, because sometimes you can be walking down the corridor looking a bit grumpy, but when I’m with the dog, people can talk to the dog, and then by accident, they get into conversation,” he says.

“A couple of years ago, we did this thing called ‘Wisdom of Murphy’ and it was all about how we could use being more Murphy as an idea of calming down: it was about being more mindful, present, happy to see people and genuinely letting things go if you’ve had a bad day.”

When it came to the leadership category at the Tes FE Awards, Rimmer’s work on leadership of mental health made him a stand-out winner for the judges. As well as chairing the Association of Colleges’ mental health and wellbeing policy group, which published a major report into student mental health this year, he also personally published a research report for the Further Education Trust for Leadership, focusing specifically on staff mental health and ensuring the publication of much-needed research on mental health in FE.

Leadership and the importance of mental health

It’s an area he is clearly passionate about, and determined to drive forward. 

“Mental health isn’t something which can be bolted on to strategy, policy or delivery - it’s got to be embedded. It has to become mainstream, and we need to challenge ourselves daily about how are we setting up things, whether it’s the working day for staff or having meetings in the evenings or how we run governance or how we run introducing policy from government with late change, which we often do, with the Friday night DfE [Department for Education] bulletin, all of which needs to shift a little bit. I worry there are now people in FE who don’t want leadership roles because of the pressure,” he says. 

“I think we’ve created roles which are unsustainable. So we can do all the training and awareness and the sort of nice stuff, but if we don’t fundamentally restructure how we think about how we run things, I don’t think it’s sustainable, and it’s not healthy. Healthy teachers will deliver better lessons.”

Rimmer says he’s worried about next term, and the toll Covid-19 and the after-effects will continue to have on staff mental health. If he could have one thing from apprenticeships and skills minister Gillian Keegan, it would be long-term stability.

“Our sector needs stability, which can only come through having a long-term view, and long-term funding allocations, so we know what everything’s going to look like two to three years from now. FE leaders are great at planning once we know,” he says.

“When it comes to late decisions with late money, I prefer not to have the money at all. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but don’t tell me about a catch-up fund in the week before it needs to be delivered. I’m not interested, it’s too late. Don’t tell me about level 3 retraining funds for adults the week before it needs to start,” he says. 

“If we could be given one thing, it would be a long-term sustainability, where it would allow colleges to plan curriculum over three years, four years, five years; it would allow us to do development work over that long period as well. It would allow us to make pay awards for staff, which would give people that personal stability. It would give FE a lot of confidence and give us stability, and then results will follow. Just trust that as a process.”

As a sector, Rimmer says FE isn’t very good at “saying no to things”, and needs to stand up for itself more. 

“We are quite subservient. As a sector, we doff our cap to those in power, and say, ‘Yes, we’ll do it, sir,’ and we’re so grateful for the crumbs off the table when HE have eaten most of the food, and schools have got the rest, because we don’t want to complain. We’re really bad at making a stand,” he says.

“I’d love FE to not only find its voice but also to get a bit aggressive and abrasive and get into the trenches for a bit of a scrap.”