David Hughes is the chief executive of the Association of Colleges (AoC). It’s a role that has historically required frequent shouting of “and what about colleges?” when announcements about schools and universities are made by the government.

Finally, it seems that the message has got through. Earlier this month, the Queen’s Speech included an announcement that there will be a post-16 education and skills bill, signalling a sea change for the further education sector.

Undoubtedly, Hughes has been a prominent figure leading that charge for change. Tes got to know a little bit more about him and his vision for the future.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

This is easy: my Year 6 teacher, Harry Mycock. He became a really close friend as I grew older: he came to my graduation and to my wedding. Harry was a fantastic teacher. He was inspirational and he knew how to control the class, and get everyone motivated and focused. I’ll never forget just how much respect everybody had for him.

I loved school but I used to get really bored and frustrated. When he could sense I was getting restless, he used to send me to the shop with 50p to get him 20 Rothmans. Looking back, there were a few safeguarding issues there but it was perfect because it made me feel special, and he was able to concentrate on the others while I was out of the classroom.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school and college?

I went to a grammar school in North London, which later on became a sixth-form college.

I hated it: it was really, really busy but there wasn’t much learning going on. It was much more about memorising and it was a really strict environment. There was zero sense of respect for you as a human being and no agency. I really rebelled and I was incredibly disruptive and rude to teachers.

But when I went into the sixth form, I loved it. We were treated more like adults, we had much more freedom and that really appealed to me. I loved the expectation that we were self-directed and had responsibility for organising our own time.

3. Why do you work in education?

I was brought up with my three older brothers in a North London council flat in the 1970s. The way we were treated by the council as tenants was appalling. One of my earliest memories is of going with my mum to the council office, where they told her she had to evict my nan - her mum - who had been living with us. They said we were overcrowding the flat and my mum was in floods of tears: there was zero empathy.

That memory stayed with me, so I went to work in social housing. I started off in a housing association in Liverpool in Toxteth, and then moved across to work with housing cooperatives. After a while, I realised what I was doing was adult education: I was working with the tenants, supporting them with rent and maintenance and I ended up doing lots of training for them. I became an adult educator in community development roles in Australia and the UK. When David Blunkett came along in 1997 and wrote the Learning Age Green Paper, it described lifelong learning in a way that excited me. I was hooked.

4. What are you proudest of in your career and what’s your biggest regret?

The thing I’m proudest of is the work we’ve done over the past five years at the AoC and as a sector. The mentioning of FE in the Queen’s Speech has shown that the profile [of colleges], the understanding of colleges and the role colleges need to play in our society and economy has shifted massively. The AoC has played a really important part in that, through work with MPs, the Love Our Colleges campaign and coalition with loads of other organisations.

My biggest regret goes back to the Learning Age Green Paper. The vision in that is very similar to the vision of lifelong learning now. And yet we’ve had 20 years of not moving forward but going backwards. The regret is that there were opportunities that we just missed and lost, and millions of people could have had so many more opportunities to learn if the whole education system, politicians and officials had got it right. Now, with the skills bill, we’ve got another chance: we cannot miss this opportunity.

5. Who would you have leading and teaching in your dream college?

[US first lady] Jill Biden. She’s been inspiring in the past 18 months, and I think her passion for adult learning, in particular, and for colleges is just amazing. And, of course, she’s married to the man who is saying we need to make college courses free in America; we need to open up and widen participation. I think she’d bring that ethos across and would be brilliant.

6. What are the best aspects of our further education system today?

The best is the way colleges have reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic. I really do love colleges and they’ve been amazing in the past year: look at the shift to online learning and initiatives like FE Foodbank Friday. They’ve supported the NHS by opening up training facilities to staff, and produced personal protective equipment where there have been shortages. They’ve just quietly got on with it despite the difficult circumstances.

The worst is that colleges still operate in a system that’s dysfunctional, which hampers and constrains them. They haven’t got anywhere near enough funding: there’s been a 30 per cent cut in funding in a decade. We have to get the chancellor to restore the funding that has been lost. The Institute for Public Policy Research suggested that if funding carried on at the same level as 10 years ago, it would be £5 billion more a year now than it is.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you most?

At the risk of sounding really cheesy, it’s my mum. She left school at 15 and had four children by the age of 25. She worked incredibly hard to bring us up, and to make sure that we had the right values and believed in ourselves. I am the youngest and was the first to go to university, and I suggested to her that she might want to return to education. She went to night school, got her GCSE French and GCSE Spanish, and then went on to an access course to get a language degree. She never believed she was clever and she was 58 when she graduated.

I still remember her graduation; my brothers and I went and it was quite formal, with people clapping politely. When she went up to get her scroll, she turned and waved to us, and we all stood up and cheered her on. It was an incredibly special moment.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d do?

I’d get a meeting with Rishi Sunak and convince him that the very best investment he could make would be in the education system at all levels, but particularly around FE and skills, and I would not stop until I could persuade him to do it.

9. What will our further education sector be like in 30 years?

Colleges need to be resilient anchor institutions; real community resources, in which people don’t just go for a year or two but keep going back. If people are going to work for over 50 years, they will need to continually think about retraining and updating their skills.

A college should be a community hub you attend and become an alumnus of the college, so the next time you’re considering a career change, you go back, get some advice and brush up on your skills. For example, plumbers now have to start thinking about learning how to install heat pumps rather than gas boilers, and their local college should be the place they naturally go to for that training.

The government needs to respect colleges as much as they do schools and universities. We need three key education institutions, linked together in a community, which can help you from cradle to grave.

10. What one person do you think has made the most difference to FE this year?

It’s everybody’s teacher this year. Throughout the pandemic, all teachers have bent over backwards to support their students. They’ve tried so hard to minimise the impact of the pandemic, moving to online learning and then blended learning. They’ve literally risked their own health by going in when the virus is still alive and kicking; they’ve done it uncomplainingly because they absolutely are committed to supporting students. It’s incredibly impressive and the sooner we get the funding to pay people like that what they deserve, the better.

David Hughes was speaking to Tes FE reporter Kate Parker

This article originally appeared in the 21 May 2021 issue