The opening paragraph of the latest Further Education Trust for Leadership (FETL) paper -  FE and Skills and Shame in Organisational Life - includes a stark reminder, if any was needed, that: “In December 2018 the sector was in deep shock at the news that a young and experienced sector principal had died by suicide.”

That’s quite some opener for a report published just ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week and is a worthy reminder of how important it is for us to understand the challenges that leaders in our sector are facing.

The opening line took me back to the many discussions I had with college leaders early in 2019, after the news had broken. Conversations in which people were seeking to understand what had happened, why it had happened, what any of us could have done to prevent it. There was anger at the time about what many described as an atmosphere in which college leaders were fearful for their own futures.

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The previous autumn, I’d written about these pressures in Tes, describing my concerns then that the risks facing colleges had heightened and that too many leaders were being blamed, if not vilified, for problems that were systemic.

Mental health: The pressure on college leaders

I argued that: “We will struggle to create the culture, the environment and the institutions we want if the leadership roles are fraught with risk and potential vilification.” So it is good to see this paper providing the academic backing and testimony from current leaders to those concerns, honestly setting out how it feels to lead colleges after a decade of austerity.

As Dame Ruth Silver, president of FETL, points out in her foreword: “The level and nature of scrutiny in the further education sector has sometimes gone beyond what is fair or justified, helping create a culture of fear and anxiety in which honest but struggling leaders might be reluctant to admit vulnerability or to reach out for help.”

Early in 2019, it felt like things might change, with many people across the sector reflecting on their own behaviours, on the systems, the rules, the environment, and wanting something better. There was talk (quite rightly) about it “never happening again” and “learning the lessons”, but I am not convinced that we have moved on very far.

I still have too many conversations with college leaders feeling under siege, desperate for help and support, but faced with challenges they simply cannot overcome on their own. Sometimes it is leaders bewildered by the complexities of the system they work in; other times it is about the lack of resources and the need to make cuts again. The calls come from the experienced and the new, those with strong track records, as well as those setting out.

Perhaps perversely, I’m always pleased when I get those calls, difficult though they are, because every leader will feel vulnerable at times, so when they call it’s a good sign that they recognise that they need support. But in every case they express worry about how that call for help might be interpreted and whether their future career will be impacted. That cannot be right, and suggests that we need a step-change. And I worry, too, about the calls I don’t get, potentially from leaders who are too frightened to ask for help.

I thought in early 2019 that the climate for college leaders was going to change, that asking for help would start to be seen as a positive sign. I was wrong, but the current Covid-19 crisis might help us to achieve that.

I hope so, because we cannot attract and develop the great leaders of the future in the numbers we need and we will continue to lose out on talent, innovation and improvement without change.

Above all else, as I said in 2018, “this isn’t about rewarding failure, but it is about having a system between government and its agencies and colleges that recognises failure will happen. It is inevitable in all walks of life and work.” As a sector dedicated to learning and education, you’d imagine that we’d have worked out by now that learning from failure is all that matters, but for that we need a mature, calm and supportive environment to work in. Maybe we’ll get that out of this crisis.

David Hughes is chief executive of the Association of Colleges