Kirstie Donnelly has had a lot of jobs. Her first experience in the world of work was at age 11, when she picked lettuce in her village. Growing up, she was also a glass collector, a barmaid; she worked at a campsite in France when she was 16 and also in a tulip bulb factory.  

The variety of roles gave her many transferable skills, and the ability to interact with different people from all walks of life – but, she says, these experiences are harder than ever for young people today to get.

That’s why the work Donnelly does as chief executive of the City and Guilds Group is so important to her. There the focus is on skills: helping and supporting organisations and learners to gain the training and qualifications they need to go on to have a successful career. It’s critical work – now more so than ever, as the country prepares for huge levels of unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Donnelly’s story begins in Lathom, a small village in Lancashire. Her father was a teacher, who went on to become the youngest headteacher of the first comprehensive school in the 1970s, and her mother was a housewife who retrained and worked as a reading instructor for children with special educational needs and disabilities.

A family of teachers

It was a very “Swallows and Amazons” upbringing, Donnelly says, and as she grew older, she was desperate to go out into the world and have adventures. So when the time came to go on to university, Donnelly chose to go to a big, bustling city: Manchester. 

Despite being from a family of teachers, she was never interested in becoming one herself. She says she fell into education – but growing up, she had a very strong sense of the value of learning and the value of education. 

“I always felt very passionate about wanting to provide more access to people from all walks of life to have that privilege – because it is a privilege, I think. Sometimes we can take it with for granted in our country,” she says. 

She studied English with the view to becoming a journalist –  but when she left university, her first job wasn’t in a newsroom but in a classroom. She “somehow winged” her way into a sixth-form college outside of Warrington, running its business course. 

She ran the course for a few months while thinking about what she really wanted to do: teaching wasn’t it, she says, but she knew it had to be something in education.

Fighting for social justice

Donnelly moved to the social justice charity Nacro – where, she says, it “all began”. She was just 21 at the time, and became involved in designing education programmes, initially for prisoners who had just been released. After a few years at Nacro, she went to work for the new Manchester Training and Enterprise Council. 

“I think I was just at the right place at the right time. Like a lot of people, if you ask about their career, it’s down to some people who spotted their talent and gave them some opportunities,” she says. 

By the time she was 28, she’d already been involved in David Blunkett’s The Learning Age Green Paper, she’d set up innovative "one-stop" careers advice centres, and she was the youngest person on the board of Manchester Training and Enterprise Council. 

“I think I always have enough humility to watch and learn but also to not be afraid to contribute as well. I was clearly there for a reason. I wasn’t there for my experience in the sense of lots of it but I was there for my thinking and innovation,” Donnelly says. 

Leading digital transformation

After a two-year stint at Video Arts, an online training company, Donnelly moved to City and Guilds as managing director. She says that digital transformation has always been the “golden thread”” running through her career.

“I've always been involved in national and regional programmes and making the best use of the innovation that's available, and learning technology to really widen the participation and the access for many more people to benefit from skills and education,” she says. 

“It's quite interesting – now we talk about Covid and the whole digital transformation, but my career started at the point when we saw the first-ever digital transformation: the worldwide web."

The digital transformation in education has accelerated in 2020, due to the Covid-19 lockdown, and colleges, training providers and skills organisations are offering education online more than ever before. But it hasn’t always been that way: and Donnelly says that she’s come up against a lot of resistance to technology many times in her career.

“I think the skill set for people like myself, who've been in careers trying to lead the way, is not to get impatient with people, to understand that any change, whether it's about technology or anything, is hard for people," she says.

"I think I was really very patient about that, but my line of defence was always to try and show people the impact it could have. If you can get people to buy into the impact you can have and they have that ah-ha moment and recognise it's not actually a threat but an improvement, not just for them, but more importantly for the end-user. 

“Let's be honest, we've been talking about digital in learning and technology in education for all my career. I've been working 32 years and I would say it's probably only now, in this particular country, that I think it’s going to stick this time. It’s almost taken a crisis like Covid-19 to become the tipping point.”

Coronavirus and edtech

Donnelly was promoted to chief executive of City and Guilds Group in January, just months before the coronavirus pandemic forced the UK into lockdown. She says she didn’t expect her first 100-day plan to include a mass pandemic. 

“It was a significant moment, but I think, like any leader, while most of us wouldn't have wished Covid on anyone, or any one person or any one organisation, it’s those moments that test you,” she says. 

“I'd like to think that I've sort of grabbed hold of that. I've led as I always will lead, which is with openness and transparency. And, as you know, we have been taking the organisation through this difficult period and we are, at the moment, wading through it.” 

At the beginning of lockdown, the organisation worked quickly to look at how it could deliver its programmes online – within two weeks, it released online resources free for charge for learners and businesses, and had introduced a new suite of online training to support businesses through the big changes in their workplace. The company also worked hard with regulators to create innovative solutions around assessment and online integration.

“It was a candlelight ride. It was a challenge, but also an opportunity to really try and fast-forward something. Let's be honest, had we as a nation been more deeply switched on in terms of how schools and education is taught online, we would have been far better geared up to deal with Covid,” she says. 

Donnelly adds that things won’t return to “normal”. Covid, she says, has caused the pendulum to swing to the extreme, but, in time, it will swing back into balance and bring about a blended-learning approach.  

The importance of skills in economic recovery

And in the immediate future, it’s crucial that upskilling and reskilling is a government priority  – the chancellor's new initiatives simply don't go far enough, she says.

“If you go back through that speech Rishi Sunak made, there were over 50 references to jobs and there were four references to skills. Now, my argument would be, we want a lot of people to get a job if they can, and we want that to be a job that includes skills and training,” she says. 

“While I'm positive that the chancellor does at least recognise the need to now address the burgeoning jobs issue we're going to have, they do need to put much more attention to skills.”

Attention to skills doesn’t require new money, says Donnelly, but redirection of what is already out there: the adult education budget, the apprenticeship levy funding, the national skills fund. She says that those pots could be used to target short-term initiatives to deliver skills training to get people back into local jobs, match people to jobs with the skills that they've got or help people to take their transferable skills and do some top-up. 

Just one day after Sunak’s speech, education secretary Gavin Williamson made a landmark speech about reforming the FE sector. In it, he said that England would get a “German-style” FE system. This, Donnelly says, is confusing.

“Why do we need to copy Germany – or any country for that matter? Germany does really well because it has a genuinely decentralised, employer-led system. Our government pretends they want this but they won't give up the control to allow that to happen. That's a fundamental problem,” she says. 

“I also find it really sad, because I think we've got a really good existing TVET [technical and vocational education and training system] that we should be proud about and that many countries envy. Why are we worrying about copying one in another part of the world that actually probably won't work for us anyway? We just need to better invest in it, and create a proper skills infrastructure around it.”

Donnelly has been championing England’s technical and vocational system for 33 years – and she’s not about to stop any time soon. To be chief executive of the City and Guilds Group is the dream job, she says. 

“I knew that, when I came to City and Guilds nine years ago, it was an organisation I wanted to be part of. I knew there was some transformation that could be done in there, but to work for an organisation and now lead it in this sector, it’s a dream job, and the dream ticket, and, despite Covid it, remains that. 

“I don’t know what the next 10 years are going to bring. I don’t think any of us want to predict the future any more – but if I look ahead to my career, where I want to be contributing and delivering on a purpose such as City and Guilds have, I can’t see it being anywhere else than City and Guilds.”