As a big Middlesbrough FC fan, David Gallagher has been to countless matches. But there’s one particular match that sticks in his memory - and not just for football reasons.
It was at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and Middlesbrough were playing Bolton Wanderers. During half-time, he was shocked when he saw Francis Adou coming across the concourse with open arms.
He’d known Francis years ago: when he was working as a careers adviser, Francis was one of his customers. Francis had left Zimbabwe with his wife and children at a time when there was a lot of racial tension there around mixed-race marriages. Gallagher remembers he was “built like a tank” and eager to provide for his family. When the pair first met, Francis was a broken man: he couldn’t find work, he didn’t have a CV, he had no references, his qualifications weren’t valid in the UK. But he was committed, and, week after week, attended meetings with Gallagher and took any job he could. Eventually, he got a green operative role at the local council.
Three years later, at the football match, he remembered Gallagher. “He just said, ‘Thank you for everything you did for me to help me get a job.’ And I’m there in floods of tears, and all my friends are thinking, ‘What’s going on?’ And I thought, ‘I didn’t do very much. I just tried to help him get there,’” he says.
“It’s people like him who I remember throughout my career: people where I’ve got to do a tiny little thing which was really easy for me to do and made a massive, massive difference. All it took was a bit of my time and a bit of belief that, actually, I could do something which would help him help himself.”
Today, Gallagher is the chief executive of NCFE, one of the UK’s biggest exam boards. Making a difference for everyday people is still at the heart of what he does - and he sees encouraging his staff to be the best version of themselves as his number one priority.
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Hearing about Gallagher’s childhood, it’s obvious his story could have been very different. He was born in Middlesbrough, the youngest of six children. “I was learning how to argue and fight by the time I was maybe 3 or 4,” he laughs. Both of his parents had busy working lives: his mum retrained as a social worker when he was 2, and his dad worked away offshore. From a young age, he was left to his own devices, and quickly gained a real sense of independence.
There’s a common theme across his education: boredom. Having an older brother and sisters meant he was advanced from an early age: he knew the periodic table before he started school, and could even speak some conversational French.
“When I went to school, it was a mix of I did really well in some things but in other things I just got really bored. I remember from the youngest age being really, really bored at school,” he says. And throughout secondary school, it was no different. Gallagher describes himself as disengaged, undisciplined and disrespectful of his teachers. It was actually outside of school, in the workplace, where he really thrived as a teenager.
From the age of 14, he worked in an Italian restaurant washing pots during the weekends. During the holidays, it wasn’t unusual to do a 50 or 60-hour week. The hands-on practical experience, he loved - and on reflection, he says he would have been more suited to a more vocational route.
He got through his GCSEs with “pretty good results” and went on to the sixth-form attached to his school. There was never any discussion that he might choose a different path: despite his reluctance to engage, he was bright and his teachers pushed him towards A levels. He studied law, English language and geography - and scraped through, despite being kicked out of college a few times.
He left education completely disillusioned with it - an irony that he says is not lost on him now, as chief executive of an exam board - and went to work at a BT contact call centre. It was almost like an apprenticeship, he says, where he learned the basics of business. From there he moved to Reed as a recruiter, before “falling into” working as a personal adviser on the Labour programme Welfare to Work.
The job changed his life.
“It was a big wake-up call. There were so many people I spoke to who didn’t have the start I had in life and didn’t have support and care from family and role models to look up to. They weren’t rebelling, they were just getting on and trying really hard, with all of the disadvantages they had, versus all of the advantage I had,” he says.
“I look back and I’m embarrassed by my own behaviour. I didn’t make the most of education, and, yes, there were certain things which were wrong with education then, but there were also things wrong with my attitude and approach to things. In a nutshell, I’ve used that to inspire and guide my career. If I hadn’t had those experiences of education, it would matter less to me about it.”
Totally inspired by the positive impact that education could have, Gallagher went on to work across a number of skills and employability organisations: the Learning and Skills Council, Working Links, Ingeus.
When looking back, it’s his courage and conviction in setting up his own business that Gallagher feels particularly proud of. The business was called Employment and Skills Innovation Services and was focused on helping businesses to make sense of the funding streams available to them to fund training in the workplace. Nine months after setting the business up, the apprenticeship levy was introduced and wiped out the entire business idea.
“I did manage to keep the business going: I pivoted it and there were days where I quite literally was just curled up in a ball thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ But I managed to find a way through it. I am quite proud of it, actually - I gave it a go, in spite of the biggest knock you can have in business, as in your entire plan going in the shredder,” he says.
A role at training provider Babington followed, and then in 2018, Gallagher became the managing director of EPAO, an arm of NCFE that looks after apprenticeship end-point assessments. Six months later, he was hired as the chief executive of NCFE.
Like many others, when asked about their proudest moments in their roles, Covid dominates Gallagher’s answer. “We’re still alive, we’re still running, and no one has killed each other,” he laughs. And the company is still running: but perhaps differently to how it was before Gallagher arrived on the scene. Right from the beginning of his leadership, he wanted to focus on the company’s core purpose.
“I really started thinking about: ‘Why does the organisation exist? Why did it start out 172 years ago? What’s its DNA?’ If you imagine a grand old stately home which has, ever since the 70s, been redecorated and redecorated, but nobody had ever stripped it back, it was wallpaper, and layers of paint. That is how NCFE felt,” he says.
The work is still ongoing: and the focus isn’t just on transforming NCFE, but the entire sector to the benefit of learners.
“It’s not an overstretch to say we are trying to reimagine and reinvent what this corner of education does,” he says. He talks about the “transactional” nature of providers’ relationship with awarding organisations - and says that relationship is a missed opportunity.
“What typically happens is, we know there’s a labour market need, we go and understand the need, we turn it into a product. We then give it to the centre, and they go on and do it,” he says.
“But, actually, we’ve got this deep insight into what’s needed and the source code for that. So how do we then go and set our centre up for success? What’s the content that they need? What’s the CPD they might need? What’s the advice they might need? How can we introduce them to these experts which have helped to build the qualification that can then help shape their delivery?
“We’re all there for the same thing. We’re there to enable centres and educators to deliver the best possible learning experiences, to get the best possible outcomes, to get the best possible progression opportunities in life. But we, as an industry, we’ve forgotten that.”
Changing the shape of the sector is a big task: and one that Gallagher is completely dedicated to. But, of course, he has other priorities, too: he is a family man, and even coaches his son’s football team on the weekends.
And while those seven-year-old boys have their whole lives ahead of them, it’s safe to say that, at some point, many will take a qualification through NCFE. Their experiences will hopefully be positive, and if Gallagher completes his mission, perhaps one day they will, like Francis before them, approach him with open arms, thanking him for it.
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