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Meet Ruth Gilbert: the careers guru
Ruth Gilbert, chair of the Career Colleges Trust and a former principal, has been at the heart of transformation in FE
When Ruth Gilbert was hired by former FE principal Tony Pitcher, he told her it was because she was a “non sequitur”.
“I had to look it up because my Latin was appalling,” she laughs. “But it’s about being a non-conformist, and Tony said, ‘I’m hiring you because you’re a non sequitur. You will tell me what’s wrong, and you will do what’s right.’ He, and later I, observed that even senior leaders often tell you what they think you want to hear, not what you need to hear. It’s not a popular approach, but it’s needed.”
Pitcher had taken up the role of interim principal at West Herts College, which had been given a grade 4 by Ofsted, and was in serious trouble. Hiring Gilbert as vice-principal was seen as an unconventional decision.
By that time, she had around five years of teaching experience under her belt, and had actually left the public sector because she was keen to innovate, and was repeatedly told “no” by leadership. She describes herself as a rebel, someone who was constantly pushing boundaries.
Gilbert was instrumental to the transformation of West Herts, and Oaklands College, too, where she was vice-principal to former Association of Employment and Learning Providers chief executive Mark Dawe. In 2010, she took on the principal and chief executive role at Southwark College, another institution in a lot of trouble - and again had a transformational impact.
Today, she works across a vast array of portfolios within the education and skills sector, and is, among other things, chair of the Career Colleges Trust, a charity focusing on careers education that she co-founded with Lord Baker, the former education secretary, in 2013.
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Gilbert grew up in London as the oldest of three girls. Her mother is Moroccan, and her father Russian Polish - they met on the beaches of Casablanca, and married young. Her mother was just 19 when she moved to England with Gilbert’s father, and didn’t speak a word of English. Growing up, Gilbert says she was in awe of her mother’s strength and bravery at leaving her life behind.
A passion for careers opportunities
As the oldest, Gilbert was pushed to succeed academically, and says she was always aware that she had to be a role model for her sisters. Determined that she’d get into grammar school, her father gave 11-year-old Gilbert 13-plus papers to practise on instead of 11-plus ones. “When I sat the 11-plus, I thought, ‘Wow, this is easy,’” she laughs.
Gilbert went to Westcliff High School for Girls in Essex, which she describes as “quaint, polite, courteous, all about manners and grace”. At Westcliff, she was taught that women are capable of anything.
She remembers sitting outside the headmistress Ms Howard’s office aged 16 waiting for her careers appointment - and says the conversation has stayed with her since.
“When Ms Howard asked me, ‘What do you want to do?’, I said, ‘Well, Ms Howard, I’d like to be in law.’ She said, ‘Right, you need five As at GCSE, no less, and at least eight overall, no less than a C.’ That conversation has stayed with me forever. Because I said, ‘Yes, Ms Howard,’ I left the room and I dutifully got results. There was no debate about it.”
A fish out of water in university
Gilbert went to University College London to study law and immediately felt like a fish out of water. The UCL’s law faculty was “terribly posh” and while her roommate went out to the pub with the geography tutors, she was having wine and cheese with law professors.
“Most of the people on the course with me were public school boys or international students. There were lots of very well-to-do, very well-spoken young boys with wax parka jackets, and they were like, ‘Who are you? You’re an Essex girl,’” she remembers.
Very quickly, Gilbert became determined to prove them all wrong. The worse she was treated by authority figures - she describes a work placement in which the QC didn’t learn her name, but simply called her “girl” - the more defiant and resilient she became. And, while she admits it was tough, she completed her law degree, and after a vigorous application process, gained a place on Unilever’s graduate programme.
She puts her success down to the jobs she did throughout her teens and while at university.
“What I realise, looking back now, is I had loads of those crazy, slightly mundane jobs, the night shifts at the union bar, the shop, the post office. And although I found it terrifying, I could hold my own with adults, and I learned how to control that fear and shyness,” she says.
“I believe my careers education was all those little jobs that I did: interacting with the public, dealing with difficult situations, difficult people, all of that helped me get that graduate job because I was perhaps a little more mature and a little bit more articulate than some of the peers that I witnessed at those interviews.”
Being introduced to the world of FE
Gilbert loved her career at Unilever, but when her role was moving to Holland, she wasn’t keen to follow. She worked in sales for a while, before turning her attention to teaching, inspired by the teachers she’d had at Westcliff. When she walked into South Essex College, she was amazed: having never set foot in a further education college before, she was taken aback by the bright modern building, a million miles away from her own school building.
Gilbert needed teaching experience to get on to the PGCE - and the college employed her to teach “a bit of everything”, GCSE resits, law and business studies. She took to teaching like a duck to water - once she’d got to grips with the slang students used. “I didn’t understand what the students were saying, “ she laughs. “I was out of touch and felt like a much older person, despite being no more than six years older than most of students. Sometimes they were really rude, but I didn’t realise and they would snigger. I had such a closeted environment and I did think, ‘God, I am such an idiot.’”
Within three years, Gilbert completed her PGCE - and a whole raft of other qualifications - and was hungry for promotion. She moved to the College of North East London and worked with young people who were often second or third generation unemployed. She saw the necessity for a programme on employability, and pitched fast-track qualifications that would deliver the training in fewer hours, and help to tackle unemployment. Leadership at the college said no.
“I was seen as a rebel, a bit of a nuisance,” she says. “I did Tesol, learning to teach online, I studied, studied, studied. I was always pushing for innovation, as I was encouraged to do this as a commercial intern at Unilever. But after a while, I got really fed up being told no and I fell out of love with education. I thought, ‘God, they are stuck in their ways.’”
The moral crusader
Gilbert left the public sector and spent the next few years working in business, setting up her own training organisation, and then going on to work for human resources company Ceridian. And then, in 2003, a lunch with Tony Pitcher, brought on by a random meeting, changed everything.
Within weeks of that lunch, she was appointed deputy principal, and in the following seven years, Gilbert was at the heart of college transformation: both at West Herts College and Oaklands College. Having rebelled against college leadership as a teacher, Gilbert was finally in control herself.
“For me, it was the opportunity to be the moral crusader, to do something I truly believed in, to finally make the changes I knew needed to happen, and to be in control of that destiny. I had been so frustrated in the junior ranks. I didn’t actually know I had it in me. I hadn’t decided I wanted to be a principal or anything like that,” she says.
“But Tony gave me the confidence I needed: he was a very experienced, right, calm, measured individual. I have a lot to thank him for. His style tempered my kind of Skippy the kangaroo approach - I was like Scrappy-Doo, going, ‘Let me at it, let me at it!’”
In 2010, Gilbert was ready to take on a chief executive role for herself, and set her sights on another struggling institution: Southwark College.
“In my first month, the financial director came to see me and he was so nervous. He was in such a terrible state, and he told me we couldn’t pay the payroll that month. My heart hit the ground. I said, ‘What do you mean, we’ve got £8 million in cash reserves? How can we not pay the payroll? What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘It’s all gone,’” she remembers.
Gilbert sprung into action and commissioned an independent audit. It was a very uncomfortable and stressful time, she says - and one in which some very difficult decisions were made. She reached out to her former colleagues and asked them for help.
“That’s really an important point for principals going into this role now. It’s even more challenging, and you can’t be prepared for all these situations, and you have to be prepared to ask for help. I didn’t have a clue,” she says.
Over the next two years, slowly but surely, Gilbert turned Southwark College around, but it took a huge toll on her mental health and wellbeing. She describes putting on weight and feeling constantly tearful - and says the situation was unsustainable. Gilbert knew she needed to leave, but was determined to secure the future of the college first. New legislation on mergers had been introduced and she was concerned the college would be forced to merge and its assets - all prime London real estate - would be sold off.
“People kept asking me, ‘Why don’t you just go and let the person who’s taking over come in and sort it out?’ And I would say, ‘No, not until the assets are secure and we can ensure there’s provision for our students,’” she says.
Gilbert forged brilliant relationships with both the local authority and employers in the area, and, ultimately, she secured the college the training contracts for the regeneration of the South Bank, therefore future-proofing the institution.
The birth of the Career Colleges Trust
Through that work, she met Lord Baker, and wasn’t afraid to tell him what was wrong with his passion project, University Technical Colleges. “I said to him, You’ve really missed a trick with your UTC, you really haven’t thought about the FE colleges, their technical prowess, their expertise,’” she says. He challenged her to set up an organisation that did just that: and the Career Colleges Trust was born.
“We agreed that it would be about skill shortage areas: if it wasn’t broken, we weren’t going to fix it. We really wanted to channel employers into supporting education built by industry, for industry, and to improve the career prospects of the communities that we serve,” she says.
“That was so important to me as someone who scrimped and saved through university, so determined, almost bloody-minded to stay independent. It meant a lot to me, but at least I had that opportunity. Most of these kids hadn’t even thought about going to university or any of these many different careers.”
The trust grew from strength to strength, and today works with a huge range of employers, training providers and colleges to support careers education and equip young people with the skills they need to succeed. Gilbert led the trust for almost six years, before branching out into her own consultancy and portfolio work while retaining a position as chair of the board. She also holds several charity roles as well as being a trustee of the CyberHub Trust. While all her work remains in the education and skills space, the diversity in her work gives her immense variety.
“I am really privileged, I think at the tender age of 47, to be doing exactly what I love. I’m always willing to share and support others. I have a terrific network who supports me,” she says.
“I think that comes from learning that, actually, it’s OK to be yourself but also know when you’ve done something wrong and say you got it wrong.”