THE year 1992 might be best remembered as Neil Kinnock’s “annus horribilis” when the Labour leader threw away an expected general election victory, but the further education world remembers it as the year of incorporation - or, as the critics would have it, “the rise of the suits”.

Glasgow firms Morison Bishop, solicitors, and Wylie and Bisset, accountants, are among these “suits” who have benefited from incorporation. Morison Bishop alone acts for 11 colleges and this week launched a specialist education unit headed by Robert Hynd, one of the partners.

There have been career opportunities for senior FE figures as well. Ken Fisher has been taken on as a consultant with Wylie and Bisset: as the former deputy principal of North Glasgow College he was once head of a business studies department.

Mr Hynd is passionate about the value of people like himself and Mr Fisher to FE colleges in what he freely admits has become a corporate governance industry. “We acknowledge the strength of feeling in colleges that staff are there primarily to be teachers not lawyers, businessmen or accountants. Senior executives in colleges would lead a schizophrenic existence if they tried to be all these things,” Mr Hynd says.

He adds: “That’s why companies like ours can remove some of the financial and legal burdens of corporate governance, and it shouldn’t be seen as an admission of failure to call on advice of that kind.

“The problem is that colleges only see their professional advisers when they hit trouble. So we have got to put in place a system which moves colleges on from crisis management to one which stops the crisis happening in the first place. These often happen simply because senior management and boards just do not have the time.”

Mr Fisher believes colleges are “learning a few more tricks”. He also feels the funding council has been more helpful, “if a bit more interventionist”, than the Scottish Executive Education Department.

There is a greater degree of professionalism among Scotland’s colleges 10 years on from incorpo-ration, Mr Hynd believes. “But I recognise there has been antipathy to the rise of the suits,” he says. “The point is, however, that we are coming in to enable colleges to concentrate on their prime business, delivering education. We should act as facilitators.

“I am perfectly open in saying that there have been business opportunities for us as a result. But I would also hope that we have provided value for money.”

The proliferation of accountability checks to which colleges are subject, from HMI to quality audits to financial appraisal and monitoring, makes it imperative that colleges should have professional expertise available, Mr Fisher states. “So there should be no dichotomy between the suits and senior college managements.”

The latest bit of scrutiny for colleges comes from the Public Finance and Accountability (Scotland) Act 2000 which, from last April, subjected colleges to public, external audit. This makes the need for professional advisers all the more marked, Mr Hynd suggests.

He also warned, in a speech to an FE conference on Monday organised by his company, Wylie and Bissett and the Clydesdale Bank, that colleges could “sleepwalk into a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights”. This could be triggered by any legal action taken against a college by students.

In his speech to Monday’s conference, Bob Kay, chairman of the Association of Scottish Colleges, said he did not see the pressures on college employers abating. While college boards would need greater expertise from among their own members in the future, they would also need to call on expertise and services from outside.

Mr Kay, chairman of Borders College board, said that when he took his seat on the former college council, he had “no notion that eventually you could be called to a committee of a legislature to account for your own and for others’ misdeeds of the past.”