Hugh Hall may have no previous experience of running a college, but he sees himself as a further education leader “of his time”.
The new Fife College principal - a trained accountant - says: “Funding from the government isn’t going to become generous and we are going to be on tight reigns as far as budget is concerned. So we need to think more creatively about how we generate money.”
Hall’s most recent job was chief operating officer at the University of Strathclyde, and he is a well-known face in the Scottish further education sector, having chaired Forth Valley College for eight years. Still, his new appointment came as a surprise to many, and made him the first college chair in Scotland to make the move into that position.
Hall previously worked for Audit Scotland and the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, and sees his accountancy background as a significant strength given the difficult financial climate that colleges find themselves in. He says: “I would have thought having an accountant in the top seat doing that is [a good thing]. I am of my time. Maybe 10 years ago you needed an academic.”
Three months into the role, he is stressing he sees himself as the business leader of a “40-odd million pound business”.
“I am first and foremost a chief executive,” he says. “I am not here to dabble in academic matters.” Raising commercial income will be a priority. “I am quite logical about this. I go into accountant mode...what I am not going to do, I tell you categorically, is run a deficit. I have a responsibility as accounting officer to balance the books.”
The options, he says, are to “cut costs or grow income”. “I would like to grow income. The easiest way is to earn my way out of it. Cutting costs is a downward spiral and has implications. We will make the books balance. That is my main priority, because that is in the best interests of staff and students.”
Freeing up people to “do their job” is also crucial, he says. “I am definitely going to increase our productivity. We are going to create capacity, but we are going to do that through innovation, de-bureaucratising and working smarter. I want to free people up. There is still too much form-filling and people asking permission to do stuff.”
He says he initially had no intention of leaving Strathclyde. But chairing Forth Valley showed him the sort of work colleges were involved in. “In actual fact, colleges do some phenomenal work, transformational stuff,” he says. “I have been having a great time. We are involved in everything from learning needs, we produce plumbers, joiners and creative people, and we also do some fantastic university programmes. And we do it within a community setting.
“It wasn’t about leaving Strathclyde, it was about coming to Fife College.”
It has not been a completely smooth transition, admits Hall. For one thing, the limited resources available to colleges took some getting used to. “I started here on a Wednesday,” he says. “By Saturday morning, I sat at home thinking, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’ But that was a momentary thing.”
Since then, he has held all-staff meetings at all campuses, created a new leadership team and started to set out his stall. He says: “What gets me really excited is the fact I’ve got some fantastic colleagues. We are not only doing great stuff: I have got a bunch of colleagues who are completely and utterly committed. I’m laughing now. This is going to be much more straightforward than I thought.”
Fife College was created through a merger as part of the Scottish government’s regionalisation process in 2013. The policy, Mr Hall says, has been a success and is something the sector could be proud of. “Having gone through the trauma of regionalisation, we now need to capitalise on it,” he says, adding that regional boundaries should be permeable. He plans to work closely with Dundee and Angus, Forth Valley and Edinburgh colleges.
@JBelgutay
