University of Sunderland and Stone King Insights

University of Sunderland and Stone King Insights

Stone King is proud to be collaborating with University of Sunderland on a research study into college governance.  A number of our clients are participating and we are intending to make resources available to the sector as the work develops. We are going to provide updates about this exciting and innovative project in the form of a blog.

Tom Morrison, Head of Further Education, Stone King

10/12/2024

A tale of two conferences 

By Dr Ron Hill, Honorary Professor (University of Stirling), Visiting Professor (University of Sunderland) and Consultant, Stone King LLP.

It was the best of times …. We don’t need the rest of the beginning of a Tale of Two Cities as my two recent conference attendances were just that … the best of times.

To confer is, of course, to exchange opinions and that usually takes place around a topic of shared interest at a conference.  My two, recent, conferences were both in-person. This feature certainly contributed to my best of times assessment. That inter-personal warmth is just not possible with on-line conferences. The exchange of opinions, the conferring, the conversation, is also of a much higher quality in person. Both the informal and the formal elements of a conference are so much better when we’re all in the same physical place.

The topic of shared interest for me was the leadership, governance and governing of colleges. We all go to conferences with particular topics in mind, and mine inevitably gravitates to my continuing exploration of educational leadership provided by governing bodies.

The first of my two conferences was an event held at the University of Sunderland in September 2024. The focus of this conference was governing of organisations with an educational purpose. The particular interest here was the nature of the issues influencing governing practice with presentations reflecting a multi-academy trust, external governance reviews of colleges in England, and researching governing in the university sector. There was also a comparative overview of governing colleges in Scotland. The University of Sunderland announced the development of an innovative suite of programmes which will permit the exploration of a higher-level study of governing of education and the creation of a research community. Taken as a whole this Sunderland conference, supported by Stone King LLP, was transformative and exciting. We need much more research about the contribution of governing to teaching and learning in all our phases of education and this event (and more to come in future years) seemed to provide that launch pad.

The second of my conferences was the 2024 Association of Colleges Annual Conference in November 2024. I’ve been attending this conference in its various forms since the beginning of the AoC. Indeed, being a regular, I used to be greeted by one of the Birmingham International Conference Centre staff at the foot of the escalator with “good to see you again this year Sir”. With age, experience, etc I’ve refined my time on the Wednesday of this conference to informal conferring with colleagues, rather more than engaging with the formal programme. My regular exception is to attend a governance session, usually in the early afternoon. If this sounds like conference-lite, I enjoyed a very full and varied day of discussion, ideas, possibilities and gaining insight into the bigger picture for colleges. The mood of the conference (as I experienced it) seemed positive, even hopeful. As always, there’s a frustration that colleges in England don’t reach the profile that other phases in our complex education landscape seem to achieve. But also, as always, there’s such a commitment on display at the conference to drive the college sector and its immense contribution to skills development, education pathways, and community cohesion.        

So, it’s been the best of times. Both conferences will be running again in Autumn 2025 and I’m already looking forward to them. In the meantime, I hope colleges can make progress following those external college governance reviews which concluded in July 2024, continue to create purposeful governing processes and practices for our governors in colleges and corporation groups, increasingly value and develop governance professionals and, of course, place college students and college teachers at the centre of our governing deliberations.

08/11/2024

Blog: Stone King and University of Sunderland Research Study into College Governance

It’s November 2024 and I’m on a Scotland bound train from Leeds where I have spent an enjoyable morning with Tom Morrison of Stone King and Prof Ron Hill (consultant to the firm since 2019 and academic nomad). A little over a year ago the three of us agreed that it would be a great idea to undertake to carry out a piece of research focusing on governance reviews. Given Stone King’s place as an organisation working in partnership with many colleges to undertake governance reviews, it was simply an opportunity that any researcher would jump at. Having established an excellent working relationship between us, embarking on an ambitious project that would draw on each of our areas of expertise and practise felt right and it has proved quite profoundly to be so.

So, what did we agree to do?

Simply (in so much as any research can be) we agreed that looking across a number of final college governance reviews that had been undertaken by Stone King’s consultancy team, would afford us an opportunity to begin to understand a number of important phenomena. What are the common points of feedback from review? Where are colleges consistently succeeding in governance? How are we constructing and understanding the role of governance professionals? Is the review process successful in carrying out the aims under which it was commissioned? What is the impact of review within the reviewed institutions and importantly, does it make a difference?

I won’t bore with the finer details of the philosophical approaches to epistemology and ontology but, in designing the research we were very clear on a few points. This work does not compare colleges. It is designed to enhance the processes of governance and review by feeding back into those cycles. A clear purpose is to begin to fully understand processes and seek to codify and propose a practice model of governance for testing and finally but critically, to look at communication, human interaction and professional practices in governance spaces. In short, this work would need a lot more than a survey and from the outset collaborative partnerships with colleges, their boards and governance professionals.

Gaining ethical approval from the University of Sunderland preceded Tom’s invitations to colleges to participate in the study which yielded a huge and very positive response. Appealing to communities for research participation usually yields a very low response rate but in this instance, we had more volunteers than we had originally planned for. As Hammersly famously said, good qualitative research is flexible and reflexive research, and plans to incorporate participation from all positively responding colleges were made.

It also became immediately apparent that reviewing documents alone was insufficient and would only reveal commonalities that existed within fixed points in time (i.e. the review period) and within fixed spaces (those observed by reviewers) and that we were missing the humans from the story. A critical part of this study now focuses on interviews with governance professionals and a selection of reviewers.

So where are we now?

The field work for the project began in early October 2024 with the delivery of a selection of review documents. I spent three wonderful days in Stone King offices in Leeds surrounded by documents and began to construct the analysis framework needed to begin to understand and answer our key questions. The final day was spent interviewing  governance professionals from colleges all over the UK (with further interviews conducted the week after). These conversations have been so powerful and insightful and, have changed in some ways our thinking around the expected project outputs. Thank you so much for your time if you’re reading this and I look forward to our follow up discussions in a few months aimed at exploring longer term implementation of recommendations from reviews.

What next?

We now need to begin to analyse everything we have so far and book the follow up interviews. We will publish interim findings to the sector in early Spring 2025 with the intention of generating points for discussion and feedback. We have secured the help of another academic from the University of Sunderland to assist in a comprehensive literature review and the collating of research findings and reporting on methods used.

As you can see, it’s been a busy few months and we are excited to be able to start to share our early findings. We have also decided to keep this blog going and look forward to reporting back progress, so, watch this space…

Prof Gary Husband, 8 November 2024