Capital City College Group welcomed three new governors on Friday 13 March.

Sanna Jordansson, Sharon Saxton and Anthony Impey have joined the existing board of eleven governors to help bolster our expertise in training and apprenticeships, in line with our aim to become the first choice training provider in the region.

Sanna Jordansson joins us as a board member of young person’s charity Making the Leap, and as Global HR Director for Broadway Maylan. Having built a career around social mobility and finance projects, Sanna makes an important addition to the team with experience of education settings abroad.

Sharon Saxton worked as Group Director of People and Organisation Development at vocational education provider City & Guilds until 2019, and is currently a freelance HR Consultant, Trustee and Leadership Coach. At City & Guilds, Sharon helped increase revenues from £98m to £150m with the design of a new strategy, and joins us with familiarity of the Further Education sector and its challenges.

Anthony Impey has an extensive track record of board and advisory positions in a number of sectors, working to analyse London’s skills shortages, and advising the City & Guilds council on strategy. Anthony’s experience in tech led to the launch of Tech City Stars and Tech Up Nation, providing employer-led training for young Londoners to kick-start a career in technology

We are delighted to welcome our new board members to Capital City College Group.

Kim Caplin bid a final farewell to students and staff on Wednesday 18 March after three years as Principal and seven years as Vice Principal at Westminster Kingsway College, and twenty-eight years in the further education sector.

With a series of successes under her belt, Kim is retiring and plans to spend her time focusing on new interests, including fundraising for the charity Myeloma UK and joining the London Symphony Orchestra Community Choir.

During her time at WestKing, Kim oversaw many pivotal moments in the college’s history, including the opening of the King’s Cross Centre in 2010, attended by alumni Ainsley Harriott, Trevor Nelson and Steve McFadden, winning the Careers and Enterprise Award and three successful Ofsted inspections, where teaching and learning was rated consistently good throughout the college.

Kim said: “Westminster Kingsway College is unique: it is creative, innovative and highly inclusive, with a culture of mutual respect and tolerance throughout staff and student communities. While I was at the college, we produced a Key Stage 4 provision which transforms lives; developed a strong career-focused ethos that won two AOC Beacon Awards for Careers and for Mental Health and become a Careers College for Health & Social Care and Digital Skills. We have developed an award-winning creative media department and a multiple award-winning global Institute of Culinary Arts.

“All of this I will dearly miss, but I feel confident that it will only go from strength to strength as it continues its mission to open minds. Thank you for all the support you have given me and the college over the last 10 years and may the spirit of WestKing continue with passion and success!”

Kim was highly esteemed by colleagues. Gary Hunter, Deputy Principal for Westminster Kingsway College said: “Kim always placed students and learning at the heart of every decision that she made as a leader of WestKing, and I know that the college’s senior managers hold this aspect dear as we take up the challenges of further education into the future. I would personally like to thank Kim for her mentorship and confidence to share her experiences with me, in her support of my development as a senior manager and leader.”

Curriculum Director, Amanda Whelan said, “Kim was a truly inspirational Principal. When she arrived as a Vice Principal, she had a very clear vision and strategy of what she felt the 14-18 provision should be. One of the most important aspects of this was her passion and interest in the type of work I do; the vulnerable low-level learners and the Special Educational Needs (SEN) work in Foundation Learning. This work is unglamorous and largely unnoticed, and I always appreciated her championing of these learners.”

CEO of Capital City College Group, Roy O’Shaughnessy said, “Kim is a consummate professional who represents the best of further education (FE) and inclusive education. Kim has worked tirelessly on behalf of her learners and staff whilst building deep relationships with external stakeholders including local authority partners, local businesses, and civic society. Kim also mentored several of the emerging leaders within the college staff and has seen those individuals progress within the college and move on to senior roles in the larger FE community.

“Since the merger to create Capital City College Group, Kim has worked with her fellow Principals and the other members of the Group Leadership Team to integrate cross-group services whilst also speaking out on behalf of her staff and students, when improvement was required. I am grateful to Kim for the expertise she has provided to me since I joined the organisation, her professional approach and, most importantly, her absolute commitment to our learners and staff.”

Respected by staff and students alike, everyone at Capital City College Group would like to thank Kim for all the hard work and energy that she has tirelessly given, to make Westminster Kingsway College one of the capital’s leading FE institutions.

The annual National Apprenticeships Week #NAW2020 (a week-long celebration of apprenticeships across England) ran from Monday 3 to Friday 7 February. The theme of this year’s Week was ‘Look beyond’ – encouraging people to look beyond the traditional stereotypes around apprenticeships.

What is an apprenticeship?

It’s a real job, with hands-on experience, a salary and the chance to train while you work. If you’re an apprentice, just like in any other job, you work for, and are paid by, the organisation that employs you. You’ll have a contract of employment and get holiday leave too, but the difference is that you do training or learning (typically at a college, university or another training provider) for at least 20% of each week.

Apprenticeships are for everyone, not just young people or those in blue-collar jobs. Look beyond the old stereotype that apprentices are all teenage brickies or car mechanics – you can be an apprentice at any age or educational level (example: the Group’s Director of Marketing has years of experience and she’s recently started a high-level apprenticeship!) Hundreds of different types of apprenticeships are available, in a wide range of industries and organisations, from small local organisations to large national brands. Your training is funded by contributions from the government and your employer, and you get paid a regular salary.  What’s not to like?

As one of London’s leading apprenticeship providers, delivering over 1,250 apprenticeships in 2019, we were at a range of events across our colleges and London, to promote apprenticeships and to inspire Londoners of all ages to find out more about apprenticeships.

On Monday 3 February, current and prospective students at the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL) were invited to learn more about the Group’s impressive apprenticeship training provision. Around forty students asked staff from the Group’s training arm (Capital City College Training) about apprenticeships at the CONEL’s Tottenham Centre. For many completing their Level 2 course in summer, a Level 3 apprenticeship will be the perfect next step towards a fulfilling career in plumbing, IT or construction. Overlapping with Monday’s open evening, the stand also gave prospective CONEL students a taste of the diversity of experience on offer at the college.

The NHS are key partners of the Group and we’re currently providing training to over 200 NHS apprentices in non-clinical roles including Business Administration, Pharmacy, Project Management, Team leading, Healthcare Support Worker, Customer Service and Accounting. So, also on Monday, we visited Ealing Hospital, to chat to staff members there about our range of apprenticeships opportunities for them.

On Tuesday 4 February, Lloyds Bank visited City and Islington College’s sixth form college with ex-student and apprentice Francisco, to talk about the apprenticeship programme in the bank’s Audit Department.

Staff from Capital City College Training (CCCT) also went to events at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow and Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust’s West Middlesex Hospital, where they spoke to people interested in apprenticeships in Business Administration, Team Leading, Project Management and Pharmacy.

Wednesday saw us at City and Islington College’s Centre for Business, Arts and Technology (CBAT) campus on the Camden Road, where students turned out for an apprenticeship fair supported by local businesses. As well as networking opportunities and the chance to talk to staff from Capital City College Training, students met representatives of the London Fire Brigade, White Hat, the Association of Accounting Technicians, Islington Giving and Park Theatre.

Patricia, a City and Islington student, told us: “I think apprenticeships are really useful for a lot of students. Different people have different needs; some people may go to university and some might do apprenticeships or go into work. I think these kinds of events are really important for them to know better their options and the different routes they can take.”

We were also at Westminster Kingsway College’s King’s Cross campus, where we welcomed apprenticeship providers and employers including White Hat, BT, Goldman Sachs, Willmott Dixon, BDO and others, to another Apprenticeships Fair. At the Fair, students and Camden secondary school pupils had the opportunity to talk to all these employers about their apprenticeship programmes.

The Fair also included an interactive panel session, with five apprentices from amazing companies in a range of industries. The apprentices (Harvey Baker from law firm Herbert Smith Freehills; Keanu Brouard from VFX experts DNEG; Andrico Zacharia from the global finance firm Goldman Sachs; Harvey Morton from the media communications agency Starcom; and Sofija Venckute from BT, the global telecommunications and broadcasting company) told the student audience about their experiences and shared some nuggets of wisdom on how to handle interviews and assessment centres. Advice ranged from “Look smart and get there early” to “Know the company: be prepared and practice beforehand” and “Smile. It relaxes you and you perform better”.

We ended the week with a bang on Friday, with events at Camden Council, CONEL’s Tottenham site, and a joint Bectu (the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union) and Westminster Kingsway College Creative Industries Apprenticeships Fair at the colleges’ King’s Cross campus.

Not to be left out, apprentices from Accenture (the multinational professional services company) visited City and Islington’s sixth form college on Friday, to help our Computer Science A level students consider their next steps after college.  Accenture run a Technology Degree Apprenticeship programme, so maybe some of our A level students will ‘look beyond’ the traditional A levels-to-university path and choose that – or another degree apprenticeship – instead?

And finally, Friday also saw us on national television, as the BBC’s Alice Baxter interviewed CONEL’s Curriculum Manager for Construction, Paul Oatham, at a BAM Construction building site in Birmingham, for a piece shown on the BBC News Channel on National Apprenticeship Week.

National Apprenticeship Week has been a great opportunity to celebrate apprenticeships and raise awareness of this – still misunderstood – career path, but we’re providing apprenticeships all 52 weeks of the year. To find out more about our work and to see the latest apprentice job vacancies, head over to the Capital City College Training website www.capitalcct.ac.uk

Westminster Kingsway College alumnus Jack Rawlings was just 16 when he enrolled at the college in 2006. Studying for three years in our renowned Victoria Centre, he now works in an exclusive fine-dining restaurant in the London headquarters of Coutts, the leading private bank. Jack sat down with us recently, to reflect on his time at college and the world of cooking for a living.

Growing up in North London, Jack heard about Westminster Kingsway College and its culinary school through his dad: “My dad is a chef and my mum was a hotel manager, so I have always been around the hospitality and culinary world. Dad said to me: ‘If you want to do it, do it properly’ and of course everyone knows about WestKing and its culinary school.”

“When I first joined WestKing I was not only a different chef but a different person. I took part in work experience across all three years of my course which really helped me.

“College wasn’t just about Monday to Friday. It gave me experience in the industry to make me a better chef. In my first year, I went to a contract catering unit in Moorgate. In my second year, I went to Claridges and in my third, I went to a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair.”

Westminster Kingsway College works with a large number of industry professionals, which allows the college to tailor work experience to the career ambitions and natural talents of each student. Work experience is often discussed between staff and students, making it less ‘take what you are given’ and more an opportunity to get involved and play an active role in carving out your path.

Jack went on to talk about his time at the college and the extra-curricular activities he participated in: “I took part in a lot of competitions while at college and one tutor in particular, Vince Cotton, was my mentor for these events. To have someone there for me during quite a stressful time, someone who was so experienced not only as a chef but also as a competitor was amazing to have.

“I travelled around the country and was even lucky enough to go to the USA after winning the Escoffier competition [a competition in which the top five third-year students design menus and then compete against each other in a week-long finale] and visiting the Institute of Culinary Arts for a week in North Carolina. To experience this while at college was great and isn’t something you get everywhere.”

Just two months after completing his course at Westminster Kingsway College, Jack started a full-time job at Coutts Bank. Founded in 1692, Coutts is one of the oldest banks in the world and looks after some of the most prestigious clients in the UK. Jack got a one-day trial at the bank’s restaurant while working at the college and, nine years later, is still a permanent member of staff.

Jack said: “When I first started at Coutts I was on the stove cooking meat and fish within my first two weeks. This is a massive role in the kitchen and it made me feel great that the head chef had faith in me to do it. I was thrown in at the deep end, but this helped me progress into the position I am in the business now.

“In my nine years here I have learnt so much and progressed through six job roles. I started as a commis chef, then went up to demi chef de partie, chef de partie, junior sous chef, sous chef and now senior sous chef. I now have a great relationship with all of the chefs and this is because we have all been there so long. This is quite unusual for any Michelin-starred restaurant and the culinary industry in general. I think this is because of the sociable hours, Monday to Friday, so I get my weekends. We do evening work but you get paid overtime for that. Normally, if you want this work/life balance in the industry you either have to compromise on pay or quality of food. Here at Coutts, you don’t.”

“I am very happy with my job. I have always said if I am learning then I will be happy and I am still learning every day.”

Jack’s culinary excellence has been allowed to blossom on stages beyond the Coutts restaurant floor. In 2013 he took part in Professional Master Chef. Jack said “One of the highlights of my journey so far, I would have to say, would be taking part in Professional Master Chef after my head chef asked me to apply. After passing the phone interview and the face to face interview I made it onto the show and to date, I am the youngest chef to ever make it to the quarter-finals. It was a good experience and I learnt so much. I just wish I had waited till now in my career to go on the show as I have learnt so much since and think I could go even further.”

The relationship between Westminster Kingsway College and Coutts extends much further than Jack; in fact, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, of the Coutts family, funded the building of the college’s Victoria Centre and the restaurant is also home to many other WestKing alumni.

“I am not the only one from Westminster Kingsway College here at Coutts. At one point we had seven people from the same year in the Coutts kitchen, we still get international students coming from WestKing and we also have regular students from the same diploma course that I studied.

“My executive chef has always had college students in his kitchen on work experience and many of them come from Westminster Kingsway College due to the standard of chefs they produce. There is still one chef at Coutts who was in my year at college, our head pastry chef was one year below me at college, one of the junior sous chefs did the part-time course at WestKing – you really see a difference. We even have lecturers from WestKing coming in during their students’ rotations in the kitchen. They get to sit down with the student and us, and have a chat about how the student is doing.”

Pablo Lloyd, the co-founder of our visionnaires entrepreneurship and mentoring programme, has worked in education and skills – inspiring the next generation of businesswomen and men – for 20 years. 

And on Thursday 7 November, his years of dedication to young people’s vocational and technical careers were rewarded, when he received an OBE (at a ceremony called an Investiture), from HRH Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.

After the Investiture, we caught up with Pablo, to ask him about his journey from primary school to an OBE and to find out if he took the bus to the Palace…

Capital City College Group (CCCG): Hello Pablo and first of all, congratulations! What an achievement! Can you tell us why you were awarded an OBE?

Pablo Lloyd: Hello, and thank you! The citation states that my OBE is “For services to WorldSkills UK”. I was a Trustee of WorldSkills UK for 12 years and, although I stepped down last December, I still do some informal project-based advice and coaching for them, including support for their exciting new Productivity Lab.

WorldSkills UK is a charity that champions vocational and technical careers and world-class skills across the UK. They do this in a number of ways, but principally by selecting and training young people to represent the UK in the EuroSkillsand WorldSkillscompetitions. They also run the national skills finals, held every year at the massive WorldSkills UK LIVE event in Birmingham.

The WorldSkills and EuroSkills competitions are a big deal. Take WorldSkills for example. The last one was earlier this year in Kazan, Russia. In all, 1,354 young people from 63 countries competed in 56 different skills competitions: best chef, best landscape gardener, best beautician, best tiler, etc – categories covered everything from Cyber Security to Fashion to Plastic Die Engineering. China, Russia and Korea are the countries to beat, but the UK usually gets in the top 10 in the categories we enter, and in Kazan we won Gold medals in two incredibly competitive categories, Aircraft Maintenance (Haydn Jakes) and Beauty Therapy (Rebecca West).

CCCG: So it’s fair to say that skills and education are close to your heart. What’s your personal education journey?

Pablo: Well, I grew up in south London and I managed to pass my 11 plus exam at primary school. That meant I got a subsidised bursary place at a public school in Wimbledon called Kings College School. From there I went on to read maths at Cambridge University and got a job in the City of London as a trainee Chartered Accountant. Today we’d call it an apprenticeship.

For a while, I was a Finance Director in the music industry, at the Performing Rights Society(PRS) – making sure that musicians and performers got the royalties they were due when their music was played publically or on the radio. One of the PRS’s Board members was the record producer Pete Waterman. At that time, Pete was famous as the man who’d recently made Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue pop stars and I remember him as a funny, insightful and very dyslexic man. He was one of the people who showed me that everyone has a talent, and some people need help to find it.

In 1999, I moved into the education sector and I’ve been here ever since.

CCCG: How did you feel when you were notified of your OBE? Did you have to keep it a secret?

Pablo: I was astonished and humbled. To get an award like that, someone has to nominate you. WorldSkills UK nominated me, which was wonderful, but in reality, the WorldSkills UK’s successes are a massive team effort.  I am delighted to have been honoured but I hope it will also help to gain proper recognition for the work that we all do in vocational and technical education and training.

My OBE was announced in the Queen’s Birthday honours in June [there’s also a New Year honours every January], but I was notified back in April, so I had to keep it a secret for two months until the official announcement in June. It was hard not telling anyone about it apart from my wife!

CCCG: What happened on the day? Any strange looks on the bus wearing your finest, or did you get a taxi?

Pablo: We got a cab; we couldn’t go to Buckingham Palace on the bus wearing hats and fascinators…but more seriously, my mother in law can’t walk very far!

When I found out I could only get five tickets for the Investiture, I worked out that the most important people in my life are all women, but I did invite my brothers-in-law to have lunch with us afterwards. There have also been a few celebratory drinks with friends over the last few months too!

CCCG: Were you nervous?

Pablo: On the day, I felt strangely calm. I was just as excited to meet the other people being honoured! There were about 80 of us in all; men and women from all walks of life – from the armed services, fire service, policing, the care sector, performing arts, the Scouts – all sorts. No-one wants to be late for their Investiture, so everyone arrives early and there is a fair bit of waiting around, which means there are lots of opportunities to chat to the other recipients about what they’ve done.

Don’t tell anyone, but I was secretly disappointed not to meet Olivia Coleman or Elvis Costello who were also honoured in the Queen’s Birthday honours list. It turns out they went to the palace on a different day.

CCCG: What was it like meeting Prince Charles? What did he say to you?

Pablo: He was incredibly well informed considering he had 80 people to pin a medal on within an hour or so. He asked me if we were making progress in helping young people. I told him we were, because they are so gifted and motivated, and our training experts are so expert! I reassured him that our future is safe in young people’s hands – he didn’t look convinced, but I am. I get so much hope and energy from working with young people.

We are working with Prince Charles’s charity The Prince’s Trust as they are a referral partner for the Start Up, Step Up Londoninitiative we are running with the Mayor of London. The Prince told me about a new initiative he’s started called Industrial Cadets, but unfortunately, there wasn’t time to chat about visionnaires too.

CCCG: Reflecting on the nomination, announcement and now your Investiture, how do you feel about having been awarded an OBE?

Pablo: I am hugely appreciative of the hard work and effort of all the professionals who I’ve worked with over the years, which means that a few random people like me can shout louder about our efforts in vocational and technical skills.

Entrepreneurs make a massive but often overlooked contribution to the UK economy. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, the UK has an impressive 5.82 million small businesses (those with less than 50 employees), accounting for 99.3% of all the businesses in the UK. Three-fifths of everyone with a job in the UK – that’s 16.6 million people – works for a small business.

Between them, the UK’s small businesses have a turnover of an estimated £2.2 trillion – an amount of money so vast it is hard to get your head around. If you had a big enough pile of pound coins and could count one coin per second, it would take you 69,761 years and six months to count up to £2.2 trillion. It’s a lot of money.

So, entrepreneurs matter.

This week is Global Entrepreneurship Week #GEW2019 – a celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit – and you might be surprised to know that, as one of the UK’s largest further education college groups, entrepreneurs are important to us too. Every year, dozens of people leave our colleges – City & Islington, Westminster Kingsway and the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London (CONEL) to be entrepreneurs. Armed with the skills they learned with us, they set-up their own businesses – be they consultancies, photography studios, hair and beauty salons or even as personal trainers.

And that’s not all. We’ve set-up our own incubator – Visionnaires – a social enterprise co-founded with the Capital City College Group that provides mentoring and practical support, advice and access to funding, for people who want to pursue their dream. I started Visionnaires because I saw that new or budding entrepreneurs often struggled to make that huge first leap from having a great idea to turning that idea into a tangible and viable business.

I’ve drawn heavily on my own experience of working for and running start-ups, to make sure that Visionnaires is valuable. My first experience of a start-up was 20 years ago, when I joined a new business that used early web technology to teach maths and English. It was exciting, unpredictable and very hard work. Eventually we grew to become the largest further education provider in the UK, and over 1 million people achieved qualifications using new technology. I loved the fact we were breaking new ground in education and giving a lot of people practical help. That’s when I became a social entrepreneur and went on to start three more successful businesses, which in turn led me to start Visionnaires.

Over my years in business, I have seen many people start businesses and many fail. Here are my four tips for start-ups – which we expand on in the Visionnaires programme:

1.   Build a vision – it’s not just about the money, your purpose is to make a positive difference to your customers, your team, your communities and the planet.

2.   Love your business – if you don’t love it, your customers won’t either, do something you care about and do whatever it takes to make it happen.
3.   Get curious –  listen to your customers, team, competitors and your own creative spark, build a bank of crazy ideas, one of them will be your next move.
4.   Ask for help – don’t be alone, work out what you’re good at and build a network which helps you with everything else, find a mentor and business partners you trust.

Maybe Global Entrepreneurs Week will be the spark that starts you on your journey? You can find out more about Visionnaires on our website www.visionnaires.ac.uk

Pablo Lloyd OBE

CEO and Co-Founder, Visionnaires