Campus Conversation: Challenges lie ahead but also a bright future
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
This week I celebrated the seventh anniversary of starting work here as Principal of Moray College – or I would have done, had there been a 29th day in the month.
No balloons or popping corks for this one, but time to reflect on both the past and the future.
For me, being Principal is about embracing a role of stewardship, recognising that for a period of time, I am entrusted with guiding UHI Moray to keep becoming the college that its community and wider region needs it to be, and entrusted with working to leave it in a better position than when I found it.
I did find it with a few challenges, and the financial ones were the most urgent. In my time here we’ve managed so far to keep the wolf from the door, but that hasn’t stopped it often coming back to howl over the garden fence.
Areas that I considered then as gaps in our portfolio have mostly been turned round by our staff, from our burgeoning work with Moray’s employers, to our ‘good practice’ research work for local organisations.
I also found a college with many strengths to be built on.
I inherited a model of student support that had been lauded as an exemplar of best practice across Scotland, and by investing further in its focus on student performance, we have now helped our lecturers deliver five years of some of the best student achievement rates in Scotland.
Our work with senior phase school pupils was at a level I hadn’t seen in my previous jobs, and by hosting the DYW Moray team here, and orchestrating a remarkable expansion of Foundation Apprenticeships, our schools’ team have taken everything to the next level.
Despite the persistent workload pressures on us all, I have been so impressed by the extent to which our teams go above and beyond.
It’s also been great recently to see some of our best pre-Covid community events, like the Moray Game Jam, coming back into our calendars.
After a four-year break we are hosting individuals and teams who will work, rest and play in our AGBC building for 48 hours from March 10-12 creating board and computer games.
Public talks and masterclasses from industry experts will be held on Saturday, and we will all try the new games on the Sunday, and vote for the winners.
Following the success of our first ever Hospitality Festival last year, our team are raring to go again this year in the last week of March with an event that will again showcase hospitality skills and the great opportunities available in the industry locally, and further afield.
These are difficult times. I believe that colleges in Scotland right now are facing an existential threat. Yet for us in Moray, the opportunities are just as big as the challenges.
I’m not promising to be in this role for another seven years, but I’m also not ready to hang up my hat yet.
The best possible future for UHI Moray is worth achieving, but there are still wolf paw-prints near the path to that future.
