‘I’ve got a lot to thank a college for’
BY HER own admission, boys, Babycham and the Bay City Rollers were the priorities of the new executive principal of the Guernsey Institute when she was 16 and sitting her O-levels.
After not doing too well in those school exams, it was later a college that gave Jacki Hughes the opportunity to restart.
That spirit of fresh starts lives on in her, and is one of the drivers as she leads the herculean task of combining the College of Further Education, the Guernsey Training Agency and the Institute of Health & Social Care Studies into the Guernsey Institute.
‘Working in further education is just such a fantastic life-changing thing to do because you’ve got the ability to change lives, and a real passion of mine is that second chance opportunity for both young people and for adults.
‘As a youngster, as a 16-year-old, I discovered boys, Babycham and the Bay City Rollers and basically O-levels became really unimportant, so I didn’t actually do brilliantly at school because I was distracted, but a college gave me the opportunity to re-do, so I re-sat my O-levels, took on a range of courses and found myself working in a really great hospital environment as a play specialist.
‘So I’ve got a lot to thank a college for, and I suppose that’s gone right the way through my career.’
After working 35 years in further education in the UK, Mrs Hughes moved into a different field of helping organisations transform.
Her most recent job before arriving in the island was integrating three colleges into one in Guildford.
So it seemed like serendipity when the Guernsey Institute job came up, and she was successful and appointed last year.
One of the aims of the Guernsey Institute is to provide an outstanding alternative pathway from the academic norm.
Guernsey’s vocational, technical and professional education sector has often been viewed as second fiddle, or the poor relation of the sixth form and universities.
It is a stigma that Mrs Hughes is keen to bust.
‘What’s really important is that people go to the right place for their learning and their training and development.
‘Here there is a much stronger draw to A-levels than there is in the UK, and maybe not everyone understands that vocational training for a young person can lead not only to amazing jobs, but higher education as well.
‘Sometimes school doesn’t fit for a young person and they can’t find their place and they struggle.
‘College has a very different approach, young people are treated as adults mostly, and they’ll live up to that, they’re not on the scrapheap.
‘Degrees are fantastic, they enable people to think in a different way, so I would never say that you shouldn’t get a degree, but they’re not necessary for everybody at that point as a young person, it might be the degree is something you do later.’
