15 years at CT Skills

15 years ago I walked into Market Square House in Nottingham to try and help my mum sell her business Care Training East Midlands.

She had started a training company because she loves education and the impact it has on people’s lives.

Like many entrepreneurs, she had no exit strategy but wanted to find a way out that protected her staff and the legacy of a business that she had built from nothing but bravery, brains and a bank loan.

Our competitors were very different in 2005. Nottingham had more colleges than I can remember and the East Midlands was a hotbed of large training providers like Fern, JHP, Instant Muscle, A4e and Carter & Carter. Each one has since disappeared.

Our business was also very different back then. We had fewer than 20 staff who delivered subcontracts for two of those much bigger companies. This almost took the business down when Instant Muscle and Carter & Carter followed each other into administration in 2008.

It was clear that we had to reinvent ourselves and quickly establish relationships directly with government funding bodies. Luckily we were small and agile and secured contracts with the Learning and Skills Council and Department for Work and Pensions which meant expansion into Derbyshire, Leicestershire and work-based learning.

As we began to rebuild the company, my mum and I developed the sort of polarised relationship that defines many family businesses.

In a crisis, we were unbreakable and would fight anyone or anything to protect the business and the staff. In the good times, we would fight each other. And before we both agreed that she was right, we would say things with the sort of brutal honesty that only family members are prepared to use.

On one occasion our LSC contract manager had to pull us apart in our head office only two hours after we had signed off accounts showing record turnover and profits for the company. Some call it passion, I’d call it getting publicly duffed up by your mum.

Now we find ourselves with a different challenge which means we have to reinvent CT Skills yet again to give our learners the best possible chance of success in the post-Covid and post-Brexit world.

I must admit that this challenge is pretty scary. The relationship between training providers and the Department for Education feels unnecessarily strained and volatile at the moment and the long road to rebuilding mutual trust needs to start here and needs to start now.

Training providers will drive hundreds of thousands of people into jobs and apprenticeships as soon as we’re safely out of lockdown. And young people who feel disorientated by predicted GCSE and A-Level grades are going to need low risk and high reward Apprenticeship opportunities to rebuild their faith in the value of learning.

A sensible level of support from the DfE will protect the entire further education ecosystem, including examination awarding organisations and the apprenticeship brand. It will also enable training providers to focus all of their energy on reinventing and modernising their curriculum to solve the skills shortages of the future.

I’m excited about this challenge but I’ll admit that I’m struggling with lockdown. I miss the energy, ideas and inspiration of having brilliant people constantly buzzing around me. I even miss the marketing team finding new ways to humiliate me to generate social media traction.

I dread to think what they would do with images of my grey lockdown beard that looks like it’s been stolen from an ageing warthog.

Despite that, I have total confidence in the future of CT Skills and our ability to navigate any challenge that comes our way. 15 years in and I couldn’t have a better team around me. We’re the biggest, bravest and best that we’ve ever been and I’m sure that in 15 years time we’ll look back at this and think why did he grow that ridiculous beard?

In 2035 my eldest daughter Emily will be the same age that I was when I started at CT Skills. And I’m sure that nobody would be happier and prouder to see her duff me up in head office than my mum.