Deskful of paper, earful of woe

Pastoral care is a central part of college culture as pressure builds, Elaine Williams reports. A wide expanse of carpet and a jaunty receptionist greet visitors to Cleveland College in Redcar; to anyone who knows it, the first outward sign that things have changed since it became an independently funded and governed institution.

Students now have a full-time student advisor in the well-resourced advisory office strategically placed near this ground floor entrance. Carolyn Whelan who runs the office says that hers is now the first port of call for any student with a grievance or seeking help with courses, careers, university applictions, accommodation and counselling.

She says: "We have more part-time than full-time students here. They don't have the same close contact with tutors. They merely dip in and out of lessons and miss out on the pastoral side of things. This facility is of enormous benefit to them. I now work with staff as part of the curriculum. The profile of guidance and counselling has certainly been raised."

Colleges are businesses and the attraction and retention of students is essential for their survival.

Staff too have been provided with their own counselling service. An independent counsellor outside of the college and Brian McMahon, head of the faculty of health and social sciences, are both paid to give time to staff.

If nothing else, the college principal, Michael Clark, has acknowledged the pressures placed on staff by the college's incorporation under the Further Education Funding Council. A series of unfortunate circumstances and ill-advised moves and decisions has left the college with a Pounds 79,000 deficit - a tenth of its total budget - and staff over the age of 50 have been asked to apply for early retirement.

Michael Clark explained that the college had anticipated income that in the end was not forthcoming. Money bid for from the European Social Fund did not materialise because Cleveland failed to attract the right kind of students for courses.

European bids had previously been made for the college by the local education authority and Mr Clark admitted there was still much to learn.

Full-cost courses run for business and engineering employees of Libyan petro-chemical companies collapsed after the imposition of the trade embargo with Libya.

"Both of those things hit us in the same year - 1993/94," says Mr Clark.

Moreover, the student records system "was not robust in the first year". The college overestimated the number of students it had on its books, and now has to pay back monies to the FEFC.

Mr Clark says "We are not attracting students as rigorously as we would like. But I don't think our financial problems are worse than for many colleges."

Cleveland is a small college, with 6,500 students, which serves the community of Redcar, part of the North Yorkshire Moors and the east Cleveland coast down to Staithes.

A merger with Sir William Turner's, the town's sixth-form college, has vastly increased its A-level provision, but very little higher education is on offer - some HNDs, a PGCE and a BEd franchised from Huddersfield University, and qualifications in counselling validated by the University of Teesside.

With a local culture antipathetic to continuing and higher educcation - the staying-on rate is 50 per cent, well below the national average - the college is attempting to increase numbers by laying on buses to bring in students from outlying areas and villages.

Peter Chester, head of Sir William Turner's humanities faculty said: "Communities around here are very insular. People don't like to travel from one side of Redcar to the other, even. It's a real challenge to us to persuade young people that staying on in education and going to college is something they can do.

"Now we are part of a bigger tertiary college we can lay on a bus and this has proved very cost-effective. It has brought in students who otherwise would not have made the effort."

There are few opportunities for setting up full-cost courses, something many colleges view as essential money-spinners, since ICI at Wilton and British Steel, two major employers on the doorstep tend to provide their own training.

"It is better if your college is situated in an area with a lot of medium-sized businesses, the opportunities are then much greater," Mr Clark says.

"Some college principals have been charging around since incorporation looking for full-cost work. We went down that road four or five years ago but the opportunities were limited and I believe would reduce the quality of our bread and butter work.

"If you have a good number of staff taking a week out to teach on this course and two days out to teach on that, then the quality of their main work (vocational and A level) suffers.

"While babies are being born young people will need to learn and adults need to be trained and re-trained and we should concentrate on that."

The college management has worked hard to keep good relations with staff, negotiating a contract and 30 other agreements covering such things as maternity, holiday entitlement, competency, disciplinary and grievance procedures prior to incorporation. Cleveland is the only college in the north to have settled a staff contract so far and has escaped the industrial action now bedevilling many other colleges. However, it is believed the relentless pressure being placed on colleges by Government, will put those good relations under increasing strain.

Mr Clark admits, for example, that the contract is going to have to be re-negotiated.

"Frankly," he says, "staff are going to have to teach more. We cannot assume that something can be left untouched year after year. We are constantly having to review what we are doing in order to fulfil the Government demand to deliver more and more at a lower and lower cost."

Next year, like all other colleges. Cleveland will have to find 8 per cent more students and to increase productivity by 5 per cent "in order to stand still".

"Staff know this is coming," Mr Clark says, "you can tell by the atmosphere. But if everything is in the open then this staff is good at sorting things out."

Under the FEFC ruling that colleges are to be inspected every four years, Cleveland faces its first inspection in the latter half of this year, a fact which staff feel is the immediate and overriding pressure.

Mr Clark says staff were simply not getting the evidence together to be able to show to inspectors what they were doing. Mr McMahon, himself a part-time FEFC inspector, says staff felt overwhelmed by the paperwork involved.

He stated:"I think inspection is a good thing. There was too much freedom before, too much sloppiness. But there should be internal support as part of the inspection process. Everything we do as part of our professional job has to be down on paper and that can make staff feel very anxious. You can feel the tension."

In addition to inspection, staff were also having to grapple with the unfamiliar requirements and byzantine bureaucracy of NVQs and GNVQs, the Government's new vocational qualifications. Dave Parks, the college's Natfhe negotiator says he estimated that his two-year GNVQ leisure and tourism course had engendered 12,000 pieces of paper for the assessment of 20 students "and that's paring things down to the absolute minimum".

As a consequence of fundamental and rapid changes, Mr McMahon's counselling services were being fully used. He says: "A lot of demands are being made on staff week by week and they come here to try to make sense of what they are doing".

However, he believed autonomy had brought real benefits. The college could now be more flexible and responsive to local needs.

Previously, Cleveland County Council had required colleges to specialise in areas of excellence. Cleveland College had long felt it was being sidelined by Middlesbrough Colleges in the area of health and social care.

Mr McMahon says the authority would not support the college in funding the Nursery Nursing Education Board and social work courses which were offered by Billingham, an hour's journey at least for many students in east Cleveland. With such restrictions no longer there the college is able to offer courses in these areas which are easy to staff and cost-efficient to run.