What does it take to rebuild trust in an organisation where staff feel neglected and morale has collapsed?

Nick MacKenzie shares insights from his conversation with Janet Smith, CEO and Principal of Nottingham College, on resilience, recognition and what staff culture really means in further education. 

"Nobody's cared about us before." 

Staff were crying. Janet Smith had just announced a £250 bonus at the college's first festive gathering – a modest gesture, scraped together from a tight budget. But it wasn't the money. It was what it meant. Someone had noticed. Someone had said thank you. 

In the latest episode of our #EdInfluence podcast, I sat down with Janet, who took over at Nottingham College in July 2022. What she inherited was, by her own description, "a college that has been through a process of being broken, really." Seventeen years of mergers. Industrial action. An Ofsted 'Requires Improvement' grade. No shared identity. No culture to speak of. 

What she did about it is worth hearing. 

A strategic plan that belonged to everyone 

Janet's instinct was to listen before she led. The college had a strategic plan when she arrived. It had been designed by consultants, put in a drawer, and mentioned only to deride it. So she started again – not from the top. 

She took 1,700 staff to Notts County Football Club, filled four banqueting suites across eight sessions, and asked them directly.  

• What should we stand for?  
• What are our values?  
• Where do we want to go?  

Back came sheets of flip chart paper. They boiled it all down. 

The result was a five-word mission statement, voted on by staff: "We unlock potential through learning." It stuck because it was theirs. Whether you're an apprentice, a full-time student, a part-time adult in a community centre or a learner with special education needs – the purpose is the same. 

When the turnaround starts to feel real 

Ofsted arrived in November 2022 – barely four months into Janet's tenure. Before the inspection, she told staff to stop describing themselves as a college that requires improvement.

"If that's the message we give to Ofsted, it's going to land like that. It'll be mirrored back." Instead, she said, talk about the good work. Talk about changing lives. Talk about purpose. 

They got their ‘Good’ grade. "As I revealed the grade on Teams in my office, I could hear cheers echoing along the corridor. People were watching this in rooms, in groups." That was the moment it became collective. 

The small stuff 

Recognition runs through everything Janet described. Not grand gestures or corporate programmes, but principal's lunches with 30 randomly selected staff over egg sandwiches. Roadshows across seven campuses. A staff forum where anyone can raise a concern and expect a proper answer. 

"It's not the big gestures", she says.

She credits Greg Dyke's approach at the BBC as an influence – his story about an atrium nobody could enter because the door was locked and there was no key. He had the door removed. Janet's method is the same: find the things that frustrate people, and unstick them. 

Doing the right thing before the budget is ready 

Perhaps the boldest decision was on workload. Staff kept raising it. The unions kept raising it. Janet's team calculated that removing one teaching hour per week from every teacher would cost £1m a year.

They didn't have the money. They did it anyway, then worked out how to afford it. 

One teacher told her the difference was barely noticeable. Her response: "You'd detect it if I put it back on, or if I added another hour on." 

"There's always a way through" 

Janet traces her resilience to losing her mother at 12 – an event she describes as the single thing that most shaped who she is. "Honestly, nothing can ever be as bad again", she says. "There's always an answer, there's always a way through, and there is."

Nearly 40 years in education later, that conviction hasn't shifted. Neither has her sense of humour – something she puts down to being a northeasterner. Both, it turns out, are essential equipment for leading in FE, where, as one colleague once told her, "our only constant is change". 

Listen to the full episode 

This episode of #EdInfluence is available now. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and share it with someone leading through change in further education. 

#EdInfluence is Browne Jacobson's podcast series exploring the human side of leadership with some of education's most inspiring figures.

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