TWENTY-FIVE years ago, a single meeting helped shape the future of further education in Wiltshire. Former Chair Geoff Burgess looks back on the decision that brought the county’s colleges together.
A Sunday morning meeting in the dining room of Geoff Burgess’ home in Trowbridge a little over 25 years ago changed the course of further education in Wiltshire.
At the time he was Chair of Governors of Lackham College and his guests at the meeting were his counterparts from Trowbridge and Chippenham colleges. They had arranged to meet to discuss the prospect of a merger and the outcome was the formation of the thriving organisation that exists today.
Why the merger mattered
“At the time it was becoming quite clear that a small college like Lackham couldn’t survive on its own,” he recalls. “Many of the old farm colleges around the country founded after the war by county councils have disappeared – and nearly every other one, with one or two exceptions, have merged in some form or other because they were just too small. I think Lackham at that point had 400 students and it just couldn’t have survived in the modern world in that form.”
Chippenham College’s then Principal, Graham Baskerville, was about to retire and Harry Hilliard, the Chair at Trowbridge, had contacted Geoff suggesting the meeting.
“Trowbridge at that time had a very strong principal George Bright and we thought this was worth exploring,” recalls Geoff.
Bringing the colleges together
The three Chairs agreed to combine all three colleges under the Wiltshire College banner but, most importantly, to retain their individual names and character.
The next stage was to tell the South West Further Education Funding Council what they were planning because at the time the new college was very much a trailblazer. “It was the early stage of mergers taking place,” says Geoff, “and the director said ‘it’s too big’. I said ‘no it isn’t, we’re going to do it’ and there was not much they could do to stop it because of course we were all independent.”
On November 8, 2000, staff, governors and students were present at Lackham as Olympian Kate Howey, herself a sports student at the college, helped plant three oak trees, symbolising the three different colleges. Blue and green bows were tied around them to represent the college’s new colours.
The new college was led by George Bright, with senior staff from all three colleges making up the senior management team. “It was not a difficult thing to pull off, compared with many commercial mergers I’ve been involved with,” says Geoff.
“George and the senior management team handled it extremely well and the new branding has stood the test of time. I still drive past any one of the colleges, albeit they do look somewhat different now, the branding has stayed the same.”
A legacy that continues today
Ironically, in 2007 the college received a call from the Further Education Funding Council. “They approached us to ask if we would consider merging with Salisbury College, they recognised that Salisbury, as part of Wiltshire College, would gain far more than continuing on its own – and for us that was the final stage.”
Geoff believes that an essential ingredient of the success of the merger was in each college retaining its identity. “Each college had its specialisation,” he says. “ Lackham still is land-based, Chippenham was very strongly engineering-based and Salisbury and Trowbridge were then more focused on the more traditional general further education, but all of them, had an identity and there was no attempt to take that away and I think that was an important thing.
“George was very good at putting together a team of managers and making sure that the senior management team were not stuck in one college. He deliberately took his office from Trowbridge down to Salisbury, but had office bases in Chippenham, Trowbridge and Lackham.
“You see in some takeovers that companies sometimes do away with old product names and put it all under a new name, but there was no attempt to do that.”
He also believes without the merger the county might have lost the farm college it had had since 1946. “I’ll stick my neck out and say if nothing had been done, Lackham wouldn’t have survived because I know two or three agricultural colleges around the country that haven’t,” he says. “Chippenham, Trowbridge and Salisbury would have survived, but they would not be able to deliver the level of activity and opportunities for the students they have now.
“I look at the development of the colleges and the facilities they have now and I don’t think they’d have them without the merger, so I am very glad we did it.”
After he stepped down as Chair in 2010 a building at Lackham was named after him and although that still brings tremendous pride, he derives just as much from seeing the college thriving today.
“I think Wiltshire College has built itself up to be a very good example of today’s colleges – and I know a number of them around the country – and it really has worked well,” he says.
“I’m proud looking back on what we created and I’m proud we did it. It’s 15 years since I stood down as Chair and a lot has happened since then, thank goodness, and if you go to any of the sites now, they really are sites of the 21st century.”
