Governance

Sir Geoffrey Holland, KCB, OMT, is one of a select handful of individuals to have had a decisive impact on UK education and under his stewardship MTS is and will be a school remains true to both its traditions and capable of meeting the demanding challenges of the 21^st century.

Born in 1938. Sir Geoffrey’S father (Frank Holland, CBE) was Comptroller of the London County Council and his mother was a schoolteacher, both children of skilled craftsmen in the Midlands potteries. His father left school at 14 and rose through the ranks. “I was not born to riches, but was born to value education and standards and to believe that opportunities had to be made”.

He won a scholarship to MTS, delighted in learning while he was here, and gained also a sense of the importance of contributing to an institution as well as taking from it.

Two years National Service in the Tank Regiment followed, during which time at  Catterick, Aldershot and Germany. After seven months, he was promoted to Second Lieutenant - he was not yet 20 – and this brought with it experience of responsibility. Then came St John s College, Oxford, founded by Sir Thomas White, the founder of MTS. He took a ‘first’ in Modern Languages (French and German) and then, in 1961, joined the Ministry of Labour.

The department’s induction programme took him, literally, to the coal face: “I spent a month in Wales working in several employment exchanges ... visited a steelworks ... crawled along a (coal) seam ... experienced at first hand the community life of the Welsh valleys. I paid unemployment benefit - over the counter in Springburn ... gave careers advice in Caithness, climbed building site scaffolds with Factory Inspectors and visited hazardous factories in the back streets of Edinburgh and Dundee. (Alas! Sir Humphrey. I Knew Him Well, Lecture by Sir Geoffrey Holland, RSA Journal, November 1995).

He became the youngest-ever Principal and later the youngest-ever Assistant Secretary in his Department, as well as serving two Ministers, Robert Carr and Maurice Macmillan, as Principal Private Secretary (Bernard, in Yes Minister terms). He was made the Director of Special Programmes in the Manpower Services Commission and four years later became its Director, playing a key role in the development of youth training, of school/industry links (the Technical and Vocational Educational Initiative and Compacts) and the development of open and distance learning. He wrote the Government report Young People at Work (1977) - widely regarded as a turning-point in the battle against youth unemployment.

In 1988, he became Permanent Secretary at the Employment Department Group and in January 1993 and moved to become Permanent Secretary at the Department for Education before becoming Vice-Chancellor of Exeter University, a post from which he retired in 2002. In 2003, Sir Geoffrey became Chairman of the Learning and Skills Development Agency and 2006, Chair of the Quality Insurance Agency.

Sir Geoffrey’s concerns have coalesced around the need for educational institutions such as MTS to grasp the full implications of a mass higher education system in contemporary society, whether those implications concerned the need to remain highly competitive, recharging management and leadership structures, developing the quality of teaching and seeking fresh sources of revenue. Above all, he has challenged the divide between “Academe” and “Mammon”, understanding that a post-industrial economy would increasingly prize “soft skills” and breadth rather than a narrower subject-specific expertise: at Exeter, every undergraduate programme in every department is to include personal transferable skills. Above all, MTS boys will go out into a world where the capacity to learn new skills throughout one’s career is itself a highly-prized skill: the need for lifelong learning is at the heart of the brief of the Quality Insurance Agency.

“We recognise that employers are increasingly looking for graduates with demonstrable personal transferable skills (PTS), which in many cases are accorded greater importance than subject knowledge…self-management, learning skills, communication, teamwork, problem-solving and data-handling”. (1996)

“Look to develop teaching arrangements designed to promote … independent learning capabilities … enhance the resources available to … move to more student-based learning”. (1995)