Capital City College CPO: My mission to recruit, retain & inspire in further education

There are a very small number of people in this world where – after meeting them – you wish everybody could be just like them.

Trovene Hartley, Chief People Officer at Capital City College – London’s largest further education provider – is undoubtedly one of these. We’ve never spoken before, and I can tell she is insanely busy. But right now, that’s of no matter, because instantly, the former Head of HR for Save The Children UK demonstrates that rare quality of being able to speak to you like only you matter. She talks like she is solely focused on you; and also in a way that makes you feel she’s known you all her life. It quickly comes as no surprise that barely is she into pleasantries when she begins to tell me her entire HR life-story – of cutting her teeth as an HR advisor at London Borough of Hackney and then Medway Council, before taking on a short stint at The Kemnal Academies - one of the largest multi-academy trusts in the South and East of England. It was this stint which ultimately proved significant in solidifying an interest in specialising in HR supporting the teaching profession.

Finding her HR 'home'

“Teaching’s in my blood really,” she says. “I’ve got lots of family members in the profession, and so it’s probably no real surprise I’ve gravitated this way. I’m certainly not here for the pay cheque,” she laughs. “But I feel like I need to be able to feel having a sense of purpose.”

Right now, this purpose is being directed at supporting the nearly 900 full-time teaching staff who right now are working in one of the most challenging sectors going. In FE generally, engagement is low, dissatisfaction is high, and at the time of our interview, Hartley was embroiled in a nine-month dispute led by some of its teachers at its sixth-form campus in Angel – formerly known as City and Islington College. Predictably, it’s over pay and conditions. (A resolution was finally reached at the end of January this year).

“The FE sector is a strange one in terms of how it is funded,” she says. “When I first joined in 2020, as the Head of HR, still during Covid lockdowns, we were at that point trialing working from home and I still hadn’t met a quarter of the leadership in person. Not too long before I joined though, CCC – which formed as part of a merger in 2016 – had experienced 100% turnover of teaching staff, and there were only three HR people who had been there more than three years.” She adds: “It was clearly going to be a challenge.”

But while many future CPOs would have run a mile at this seemingly apocalyptic scenario, this was just the sort of pull Hartley says she needed.

“I’ve always been very aware of when I feel it’s the right time to move on, or up-skill, or do something more challenging,” she says clearly. “I actually felt I’d missed some career steps going straight from being an HR consultant at Medway to being HR Director at Kemnal, and that was part of the reason I stepped out of the education sector to move to Save The Children and build more experience,” she recalls.

“Within a year there, I was running the function, but to me, that’s when things started to feel natural; when I started to feel I could do this job in my sleep. When I start to get this feeling, I know it’s time to start to seek something new.” She adds: “Whenever I think ‘today’s going to be the same as yesterday’ I know it’s time to go.”

Tackling pain points

With nearly five years under her belt now at CCC – whose famous alumni include the likes of Jamie Oliver, Ainsley Harriott, Paloma Faith and EastEnders actors Jessie Wallace, and Steve McFadden – she says it’s pretty safe to say that this institution where no two days really are the same.

“We want to grow the college, and take on more students (currently around 25,000), and so this inevitably means we constantly need to forensically look at what teacher numbers we think we can safely hire in advance of predicted student number growth,” she says. “Recruiting against projected numbers is a real art in itself.”

But this isn’t her only concern. Against a backdrop of years’ of low pay growth in the sector as a whole, Hartley is doing all of this against a background of attraction and retention difficulties; and deciding how the budget it does have should be used most effectively for things like benefits and all the other spend need to keep staff motivated.

“FE is a sector where, in a lot of respects, our hands are tied financially because of the way the funding structures works,” she says. “Unions always think we can do more with funding pay rises than we can – but we often can’t. And the problem is, we’re not saying this with ill-intent, or because we don’t want the best for staff, but simply because we are constrained.”