Lecturer Shaun Leonard believes Sparsholt’s standing with students and the industries it serves is largely due to the extensive and unusual experience of its staff - and a ‘competitive corridor’. The teaching team have long years not only with the college but also running their own businesses and working with firms and agencies involved with fish and fishing. The lecturers’ sense of friendly competition ensures they take advantage of regular internal and external training, keeping their knowledge and skills consistently up to date.
“We are very much up to speed because of the level of industry exposure we have at the college. The continuous professional development we do is both a professional and personal benefit for lecturers and a huge benefit to our students. They are being taught by people who really know what they’re talking about.
The college also benefits from a certain status. Sparsholt has quite a high profile, we get a few gongs and there are financial rewards that come with them. We were one of the country’s first COVEs - Centre of Vocational Excellence. Through that we got about £500,000 to spend over three years. That paid for boats, trailers, fish tanks and a whole fish house. Then we got the replacement for COVE - Action for Business.
We have kit that nobody else has because we attract support from industry, which gives us thousands of pounds worth of redundant equipment. These donations also improve our standing.
I started in 1973 and today we have 15 full time staff including 12 lecturers and three technician instructors. The average tenure is about 15 years and 10 of us have our own fish businesses - one river keeper, three consultancies and six fish farms - which all makes a huge difference to our work, approach and knowledge because of our broad commercial exposure.
On the fresh water side, students have three routes - the ornamental fish sector, recreational fishery management (running places where people come to fish for fun) and fish farming, which involves conservation, restocking and farming fish for food.
These days students come to us from a smaller geographical area than before because in recent years other colleges have opened, but overall student numbers have doubled and we have half of the total.
Constant training and CPD - continuous professional development - are essential because Sparsholt is training for industry. We put a lot of students into jobs in fish farming and particularly the ornamental fish sector. In fact we can’t meet demand from the ornamental side.
In 2007 I did about 60 days’ CPD, though I won’t do as much in 2008! I’ve been a member of the Lantra aquaculture industry group since it started and I am in charge of the fish budget for staff development at Sparsholt. We have a quite dynamic CPD programme on the education side and about a third of my CPD time is purely education. Every summer we go away on a study trip as a group.
We all keep our finger on the pulse on the technical side, too, and we have good access to external cash, such as grants from the Farmers Club, a charitable trust that can fund scholarships to study aquaculture and fisheries overseas. We have a system of internal dissemination of information and Farmers Club money requires a written report and a presentation when you come back.
We have to work as a business as well as educating students, so we run courses that serve students and industry. Until 2004 we organised a big annual fisheries event but now we do one day workshops on specific areas, such as biosecurity and diseases, instead.
We work well with the Environment Agency and Sparsholt is top of four HE institutions where they seek to recruit staff. The Agency is concerned where the next generation of scientists is coming from and we have been asking them to be more interactive with colleges. Through their new studentship scheme they’re offering projects for students’ third year thesis work, which will become a vehicle for recruitment, whereas in the past they have just offered work experience. Nationally there are about 50 projects and we want our students to take up as many as possible.
On a local scale the trout industry also offers scholarships and we have an arrangement with the big Scottish trout farms to fund a student through college and then a two-year contract.
I also have a good example of how one thing can develop through training. One of my roles is checking the health of people’s fish and I found a parasite I hadn’t seen before. I brought back photographs and samples to use in the classroom and then we had a guest speaker from the Environment Agency, who I showed my discovery. Without the CPD day I wouldn’t have picked up on this and we will use it for a short workshop in 2008.
Things like this definitely produce a freshness and create ideas. The extent of your world could be the boundary of the campus but there’s a lot more out there and we need to know about it.
