Preston College, 1988-1999

In 1988 I started work at W.R. Tuson College in Preston. It was soon to change its name to Preston College. Most colleges around the country included the city or town name and outside Preston itself no-one would recognise the name of W.R. Tuson, who had been an Education Officer locally.

The college had been formed in 1974 by the merger of the Grammar School 6th form and the local Technical College. I was told that on formation there was a bit of culture shock on both sides as one side invited the other for a cheese and wine celebration and the other side were offering a pie and pint event... A great story but I've no idea whether it was true... It was true that 14 years after the merger some staff were still in the habit of referring to students as "kiddies".

Before we go any further I'd just like to apologise for those glasses...

I was introduced to the senior team of Departmental Heads at an important meeting. I had joined just at the time when the government had decided that Further Education colleges should become corporations and financially responsible for their budgets and fate, rather than the then current state of affairs where they fell under the control of Local Education Authorities. I had been taken on specifically to introduce computers into the administration of the college and was to start a computerised information system that would hold data on students and supply the government with the F.E. annual statistical data.

The Principal at the time was Mike Clegg and he had plunged the room into an atmosphere of shock and despair by pointing out that the new funding system would mean that colleges could now go bankrupt without LEAs bailing them out. I was to speak to them in the next session and looked at this small sea of shocked and despondent faces, who didn't know me from Adam.

"Well..." I said slowly. "I have to say I've worked with better warm-up acts..." It could have gone hideously wrong and I was relieved when everyone in the room, including Mike Clegg, burst into an uproar of laughter. Incidentally, some colleges were to go bankrupt and found themselves undergoing mergers with other more financially healthy or astute neighbouring colleges.

The college was renamed Preston College from 1 September 1989 and celebrated by sponsoring the BBC's radio show Friday Night is Music Night which was broadcast live from the local theatre. I remember the late Dame Joan Sutherland was the principle female singer, whilst being in her 60s and the then Head of Science spluttering during the interval, "I wish she wouldn't keep doing those... [pause] ... embarrassing female movements!"

The college had bought eight Amstrad 1640 computers. They had 640Kb of memory and unlike the earlier 1512 pictured, they were furnished with one 5.25 inch floppy disk and a [GASP] 20 megabyte (20Mb) hard drive. They came with a package called Ability which was an early program comprising a word processor, spreadsheet, database and calendar. It was pretty basic stuff. The screens couldn't display bold or italic characters and so any special formatting was highlighted by shaded backgrounds to the text.

We also had dot-matrix printers, one to each PC because networking wasn't something to be considered yet. Up until now documents were typed on typewriters. There were a couple of typists on the main site who could rattle out documents at a fast rate on typewriters with steeply rising rows of keys. An Imperial 66 if I remember rightly. Wanting more than one copy meant either typing the entire thing again for a second or third copy or for larger quantities you typed a Gestetner sheet, which created a template document that was then wrapped around an inked drum on a huge machine with a handle and you churned it like a butter churn to produce copies one page at a time. The templates would ooze a sort of pinkish goo and the whole process could be extremely messy.

It took me ages to persuade one of the typists to try a PC. In the end, horrible man that I am, I went into her office very early one morning and took away the typewriter and placed the PC and printer on her desk. I had to be there when she came in to calm her down. "Oh, Mr Burke! What have you done?" I sat her down and she typed the first page. "You don't need to hit the keys so hard..." I said delicately.

We covered the simple things like using the backspace key instead of reaching for Tipp-Ex, the white paint that typists used to correct mistakes. Not that she made many. In fact it was only the strange flatness of the keyboard that led to any mistakes. Having just written a novel - though it would be many years to come before it would end up as a Kindle book - I was in awe of her accuracy and speed on the keyboard. We printed the document out. We then did a two-page document without pausing to change paper (the dot-matrix printers took continuous paper with perforations to split pages apart).

We covered printing the same document more than once and at that point, without any need for retyping it or dealing with messy gooey sheets and copier machines, she began to see some advantages in this new-fangled technology. True... she did break a keyboard through battering at it with great force but I just replaced it immediately and she got used to a new way of working.

So now it was time for me to start on the student record system. The database in Ability was very basic and had no chance of coping. In any case, the individual functions contained within the Ability package were being outshone by seperate packages such as the word processor Word Perfect; spreadsheet packages Multiplan, SuperCalc and Lotus 1-2-3; and database dBASE III+

There wasn't really anyone with knowledge to help me. I printed out the Help pages and slogged all hours. I ended up with a working version that held details of all the courses (massive shock to the Academic staff that GCSE English from one awarding body couldn't be lumped with GCSE English from another body or that City & Guilds level one Fabrication and Welding was not the same as City & Guilds level two or three Fabrication and Welding and that they could not be lumped together under C&G Fab and Weld...

I needed to network three computers together to work on the database. I had already had to import from America a hard disk drive of unbelievably large size - 40Mb... I had a team of two data entry staff who at times had to put up with all sorts of mishap. On one enrolment day a member of the academic staff just unplugged one of the computers to plug in a kettle... The database locked up and lost a shed load of data. After an hour I found that only the one record that had been being worked on had actually disappeared, but that the pointers or signposts within the database software had been messed up and couldn't recognise the missing records. A couple of days to fix.

It took a long time to get to the stage of submitting the annual FESR (Further Education Statistical Return). The return had to be a text file with all fields (Surname, Forenames, Date of Birth etc) each starting at a particular place in the row of characters. This meant if the person had a short surname like "Moss" you had to pad the surname with spaces until it took up all the space allocated to surnames. Except that dBASE didn't like padding with spaces. If it saw two spaces together it "corrected" it by deleting back to a single space.

I ended up padding with asterisks (*) and then writing a program in the Basic-A programming language to replace any asterisks with spaces. Getting this right had me working 13 or more hours per day for months. The computer department at County Hall ran lots of tests on my data and gleefully told me when handing over reams of paper that "This is why only trained computer scientists should write programs..."

That year we were the last college in the UK to send in a return. Usually following submission the Department of Education and Science would contact the college with a long list of errors or possible mis-matches (such as a 23-year-old having fees waived because they were under 18). There could be hundreds of these to work through.

I got a phone call from an incredulous person at the DES. "Your return only had 5 errors! How did you do that?" We sorted out the five errors whilst on the phone. We may have been the last college to submit the return but we were the very first to have an accepted clean return. I began to get queries from other colleges.

Then the very next year Lancashire Country Council decided all ten of its colleges (the move to corporate status had been decided but not yet passed through into law) were to get mini computer systems and a software package called FEMIS that had been developed by staff at the Further Education Staff College - the college that trained college staff. The mini computer would be running Unix as an operating system and the database software would be ORACLE.

The PRIME mini computer was delivered and had an incredible 16Mb of inbuilt memory (RAM). In 1969 they had sent Apollo11 to the moon with less computing power! It could support eight people working at terminals all at the same time! The terminals were "dumb" terminals. They were not computers in their own right but just like the keyboard of a PC now. The green screens that came with them made them look like a home computer and one keyboard was stolen even whilst the rest were being unloaded from the lorry! Someone was obviously hoping to be able to plug it into their TV and to play games on it...

There were lots of courses on both ORACLE and the FEMIS systems. Most of these were held at the Staff College which was in Somerset near Weston-Super-Mare. Lancashire wasn't going to send ten people from ten colleges so I found myself one of three or four people who was on a team to be trained and who would then train other Lancashire staff on return. Lancashire also set up a county wide team to monitor and support colleges.

Running this at County Hall was an ex-colleague from Blackpool College, Pete Ryan and with co-ordinating control and oversight for County Hall was my old boss from Blackpool District Education Office, Clive Lockwood. At an initial meeting which included college Principals, Clive recognised me and nodded at which Mike Clegg must have registered some surprise because Clive explained "John was one of my better appointments at the DEO!" Aw, don't fight over me, chaps...

Anyway the photograph was taken in the tiny village of Axbridge where we were staying during one of the courses by FEMIS staff, some of whom I am still in touch with. It was 4 July 1990, we were staying in the village pub next to the church and it was the night Gazza cried as England lost to Germany in a penalty shoot out. There were three of us there that night: me, Pete Ryan and the MIS Officer from Nelson & Colne College, Rob Burnett who became a great pal and ended up working for EMIS, as the firm behind the software FEMIS became.

I don't have a great many photos of Preston College itself, but this one was taken at a ceremony to open a new amphitheatre that some of the construction students had built behind the college, using reclaimed materials such as old paving stones etc.

My student record system had to be abandoned once Femis software arrived, but I put the same skills to use on a finance system and another system to log part-time teachers' hours. These bits of software were sold to other colleges by Preston with a percentage of the proceeds coming to me. Invariably those colleges wanted some bespoke work doing to meet their unique requirements and eventually I came to view it as a bit of a pain in the butt.

However I was building a reputation for myself, not only with colleges but with the LEA and even the government department. The old DES had become the DfES - surprising many of us by calling themselves the Department for Education and Science. As one conference pundit put it: "Nice to know that the Department are actually for education..." It sometimes doesn't seem like that nowadays. At some point education ceased to be seen as an investment for the government and more a way of charging would-be students enormous sums of money that would take them years to pay off student loans.

Anyway, I was approached to become involved with a new organisation representing the interests of college Management Information Systems - managers were invariably called MIS Managers, ho ho, great hilarity all round. The new organisation would be the National CMIS Board which would lobby on behalf of MIS and co-ordinate responses to government green papers.

I found myself speaking at conferences quite a bit and at consultative meetings with the DfES, EMIS, and for the NCMIS Board. I made a point of never criticising without offering an alternative way of doing things and this was usually appreciated by those I was addressing.

One of my responsibilities for the National CMIS Board was editing and producing (having very near written 90% of it myself) the quarterly bulletin which soon featured my "How to do it" articles. These covered SQL techniques, the production of menu systems within Unix and so on. When I retired some 20 years later some kind people remembered these articles in tributes.

The government were however keen to cut down on the number of organisations lobbying and there was pressure to merge with NAITFE, the National Association for Information Technology in Further Education. The photograph shows from left Keith Duckitt from the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) looking on as John Rockett, chair of the National CMIS Board shakes hands with Malcolm Himsworth of NAITFE to merge the two organisations to form the National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA).

Meanwhile back at Preston, the now creaking Prime computer was replaced by a DEC Ultrix system with extendable data storage. EMIS software was expanding with Oracle-based financial records and staffing records as the Further Education Funding Council brought in new annual statistical returns to give information on staffing and colleges had to produce more formalised financial reporting.

Nightly, weekly and now monthly back-ups were being done on a variety of tapes and cassettes using 1/4-inch tape whilst in-house PC-based systems were still using floppy disks that were no longer as soft as they used to be and which became known as stiffies - ooh-er...

Here is a selection of backup media in use at the time. We were starting to look for software packages that would allow our PCs to connect to the Oracle databases as up until then people using the two systems were forced to have two monitors and keyboards on their desks.

Forward another few years and the early DECs were replaced by more powerful DEC Alpha Servers.

My own desk was now much more tidy... It was amazing just how much paper could be generated by computer systems!

One year my regular articles in the NILTA Newsletter took on a rather whimsical aspect that Christmas. I wrote the entire thing in rhyme. Easy at first, I was cursing myself by the time I finished it in the early hours of one morning!

I was being featured in other magazines by now. This photo and a few others were taken by Dennis from EMIS.

We had by now installed software on most PCs that made them capable of connecting to the Oracle database store and were starting to use Microsoft's Access database as a front end to in-house Oracle developments.

The college was expanding. This was a new sports and gym building. We tried to photograph it from the same spot every day as it was being built, but the most advantageous spot was from a classroom so we had to set the camera up every day instead of being able to leave it on a tripod all the time. Eventually we had an animated file, but it was just a bit wobbly here and there!

The college was holding an open technology event one weekend and I had seen this jukebox at a jukebox show in Leeds a couple of weeks before. Whilst most jukeboxes were still playing records and a few had started to play CDs, this one played video files on a PC inside the box and regularly downloaded new ones from satellite to keep itself up to date. I arranged to hire one for the event and it created quite a bit of interest at the college.

Here I and my team of a couple of technicians were about to move office to the far end of the academic IT office.

On taking the large printer from its sound-proof hood I found a computer chip. Oops... I wonder where that came from?

In 1999 I had my name put forward for a national award. NILTA gave several awards on an annual basis and there was one aimed at users or managers of information systems in colleges who had gone over and above what would normally be expected of someone doing such work. The Awards were announced Oscar style at the NILTA Annual Conference.

And I found myself walking to the stage to shake the hand of the Chief Executive of the Further Education Funding Council, David Melville.

Things happen sometimes that feel horrible or unjust and cause a lot of pain and anxiety at the time but then turn out to be the enabler for something much better to happen. Several of these coincided over a couple of years. I then had a chance meeting with the Principal of Myerscough College - Lancashire's "land-based" college of Agriculture and Horticulture. He wanted me to go and work for him and after a while I agreed to meet and discuss it with him. I went through the formalities of applying and attending for interview alongside other candidates but came out of the interview as the Head, not only of the college Management Information System but of all things I.T. including the network, academic computers, the lot. The only downfall was the job title - Head of I.T. and MIS... Hit and Miss...! But that would give me a few laughs at various conferences as a way of breaking the ice.

Preston held me to a three month notice period and the only concession was to release me one day a week to go to Myerscough. Whose I.T. network was an absolute disaster. I felt like a good car mechanic who gets a job maintaining vehicles at an airport only to find the aeroplanes don't work... But this state of affairs wasn't the college's fault mainly but the firm that had promised what they lacked the skills to deliver. But this is now a different story for a different article.

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