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S. Brown • From Educational Development to Strategic Management
Sally Brown
From Educational Development
to Strategic Management *
Sally Brown
This is the story of a personal journey from being an educational
developer to a leader of assessment, learning and
teaching in a university. This journey took place in a period
when educational developers moved from being a group of
‘voices in the wilderness’ to being a recognised profession
with high influence on higher education, and in telling this
tale, I would like to recognise the crucial influence of SEDA,
particularly a number of ‘heroes’, influential and supportive
colleagues in helping me develop the skills and confidence
to do the job I do now.
It all started for me when, in the late 1980s, I went to a
SCED (Standing Conference on Education Development)
Conference in Exeter, and found out what I wanted to do
with the rest of my working life. I’d been following what we
nowadays call a portfolio career path, since leaving schoolteaching
to have babies, and was at that time working parttime
in a further education college, and part-time at what
was then Newcastle Polytechnic, teaching study skills, communication,
creative writing and whatever else they’d employ
me to teach.
Having started teaching for the Open University at higher
education level, without a higher qualification, I knew that
I needed a Master’s degree if I wanted to become a lecturer
full time, but I was discouraged from following this career
path by a brutally honest, elitist, much younger colleague,
who told me I was too old, had gone to the wrong kind of
university, and, he inferred, was of the wrong social class.
‘At your age, with young children, without a PhD, you’re
just not going to make it,’ he said. I didn’t like what he
said, but recognised some of the truth in what he was saying.
My portfolio included school teaching, mainly at secondary
level, home tuition with excluded children, working in prisons,
borstals and for the Probation Service, being a trained
play-group leader, and having taught for a number of years
for the Open University on a radical theatre-studies course
that incorporated both practical and theoretical perspectives
(I was employed by them for my expertise in the former
area). Incidentally, the training I received from the OU
on marking and assessment established approaches and
practices that still impact on my work. However, with that
rag-bag of skills and expertise I could understand why my
CV might not leap into the hands of the selection panel for
a traditional university literature lecturing post.
Going to the SCED conference was almost literally a Damascene
experience. The weather in Exeter was sunny, and I
found the whole experience very enlightening. There was a
group of people around who, like me, got really excited
about the how students learn, and how we can foster skills
in a whole range of communication and other areas. People
there were talking and listening to one another, about the
genuine difference that good teaching could make, and
about the ways in which subject matter and pedagogic expertise
married together could be transformative.
I’d not heard the term ‘educational developer’ before I
went there: on the way home, I knew I was one. I also
made friends, people who influenced my work and my life
over the next ten years, and helped me in all kinds of ways,
mentoring me selflessly, and helping me to realise my own
capability. I was soon co-opted onto SCED’s Publications
Committee, (chaired at that stage by groupwork guru David
Jaques), which produced a really innovative and diverse
range of publications, which later included my own earliest,
and looking back now rather basic, first publication,
SCED Paper No. 63 January 1991, Self- and Peer-assessment,
co-authored with Peter Dove. When Peter and I
were drafting it, trying to describe and theorise the practices
we were using in our everyday work, we went up to
Edinburgh to visit John Cowan, then and now a leading
light for those interested in assessment. I was amazed that
someone as high-powered and famous as him would be so
generous with his time, and so helpful in guiding our work.
His fine example made me determined that I too would
help to support new writers later in my career.
I became more and more active in the Publications Committee,
and was asked to chair it when David stepped
down. This was my first real experience of chairing a crossinstitutional
group, and gave me opportunities to hone
skills in project management and people management, that
had probably evolved during my complex multi-tasking
earlier career, but had lain dormant until then.
Not long after I started chairing the group, I met another
key influence who went on to have a key role in my life:
Phil Race. I remember sharing my sandwiches with him
when he came to his first meeting without realising that
SCED worked on wafer-thin budgets and didn’t provide
lunch. Phil started sending me (and others on the Com-
* First published in: Educational Development No. 8.4, November 2007.
P-OE 1+2/2008
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