North East

Happy New Year! We hope you had a lovely break over Christmas and it’s been a good start to 2026 for our North East Colleges.

Firstly, we are delighted to say that Carly Lambton-Howard will join AoC as North East Area Director in early February. Carly is based in the North East and joins AoC with extensive experience in further and higher education, most recently as Head of MIS at Derwentside College. We know Carly will look forward to meeting you soon and getting to know all of the colleges across the region.

As always, it was a very busy start to the academic year, from results day and enrolment to a fast-changing policy environment, with changes to Ofsted inspection, the publication of the post-16 white paper and Curriculum and Assessment Review, devolution developments and much more.

The 2025 AoC conference was our biggest yet, and it was great to see over 60 delegates from the North East region in attendance. At the conference, we launched the Adult Learning Pays campaign, which aims to ensure that the importance of adult education and the key benefits it brings are recognised. It will be great to discuss this further with you: we hope to involve lots of North East colleges, stakeholders and politicians in the campaign.

We were pleased to host 12 North East regional networks in the first term with lots of brilliant discussion and debate, including input from senior officials, employer representative bodies, DfE, Ofsted and Irwin Mitchell. We have welcomed new co-chairs to the Curriculum & Quality Network: Ollie Rodley from Middlesbrough College and Angela Stevenson from Prior Pursglove College. Information on this term’s regional events can be found here, we hope to see you there.

Congratulations to Gateshead College, who were recently awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Higher and Further Education for their employer-led built environment apprenticeship programme ‘Plan Bee’. As the UK’s highest national honour for education, this is a fantastic achievement. We are also pleased to congratulate Newcastle College for receiving commendation in the 2025/26 AoC Beacon Awards.

We are always keen to celebrate success in the region. If you have anything you’d like us to share in future, please email AoC.North@aoc.co.uk.

Colleges Week is coming up soon, on Monday 2 to Friday 6 March 2026. Information and resources are available here, please let us know if you have any activities planned so we can promote and get involved.

Best wishes,
Rebecca Durber
Area Director (NW) and Senior Policy Lead (Devolution)