DRIVEN TO LEARN Oxford and Cherwell Valley College’s Principal and Chief Executive, Sally Dicketts, met with B4’s Richard Rosser to discuss her progress to date at one of Oxfordshire’s leading educational establishments, outlines her plans for the future, and her quest to recognise good talent.
Sally Dicketts is incredibly down to earth and open for an individual drenched in responsibility and surrounded by pressure. A calm, soothing character, she is quite obviously in control of all she has responsibility for, and it is a mind-boggling portfolio, I can assure you. With over fifteen thousand students, one hundred and twenty five full time courses and over one thousand part-time vocational programmes, plus courses tailored to meet the needs of business clients and courses for overseas students, this is more than just a job, this is an all-consuming way of life. Perhaps it’s Sally’s open side which facilitates a free-flowing conversation about a wide range of subjects over which she has considerable knowledge, and although she leaves you half convinced she’s lucky to be in her position given her own learning handicap (Sally openly admits she is a failed learner and a dyslexic), there is no doubt she is proven leader material and totally at ease with her position. But Sally has not had a straightforward path to Oxford, she has had to dig everything out and work for it, not that she resents this is any way. It’s more power to her that she is where she is today, despite the many obstacles placed in her way, “I was a July baby, which is fairly fatal for a child, as you are always a year behind of the rest of the class. In primary school I didn’t do well because I couldn’t spell, so when I took the 11 plus, I failed it so successfully that I spent the first part of my secondary education in a remedial stream. “You quickly develop strategies to cope with dyslexia, you have to. I was given another test whilst in the remedial stream and they discovered that, actually, I could read and write, so I moved up a class every year in my secondary school. I went from practically the bottom class to the top in the fifth year, took my O’ Levels and, much to the school’s surprise, passed. I eventually got through to College and happened to discover the reference my school had sent out to the Colleges I was applying for. It read, ‘Sally Dicketts was delightful, very sociable, and very popular, but somewhat lacking in intellect and motivation to learn.’ As a youngster, you believe something written about you by someone in a position of authority, and that really hit me. “When I went to college, it was the first time somebody sat me down and said ‘you are not doing any work, you’re really lazy’, and that was all I needed, someone to tell me the truth. I worked and actually got my degree”, beams Sally, some thirty years on, still immensely proud of her achievement. “And that’s why I went into teaching, because, even to this day, in my fifties, I am still not a confident learner, because of my experiences when I was twelve.“ Sally talks at length about the precise difficulties she encountered as a child, and then as an adolescent, experiences which encouraged her to, in her own words, ‘go into education to save the world’. Education is quite clearly a quest for Sally Dicketts, “I am very passionate about 70
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