Brains, not brawn

His critics were afraid that John Brennan would be too unassuming to run the Association of Colleges. Not so, says Simon Midgley

John Brennan does not look like a man in the thick of a no-holds-barred battle for more resources. Sitting jacketless in his hi-tech, gizmo-filled office in Centrepoint in the heart of London's West End, the chief executive officer of the Association of Colleges appears an unlikely champion of the nation's further education colleges.

This quietly spoken 60-year-old with a DPhil in theoretical physics - heady stuff involving elementary particles and high-energy quantum physics - is leading the Association of Colleges' campaign for a decent slice of the money Gordon Brown has allocated for education in the public spending review. It certainly helps that he can count. Brennan is after £1.9bn of the £8.1bn cake. Whether he will get it remains to be seen. The Education Secretary Charles Clarke is currently pondering how to distribute the money.

Despite his skill with numbers, Brennan's appointment as chief executive last September was not widely anticipated in the sector. He arrived in post to a great deal of goodwill, but also fears that he was too quiet and grey a figure to be an effective advocate for further education's case for more resources.

He is certainly very different from his predecessors. David Gibson, whom he immediately succeeds, was a master at geeing up the troops at the annual conference with roistering, confidence-building speeches. David Ward, Gibson's predecessor, in turn cut a dash as a flamboyant, champagne-dispensing maverick.

There are signs, however, that Brennan is proving his critics wrong. His conference speech in Birmingham last year was a tour de force - albeit one for which he had to be coached.

"John gains a lot of personal authority just from having such a damn good brain," says Nadine Cartner, the head of policy at the Association of College Managers. One of his key achievements since taking up his new post is to have produced a very detailed, knowledgeable and powerfully argued public spending review submission, she adds. There is nobody in the sector with a stronger grasp of detail or a sharper analysis of policy. "He is hugely respected for that reason," she says.

Brennan is also appreciated for his measured and considered style. "It is welcome, not least because it is totally different from the macho bulldozing of the AoC's first chief executive [Roger Ward]," says Paul Mackney, general secretary of the college lecturers' union, NATFHE. "John has a firm grasp of the financial situation for further education. He never shoots from the hip, but that does not mean that he has not got someone in his sights."

One principal says that, although Brennan is unassuming, this does not mean that he is not clear about what he wants to achieve. He has a quiet strength, which others would be wrong to underestimate, she says.

"He knows a great deal about the sector. This is one of the big strengths that he brings to the job. He has spent the past few years really getting into the interstices of why life is hard for further education colleges."

A hard worker, Brennan spends some five hours commuting every day to and from his home in Wiltshire. He rises at 5.35am and is, perhaps not surprisingly, looking for a London pied-à-terre.

Describing himself as "a Nolan man before Nolan was invented", he rates the things that Nolan [the head of the Committee set up by John Major in 1994 to investigate standards in public life] articulated - the values of public service, honesty, integrity, selflessness and wanting to serve others. "Those kinds of values are very much what I would espouse," he says.

The son of a bricklayer and a secondary school teacher, Brennan attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Bury St Edmunds. His home background was not impoverished, but not especially well-off, either.

Although Brennan found his school to be "indifferent", he developed a passionate interest in the sciences. And he also - amazingly enough, considering that he's not particularly large - honed his skill at shot-putting. In fact he became a schoolboy champion for his county, Suffolk, which perhaps suggests that he has hidden reserves of strength and timing. Having taken four A-levels and two S-levels, he went to the then embryonic University of Sussex to read chemistry. He joined it in its second year of existence; his fellow undergraduates included Virginia Wade and the glamorous Jay twins.

After graduating with a first, he studied for an MSc and then a DPhil in theoretical physics. To help support himself, Brennan taught a little physics in a comprehensive school and some mathematics at the university. Having considered a career in academia, he opted instead for an assistant principalship at the then Department for Education and Science (DES).

"The 1964-70 Labour Government was in power," he says. "There were a lot of exciting things going on at the time in social policy, and it looked like an interesting option."

One of his two years at the DES was spent helping to create Tony Crosland's new polytechnics. Keen for a more hands-on role, he moved to Coventry education authority where he was involved in school planning, before becoming an assistant education officer for further education.

Brennan spent the ensuing 18 years as an assistant director in charge of FE at Wiltshire County Council. A brief spell as a consultant followed, as well as a short time as education manager with the ill-fated South Thames TEC, which went into liquidation. In 1995, he joined Ruth Gee at the Association for Colleges (AFC) as director of policy.

The AFC merged with the Colleges Employers' Forum to become the Association of Colleges and Brennan became director of FE development. As chief executive, he says, he hopes to achieve a better public recognition of the role that further education plays in the social and economic life of the nation. He also emphasises the critical importance of colleges in giving opportunities to individuals and helping them to achieve their aspirations, and in providing the skills that businesses need to compete.

He wants to address the sector's historical underfunding and to reduce bureaucracy and target setting. One of his first acts as the new chief executive has been to ask the leaders of NATFHE and Unison to join him in visiting the Education Secretary. This would be a tripartite attempt to impress on Clarke how continued underfunding makes it difficult for the colleges to fulfil the Government's objectives.

education@independent.co.uk