OPENING SPEECH- BY SABOOHI FAMILI, CHIEF EXECUTIVE & PRINCIPAL, AT

TODAY, TOGETHER, TOMORROW BUSINESS FORUM

Good evening! Welcome to the Today, Tomorrow, Together Business Forum.
Thank you for giving your time to be with us this evening to discuss and be part of our and your - future!
You know, Education is THE only sound investment for the future. Education is most
effective when it is the source of initiative, ideas, and innovation within any society. And
Education is very much our business.
Your College - Guernsey College of FE - is and will be a key player in developing a society
which is positive, principled, and prosperous. Our key role at our College is to identify and
release individual potential, and to create what we are proud to call 21st century
enlightenment.
The Education Vision document, Todays learners, Tomorrows world provides rich ideas
and inspiration for what might be realised on our island through the power of education.
This document clearly points the way to progress. But what good is inspiration without
application? What good are principles if they are not converted into practice? This
College aims to close any such gap.
Our motto is Think carefully, Act quickly. Your input here tonight will help us do both
these things. It will feed into our research, helping us to design and test new ways of
providing Further Education on our Bailiwick. Our mission is to foster a more inventive,
resourceful and skilled community in Guernsey. And we want to do this together with you
by working in partnership with all who have a stake in the future of learning on island.
To that end, this College aims to be a key player at the centre of such a vision.
The purpose of this forum today is to stimulate debate and it is your opportunity to
challenge our thinking about the future. You are a key stakeholder and your ideas and
suggestions are most welcome. We will collect all your comments, ideas and challenges,
and produce a report on how this evening has started to impact on our thinking about the
future.
And tonight is just the start. We want to engage with you continually as we review and
refine our plans.
The College of FE is committed to this second version of the future. The route to long-term
growth and sustainability is not only qualifications, but broader social value, and a real stake

in local growth and development. And tonight we would like to start the journey towards
that future, by inviting your responses to that vision.
To set the scene for the debate tonight I would like to offer you two long term
futures that are possible for further education on the Island.
1. One future in which limitations and spending cuts create a culture of retrenchment
and policy incoherence; where market mechanisms create winners and losers
without engaging citizens; where further education remains a Cinderella service.
2. Another future that is fundamentally more collaborative, networked, and socially
productive; where this college is an incubator of social value and a hub for service
integration; where further education serves the needs of learners through being a
creative partner in local growth and service reform agendas.
We believe that the idea of social productivity is the key to achieving this second future.
Social productivity is a fresh approach to policy and practice that can give practitioners
and policymakers the means to make sense of the change around them, and begin
shaping new realities on the ground.
What do we mean by social productivity. To us, the idea of social productivity
represents a long-term culture change in public services shifting from a culture of topdown, silo-based delivery of services, to a culture that recognises that social value is
created jointly between the service provider and user.
It is an approach that puts engagement, joint working and civic responsibility at the heart
of public services creating sustainable systems that build social capacity, foster
community resilience, and work with the grain of peoples lives. In such a world we would
like to be explicitly judged by the extent to which we help citizens, families and
communities to achieve the social outcomes they desire.
So, in conclusion, thank your for your time, and for listening to me. For the rest of the
evening, we very much want to listen to you.