Glasgow college to deliver net zero skills and tackle poverty

The Herald Scotland

26-04-2025

'In Glasgow,' says Joanna Campbell, 'we've got some of the highest levels of unemployment in Scotland and we have a need to get people out of poverty. Plus we've got the grand challenges of our regional economy – productivity, inclusive growth, climate change.'
'If,' she says, 'you think about the technology and the industries that are going to support Scotland's drive to becoming net zero, then actually right now the college has a role to play in helping people develop those skills.'
Campbell, who stepped into the role following the retirement of Derek Smeall, has already pioneered environmental leadership in education in her previous role as principal at Dumfries and Galloway College, where she led the institution to three UK Green Gown Awards for exceptional sustainability initiatives during her six-year tenure.
Her focus now is on aligning education with Glasgow's economic and environmental ambitions. Net zero will be a core priority for Glasgow Kelvin, as is tackling child poverty. With campuses serving some of the most economically challenged communities in Scotland – in areas such as Springburn and Easterhouse – Campbell sees the college as having a central role in 'improving life chances'.
It is about getting, as she describes 'people out of impoverished situations to become highly productive members of the workforce' and also tackling the climate emergency.
It also aims to deliver education that 'develops the skills that we're going to need for the future to support the jobs and roles that we're going to have in our society'
40% of college education in Scotland is delivered in Glasgow, and 20 % of that is delivered by Glasgow Kelvin College. Glasgow Kelvin College was formed from the merger of three colleges in 2013, and named after the scientist Lord Kelvin to indicate its intent to promote engineering and scientific education programmes.
The college has already itself won a Green Gown award for a pioneering sustainable fashion initiative and is home to a Green Academy – a dedicated training facility focused on low-carbon heating systems such as air-source heat pumps.
Principal Joanna Campbell and students at Glasgow Kelvin College (Image: Glasgow Kelvin College)
Glasgow Kelvin, Campbell says, can provide 'opportunity for those people who are furthest away from the labour market by offering them not just the courses that you would expect a college to put on, like HNDs or national qualifications but actually taster programmes, bite-sized learning and we can do that in the community as well as doing it in our three campuses as well.'.
But delivering this is going to be difficult in a cash-strapped sector. 'One of the things,' she says, 'I want to get across is that we work in a sector where we've had flat cash and we have already reduced our student activity by 8% because of those funding challenges and we've reduced our workforce by about 12% to meet the challenges of funding.'
Funding is particularly important, in terms of poverty and inequality, since, Campbell says, the college has 'proportionately higher than any other college in supporting the most deprived communities in Scotland'. 38% of its enrolments are from areas in the most deprived 10% in Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD).
Principal Joanna Campbell and students at Glasgow Kelvin College (Image: Glasgow Kelvin College)
'Any reduction in our funding," she says, "has a real impact on our ability to be able to support that. And when you think about the fact that we are working with 45 community learning and development partners and as well as what we're doing in our three campuses we're actually operating across 32 locations in the community and delivering training within those locations to about 4000 learners.
"That's significant. We need the system to recognise the scale of impact colleges make – particularly when we have seen a 17% drop in funding since 2021/22.'
Colleges, however, she observes, are used to adapting and agile as organisations. 'We had the last set of reforms in 2010 where we went from 43 colleges to 24 and became regional colleges and had regional boards we managed to navigate our way through that. I'm not saying it was easy but we did it. But I think the thing that we're not seeing at the moment is we're not seeing a sense of urgency to address this. We talk about reform but we've yet to see that materialise.'
The kind of changes needed to deliver net zero are also not, she pointed out, going to be delivered just by looking at curriculum alone.
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'You have to embed that,' she says, 'into the organisational DNA, the culture of the organisation. That's one of the things I managed to do in my previous role. It wasn't just about what can we do to develop the skills to tackle climate change, but actually how can we embed it into our practices because we need to role model that, not just teach.'
Campbell's background is in digital, as a former computing lecturer. 'It's not in climate at all. I'm not a scientist. I'm not an engineer. I'm none of those. But the reason it came about is because when I first went to work in Dumfries & Galloway, we had just secured a significant amount, £7 million, of funding from what was the precursor to South of Scotland Enterprise agency, to develop a green energy centre.'
In partnership with Borders college, and with additional funding from the Green Energy Fund, the college set up not just the centre, but a whole suite of programmes.
'If I'm honest some of the work I've left behind there was leading the college sector and they were very much seen as being the trailblazer for some of the things we see now around green energy, training, offshore wind, onshore wind, just starting to touch on hydrogen production and the curriculum that goes to support that. I think they were ahead of their time.'
There is, Campbell says, one golden thread through her work in both colleges. 'It's the workforce, it's all employers whether you're in Dumfries & Galloway, Glasgow, Edinburgh, right now what employers are feeding back is that the challenges that they have now are workforce and skills deficits. Any college in Scotland is very much deeply rooted in the community that it serves, and also our heritage is providing skills for the economies that are in and around us – and particularly in Scotland where we have that place-based approach that the government has very much focussed on.'
Campbell says she was drawn to Glasgow Kelvin because of its clear sense of mission and values, describing it as an institution rooted in its communities and committed to transforming lives through education.
'This college has a clear mission – to serve some of the most deprived communities in Scotland, and to do so in a way that is bold, inclusive and future-facing. It's a purpose I feel deeply connected to. I can see clear alignment between that mission and the transformational work already being done.'