00:01 My name is Ross Baglin I’m the director of leadership for the department of health which covers the NHS across England. It involves making sure we have a pipeline of future leaders for the top jobs in the NHS and that they’ve had the right development along the way in their career. It also involves helping support the current leaders in being effective in delivering the future that the NHS is going to need.

00:27 The NHS to me is an extraordinary institution it’s got this sort of unique status as half national treasure, half political football. For me personally it was not that dissimilar to where I came from, it’s a highly technical and technology driven thing, with immense challenges I think in how you adapt to changing technology and the cost pressures and the service challenges that come with that.

00:54 As people probably judge from my accent I grew up in the suburbs of Australia. My family were very passionate about education and advancement but the idea that I might go to university alone would be a, was a bit of an ambition.

01:08 My mother was a full time mother all her life, she left school at 15. My father I think left school at 17 he ended up I think being a bank manager in a local bank in Australia. So and he was a professional footballer along the way.

01:21 Like most kids at school I spent most of my time trying not to worry about what I would have to do next and then when I was about 17 or 18 I encountered an English literature teacher, she I guess thought at the time I was promising enough that she turned up at 8 in the morning to teach myself and one other kid English literature but honestly I could only say I was incredibly lucky in the support I got from family, school, teachers, and later on in my career from some of the people who helped me out too.

01:52 My mother wanted me to be a doctor which would certainly work here, I think but I also had this very strong desire to pursue literature and those weren’t necessarily going to work together. So I ended up becoming a psychologist, it took my mother about, took about the second year to realise that I wasn’t actually gonna become a doctor by being a psychologist but I got away with it for that long.

02:08 So I left university and I got a reasonable good degree I guess, and I took a year off then to play in rock band which I duly did without, it must be noted any huge success.

02:21 I was at home on morning and strangely enough I got rung up by somebody from Shell who invited me in for an interview without my having applied that wouldn’t happen nowadays. So I decided that my whatever my other lifetime ambitions were they were quickly, quickly swamped by the offer. I joined Shell I spent most of my career internationally, although I consider myself probably British about 70% and Australian 30% until the cricket’s on.

02:48 Where you do most of your learning is on the jobs that you do and then the real learning that you do is by getting in there, getting your hands dirty and in my case it was things like you know being on the retail leadership team for Shell Australia when I was 31 I think. You know that’s what really teaches you, because you soon learn what you don’t know there.

03:07 Moving from human resources job to selling natural gas which is a highly technically oriented thing which I knew nothing about in a new country was unbelievably daunting. After 6 months of being bruised by QCs who’d been doing this for 20 years and were negotiating on the other side of the table, and given sometimes as good as I got, but really struggling I handed my resignation in and I remember vividly the boss I had at the time, lovely, lovely man, you know taking my letter of resignation and sort of ripping it up into four and handing it back to me and saying, you know you need to give this 6 more months firstly and secondly you need to take the learning from this which is actually vulnerabilities are kind of an important thing to know how to manage.

03:50 So up ‘til then I’d been, I’d been probably a bit of a golden boy, and what I didn’t have any experience in was coping with failure.

04:01

00:02 My name’s Mary Archer I’m chairman of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. My own background is as an academic I taught in the university for some years, taught chemistry and quit full time teaching in the mid 80s and took up a portfolio career which involved some business and some public service. I became chairman of a body called the National Energy Foundation. I was recruited onto the board of my trust by the then chairman in 1993 and very glad they appointed me because it’s probably the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done.

00:43 I always wanted to be a scientist my father tells me that when I was 7 or 8 he discovered me in the back garden tying an earthworm into a knot and he scolded me cos really unkind to the earthworm, said, why was I doing that and I said, well I wanted to see if it could untie itself and I think that was the scientific tendency in me coming out. Have to say it couldn’t untie itself that was the end of that earthworm.

01:12 At my little preparatory school there was a room at the top of the house it was a lovely old house that these two indomitable Scottish ladies who became joint head mistresses after the war, bought and at the top of the house in the attic they had a jumble thing called the Discovery Room and it had everything in it, it had, it had a gold leaf electroscope and it had great crystals of sulphur and it had fossilised animals and you were just allowed to go up there and discover things in those days, don’t think health and safety had quite got onto the scene and I was absolutely fascinated I loved going up there and poking around and, then when I went to secondary school and discovered there was a subject called chemistry that was it.

02:00 Did chemistry at A level, did chemistry at university, did my PhD and I really thought I would never divert from it and in a sense I don’t feel I’ve left it, although I wouldn’t like to sit my finals again.

02:18 My father was a chartered accountant, didn’t go to university, he was a real intellectual though and he was the greatest influence on my young life and he sent both my sister and myself away to boarding school greatly against the wishes of my mother, put sort of steel into our backbone I suppose. So he was a very formative influence and I suppose it was the greatest tragedy of my life that he died of lung cancer when I was 27. Cancer treatments were not as kind as they are now, so it was very, very hard. But when my father was very ill one of the things he said to me is, you know you’re well established now, it’s time to have a family, but he died before I could achieve that, but anyway, I had my son the following summer.

03:12 Going to university is the great life transforming experience I think, well it was for me at any rate. And after a rather strict boarding school I found the freedom of Oxford quite puzzling at first I mean a silly thing, I couldn’t get used to the fact I was allowed to post my own letters, you used to have your letters vetted at boarding school. Went on and did my PhD did two post docs, got my fellowship at Cambridge and I thought that was it for life.

03:47 I was put on committees and things and rather than running a mile as most academics do I found I actually quite enjoyed administration and you know sort of making things happen.

03:56

00:02 My name is David Nicholson. I’m the NHS Chief Executive and I work for the Department of Health.

00:08 I’m responsible for a hundred billion pounds worth of tax payers money. To make sure that I spent effectively for the benefit of patients and health in England.

00:21 I spent my whole career in the NHS. I’ve worked 32 years as an NHS manager, I’ve worked in Mental Health Services, Community Services. I’ve worked in big acute hospitals, I’ve run regions and subsequently I became, to work at the department of health.

00:37 My father always said that the, the aspiration his father was a labourer, so his aspiration for his son was that he should become a skilled man, so my dad was a plasterer and my father said to me that his aspiration was that I wouldn’t wear overalls, so I would work in an office. I went through school, I took my um, O Levels and A levels. I did science subjects all the way through, through school. A lot of people I went to school with left at, left at 16, they were earning. Um, it was pretty clear to me that I wasn’t gonna do that. I was still interested in what I was doing at school, I was still interested in, the, in, in the subjects, it was a good school they, they supported me they, they had expectations of me and I worked in a, a fruit shop on a Saturday and a pet shop on a Sunday. When I was at University I, I worked part time as a youth worker, um, and in the holidays of course I um, I would work in the building trade with my father.

01:36 I started at university to do bio-chemistry and physiology. I absolutely hated it. I, within a year I’d packed it in and I decided to do history and politics. I thought it was extraordinary because it was, I met a whole set of people I would never have met and I kind of, I became very conscious of the way I talked and the kind of, er, and the, and my outlook and my parents and all of that in a way I’d never, I’d never really thought of before. I mean I thought, I thought all these people were cleverer than me they were more articulate than me, they had more money than me and once I’d got over my, my natural sort of, er, hostility to anything new I kind of learnt to understand it and work with people and had a really, you know really good time.

02:21 I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, other than I wanted to get a job, a career, something that would guarantee income and genuinely on the same day I got two letters, one of them offering, offering me a job as a youth worker in Hillingdon, and the other one offering me a job as, on the general management training scheme and the interesting thing about it from the general management training scheme point of view was, they’d already rejected me. I, I am a very sort of persistent character in that, in that regard and I’d, I’d assumed they’d got it wrong. It was rather naïve actually when I think about it, but it was a sort of they’d got it wrong so they’ll get it right in the end so I put in again and I, I got on.

02:58 When they did the analysis on me at University and they were thinking about the kinds of careers I should do, it was a sort of, I had a social conscious but I liked bossing people about, which was a kind of pretty constant thing throughout my career actually. I got a job, being responsible for a learning disability hospital in Doncaster about 500 beds, but 500 people lived in these, in this hospital and um, they had communal toothbrushes in those days. They would be, they’d be pooled clothes um, er, people, there was a whole set of individuals who co, who were in wheelchairs. There was no wheelchair access to a whole set of, set of the site and very quickly you could see how changes that I made, things that I put into place could have a massive impact on the daily lives and experience of those people who lived in that learning disability hospital.

03:51 That was something really worth doing. It’s a fantastic privilege when you, you think about it, that you can make decisions that can help make such a massive difference to people and that’s when I thought, that was what I wanted to really spend the rest of my life doing.

00:02 My name is Chris Beasley I’m the chief nursing officer for England and I work for David Nicholson who is the chief executive of the NHS.

00:09 I’m the nurse that gives advice to government, I’m a sort of visible leader of the profession throughout the country, I work with a whole range of other nurses to make sure that nurses, midwives and allied health professionals are sort of integrated into government policy and I also have responsibility as a director general within the department, for children, family maternity policy and for reducing health care associated infections.

00:36 And I’ve been a practicing nurse a little while ago now but I’ve, that’s what I, where I come from. My father was in the civil service actually and my mother worked in the civil service for a little while but then fairly typically in those days was a housewife yeah.

00:50 I went to a grammar school in those days that’s where you know there was still the 11 plus when I was at school. It was always my ambition to be a nurse as, why I don’t know my family are not medical at all but when I was a small child I always wanted to be a nurse. Once I got, I did my O levels then what I did at A level was linked to nursing so, you know I did biology and I did actually history cos I was really interested in history and it wasn’t anything to do with nursing really but it’s cos I really loved it. So I did biology and chemistry and history at A level. And then as I got older and began to think of other careers I explored nursing more, in more depth and it, what I wanted to do early on seemed to be something that I wanted to pursue and so I did.

01:34 Well in those days if you wanted to be a nurse you applied when you were about 16 because to get into a London teaching hospital which is where I trained then, that’s what you did, so I applied and then I started my training when I was 18, it was great fun cos it was what I wanted to do, I was living in London you know and I came from Essex, quite a rural part of Essex.

01:55 I think what I really, really remember was that it was really hard physical work when I started nursing we were still scrubbing, sterilisers and I can remember thinking, you know a few months ago I was sitting in a classroom you know, perhaps writing an essay and now I’m scrubbing.

02:13 We lived in so, you know food and accommodation everything was sort of provided for us. I’ve always like working with people and I really liked working with patients, and so, you know that made up for it and, you know it was just a very interesting world really.

02:28 But I left to get married and have my family, I’ve got 3 sons and, when I left it was sort of made really clear to me that I’d chosen a man above nursing really and you know there probably would not be a way back into the career so that’s, that was a little while back and really I didn’t nurse for then for 10 years.

02:49 I came back really not thinking I was going to have, I didn’t come back with a plan I was going to take my career forward, clearly my children were a bit older and I was interested in nursing and I came back into community services as a district nurse I knew very little about them because we did very little community service when I was in my training and I sort of fell into district nursing, loved every minute of it and then I began to get interested in what’s the next step, having broader areas of influence, and, that’s been the pathway from there to now.

03:21 My roles went from if you like a professional role just being concerned around nursing, to general management roles, managing hospitals and then eventually I worked at a regional level in London looking at the whole regional policy and strategy and, few other things on the way and, then into this post.

03:41 I was very lucky to work with some really very good bosses over the years who have been in a way I guess more ambitious for me than I might have been for myself and had said, well Chris why don’t you think about doing this or this bit of experience is lacking, you ought to go and get that bit of experience.

03:58

00:02 My name’s Bruce Keogh I’m the Medical Director of the National Health Service. Well that involves really trying to provide a medical, clinical compass in the decision making policy development process of the NHS and government.

00:20 I’ve been a practicing clinician, a university professor, I held a number of leadership roles in cardiac surgery which is my specialty. I decided I wanted to become a doctor at the age of 4 or 5 because, I encountered some orthopaedic surgeons under some rather unfortunate circumstances. I fell out of a tree, broke an arm quite badly, I also had an uncle who was a very good general practitioner who I admired enormously. But I was being brought up as a kid in what’s now Zimbabwe and I was taken by reports in the newspapers in the late 1960s of the first human heart transplant which was performed in Cape Town. And it was that that made me think that I’d quite like to be a heart surgeon.

01:09 One of the defining moments of my life though was my father had been very ill and he was, he had just come out of hospital and in Africa, conversations quite often happen underneath a big tree and I remember going with him out into the garden and I told him that I’d failed my A levels quite spectacularly actually I was interested in sport and girls and less interested in academic endeavour, I don’t think that distinguishes me from any other male teenager.

01:43 And he just looked at me and he said, you want to be a doctor he said, what are you going to do now and that’s when I realised that there was a defining moment at which point my life had become my responsibility and it was no longer his.

01:56 Late 1960s early 1970s it became clear to me that there wasn’t a future there so I left with a rucksack and 250 quid and arrived in England on first of September 1973. At that time Britain and what was then Rhodesia weren’t getting on very well and my money was frozen, I’d got to a stage where I applied for 2 jobs where I was rejected because they thought I wasn’t fit enough and eventually it was British Steel actually and I went there, and I failed the medical, I said to the doctor look I’m in bad shape, I can’t, you know I haven’t got enough money I’m not eating properly all that sort of thing. He did a deal with the management they gave me a week’s pay in advance and told me not to come for a week, go off and get some food and you know that act of kindness was very important to me.

02:49 I dipped pipes in tar with a bunch of other immigrants.

02:57 I visited pretty well every medical school I think with the exception of Birmingham and Cardiff in the UK trying to get a place most of them told me not to bother applying. A lot of the time was spent thinking what next, I was determined to get there eventually but, with more and more rejections it became more and more worrying and I eventually got in through clearing and that was such a narrow escape for me not getting to do what I really wanted to do that it made me quite focused on pursuing my career quite vigorously.

03:34 Mentioned I failed my A levels I also had the privilege of failing my surgical exams, twice I think.

03:43 When you’re doing something that you love, that you really enjoy it’s not a burden. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, it’s fantastic. Great colleagues, great opportunity, love it.

03:59

Less structure, more control

One of the key things I found in making the step into higher education was being pro-active. You need to take more responsibility for yourself, not just if you’re living away from home like I did, but because the emphasis is much more on managing your own learning. You won’t be able to rely on prompts from teachers, you’ll have to organise and motivate yourself. It’s unlikely to be a straightforward nine-to-five and this lack of structure can be tricky. On the plus side, however, it gives you a lot more control over your life.

There’ll be a lot more people around, of course. You might be in a lecture along with two or three hundred other students. But, while the level of interaction between student and lecturer might be restricted, there is an expectation that you will actively participate with both lecturers and fellow students by being prepared, listening and speaking when you can.

Switching courses

Like many people I found that the academic side of things didn’t work out straight away, but that needn’t matter. I switched courses from geography to social anthropology and it worked out fine – the knowledge I gained about other cultures helped me get my first job with the Race Relations Board.

New friends, new opportunities

If anything, life away from your course is even more important than the academic side in making a successful transition into higher education. You’re likely to have a fair bit of free time – although some might be required for paid work or family responsibilities – and you’ll be exposed to a whole new environment. It’s a great chance to pursue existing interests or, even better, completely new ones. There’ll be loads of opportunities; you just need to take the plunge.

Making friends is always important, and especially so in this new setting: remember that everyone is in the same boat and will be looking for mates. Get to know people on your course: they are going through the same things that you are and you can help each other with your studies.

Perhaps the most important thing is not to be afraid to ask ‘dumb’ questions. No one knows everything and it’s intelligent to reveal and rectify your ignorance.

Philip Frame, national teaching fellow at Middlesex University Business School

Philip Frame’s career trajectory – geography to social anthropology to education research
I went to Sussex University as an access student. I switched courses from geography to social anthropology, and have little idea what the latter was about. Having graduated I wrote to the Race Relations Board to see if they had any jobs. They did, and knowledge of other cultures helped me get one. I did a masters and PhD in my early 30’s and enjoyed helping others learn. This commitment culminated in a National Teaching Fellowship award of £50,000 which helped me internationalise my horizons.

00:01 My name’s Rowena Cordrey I’m a Media Law solicitor here are Farrer’s.

00:05 I qualified in September, but I also trained at Farrer’s for two years and most of my work involves working for defendants, such as newspapers and magazines. I draft letters to solicitors on the other side, I’m on the phone a lot to in house legal advisors and journalists. There’s a lot of client contact and I think that’s great. It’s just very varied and very interesting.

00:30 I wasn’t one of these people that sort of decided, you know at A Levels oh my goodness I want to be a lawyer, I had quite an odd journey in that went to Manchester University and I studied Drama and English. I did that for a year and it, it just didn’t fit I just thought this isn’t quite right. I went back to school and spoke to some of my old teachers and had sort of careers discussions with people and it seemed quite obvious to me that law was the right fit, and so from then on I went to UCL and I studied law. Once I’d finished Manchester after a year a lot of people said, you know what are you doing, that’s probably going to be a mistake and a real sort of blip on your CV, but actually what it did was made me crystallise in my mind that no, I, I know what I want I’ve made the right decision and, and I really haven’t looked back, so I don’t regret it at all but it’s certainly totally changed my career direction and, and my life plan.

01:33 My father was a, investment banker actually and he actually didn’t go to University. I think he, he went to City University or did some sort of later degree but he, he wasn’t professionally qualified early on, my mother was a housewife. There certainly wasn’t any pressure on me to be a lawyer. I was very fortunate in that I went to a good school and I had encouragement from them, but I wouldn’t say that I was pushed to do it, I think probably the pressure came from me.

02:09 I think through my career I’ve been inspired by some people, certainly when I was at UCL, I had an amazing tutor and he encouraged me and said you know you can do this and his sort of confidence in me, made me think no again I, I can do this, I just have to keep trying I’ll just keep going and, and it paid off.

02:42 My two main interests are theatre and film, I recently went to see Enron which is just an amazing play, and film, obviously whatever’s out I see. In terms of work/life balance I think it’s a difficult thing for any lawyer because you know a lot of the time you are going to have to put work first, so I try as much as I can to get that balance right, but it, it’s not easy, but it’s not easy for any lawyer.

03:09 Professionally I would like to be good at my job, I think to be respected, for someone to think that I, well for everyone to think I have integrity, preferably. I’m very proud of the job I have, I think it’s a good job, I think I’m very fortunate, I think I’m in a very interesting industry, that is cutting edge, constantly changing so I’m pretty proud of that and you know to have got the job in the first place.

03:40

00:01 My name is Michael Kuznetsov I’m a second year trainee here at Farrer’s. I think at the moment what I enjoy the most about my job is the variety because as a trainee here at Farrer’s we have to change our jobs every 4 months, so every 4 months we’re doing something entirely different. So overall of the 24 months however long the training contract is you find out a great deal.

00:26 I think the biggest turning point in my life was when I left my family in Ukraine and came to United Kingdom. I was 13 when I left Ukraine and it was very difficult for the first few years. I wasn’t really prepared to be living on my own especially at that age, and British boarding schools are not necessarily forgiving, so the first few years were quite difficult but as I approached A levels I really assimilated and it became a lot easier.

00:55 My parents always wanted me to go to university to do economics because my father’s an economist and there was some sort of expectation that I would continue the family line as it were but I wasn’t really inspired by that, I really liked mathematics at school, and I quite wanted to go to university and find out more about it.

01:19 I really enjoyed going to the university they were definitely the best years of my life, suddenly there was this influx of variety, influx of people from different backgrounds and it was really enlightening and a sort of, I did a lot of growing up seeing people have different stories, different histories.

01:37 When I was doing mathematics I had to decide what my career’s going to be and I considered banking and then I thought that law would be a good option but then to do law obviously you have to have legal background and I applied to a legal conversion course and you go there for a year and you essentially get an equivalent of legal degree.

01:59 I felt a bit lost at the time I couldn’t really tell at the time what I actually wanted to do, but then I thought why is it that I decided not to stay with maths, why is it that I decided to go and do law and not for example banking and it was because I really wanted to have a good life work balance.

02:20 When I was doing my interview at Farrer’s I asked them if it was going to be alright if I take a gap year between completing my legal studies and starting work here and they were absolutely fine with that and in the end I went to Paris for 5 months and also went travelling quite a bit in particular I spent a month in Japan. More than anything my gap year gave me that sense of appreciation for freedom and liberty and the motivation that whatever you do at work in the end you’re really trying to set your path to the future so that a few years from now you can do what you’re really passionate about.

02:57 I quite like cooking and recently I’ve become enamoured with Heston Blumenthal who is, he’s a celebrity chef and he is quite known for wacky really time consuming recipes. If I have a free weekend I would usually invite friends over for Sunday night and I would start cooking on Friday evening for 2 ½ days but it usually works out, it’s really good.

03:21 I think I would quite like to be involved in shaping society in some way, whether it be because I’m still at a law firm but acting for charities or political organisations, or whether it’s because I’ve moved on and I’ve actually become part of charities or political organisations.

03:38 I think I’m quite passionate about science and I’m also quite passionate about societal change they’re quite separate things and can’t imagine I’ll end up being able to do both but I would quite like to end up doing either of them.

03:51