Jas Rohel could legitimately claim the tag of ‘the voice of Solihull’. After all, she is the founder and main presenter of the town’s only dedicated radio station. However, in the education sector her reach and influence extends far beyond West Midlands, as the force behind the nationwide Education Awards. JON GRIFFIN meets Birmingham Business’s new columnist.
She’s the brains behind an awards scheme which has grown into a national platform for educational success stories, has her own radio show – and she’s beaten cancer.
At 48 years old, Jas Rohel has established herself as the driving force and inspiration behind the Education Awards, a national initiative which has survived and prospered for a decade in an era of ever-burgeoning awards ceremonies across the UK.
For ten years the awards scheme founded by Rohel has helped highlight the many unsung heroes of an educational sector which frequently finds itself an unwitting punchbag at the hands of politicians amid a maelstrom of controversies over the curriculum, funding, teachers’ workloads and much else.
And when she is not banging the drum for the largely invisible army of teachers, lecturers and the rest working across an increasingly pressurised sector, she sits behind a microphone in the tiny studio at On Your Radio Solihull, broadcasting to thousands of listeners every Friday.
It’s been an eventful and often difficult journey for this irrepressible born-and-bred Brummie, daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up in inner-city Birmingham determined to make a name for herself in the ultra-competitive world of media.
“My mum is from Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas where the tea is produced, while my dad is originally from the Punjab,” she says.
“He came over with my grandfather, while my mum joined the family here when she married my dad.”
As a youngster Rohel knew she wanted to work in the media – “I was always reading the newspapers out loud as if I was on the news” – but perhaps surprisingly given her gregarious disposition now, she admits that she used to lack confidence and “used to go along with everything”.
“We moved to Kings Heath and I went to secondary school there and absolutely loved it. The community always looked after us – everyone knew everybody. There were no phones, no GPS systems. I remember I was so free, just to be able to ride your bike up and down the road.
“Back then it was a very different world. It was a lot safer – we used to sleep with the doors open.”
By now, the adolescent Rohel had outgrown practising reading news items from her parents’ Punjabi newspaper and threw herself into media studies at secondary school.
After completing her media and marketing degree at Staffordshire University she took a big gamble and moved to London, eventually landing a junior PR and marketing role with magazine heavyweights IPC Media.
“That was the real making of me. It was my first real experience of a large organisation with all their publications. It was such a fast-paced industry, such a buzzy environment.”
But life for Johel away from the glamour of the London media world was far from easy. “The reality is you are not earning a huge amount of money. Everybody in London is always so busy – they are on a mission the whole time.
“I really felt after a few years that I was going to become one of those people not living life, just existing to go to work. I enjoyed my time in London but I wasn’t really earning enough money.”
After a six-year stint in the capital she returned to her Midlands roots with no definite plans for the future. “I felt deep down sometimes a bit of a failure after having to come back, but sometimes when you take steps backwards it is almost the making of you.”
Those apparently retrograde steps from the London media world back to her Birmingham homeland proved a key career turning point as it prompted a life-changing switch to teaching.
“I decided to do a teaching qualification at Solihull College. My patience is the size of a peanut at the best of times – I didn’t think teaching and I would go together – but I really enjoyed it and they asked me to start working there as soon as I finished the course.
“I started teaching in the marketing units, teaching PR, dabbling in a bit of media as well, and speaking to the media students. I loved it but I suppose there was an itch in me. Why am I doing just this? This is not enough for me.”
Those frustrations with her early days in teaching coincided with a realisation that the education sector was also far from perfect, triggering a chain of events which would lead to the launch of the Education Awards.
“I realised when I was in education that actually – and this is my own opinion – the curriculum is not fit for purpose. By that, I mean it is very outdated.
“Industry sectors such as media and business are so fast-paced and moving so quickly that education can’t keep up. For me, it was very much why are we doing this, why are we not letting businesses write the curriculum?
“Why are we doing it this way, in that process? A lot of amazing teachers, lecturers, people in education were leaving the profession. I thought why, and for a majority of the time it was very much due to a lack of recognition.”
After a six-year stint in education, including teaching business at Solihull College, the seeds were gradually being sown for a regional initiative which would ultimately shine a light on the often anonymous but vital unsung heroes grappling daily with the many problems facing the education sector.
“One of the things for me was why are all these amazing people leaving education? Back then, the awards culture was coming into place and I remember being sent by the college to some awards ceremonies, including the Birmingham Chamber awards.
“I remember thinking this is great but why are there no awards for people in education? There were the Times Higher Education Awards, the Pearson Teaching Awards, but they were not actually for the whole of education. I did a lot of research and realised very quickly that there wasn’t anything representing regional education – and that was the birth of the Education Awards.
“There were no awards looking organically at regions. Every single region is extremely different – the make-up is different, the needs are different.”
The catalyst for the launch of the Education Awards was a chance meeting at the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce annual awards night over a decade ago with former Birmingham City University deputy vice-chancellor Julian Beer, who agreed to back the Rohel awards brainchild as a headline sponsor.
Armed with support from other Birmingham business heavyweights including the then West Midlands mayor Andy Street and former Greater Birmingham Chamber of Commerce chief executive Paul Faulkner, the Education Awards made their debut ten years ago, and have gradually extended their footprint into other big cities.
“These awards are national now. When we first started it was regional – just the Midlands – but we are now in Cardiff, Manchester, London, Liverpool . . . and I run them all. I have a very small team of people and we go up and down the country to put them on.
“The awards are free to enter and we recognise outstanding schools, colleges, universities and teachers. It is about the people and the teams of people that make education great.
“We are looking for the unsung heroes of education, the ones that really go above and beyond, the ones who never put themselves in for an award but who deserve the recognition.
“I didn’t think it would ever grow like this – I just thought it would be a little tick in the box for me ten years ago. Our July awards for the Midlands was our official ten-year anniversary.”
The Rohel blueprint for recognising the unheralded heroes of education has been vindicated with the growth across the UK of the awards scheme but she is not resting on her laurels, with plans for further expansion elsewhere in the UK.
“We have such a long way to go yet,” she says. “We have so many plans and so many things I still want to do within the business. I am really proud that we have done a decade of the awards – it’s a bit of a pinch me moment for that quiet little girl who wouldn’t say boo to a goose.
“We have got some amazing stories out of education, people who never otherwise were going to get recognised.”
In tandem with the decade of growth for the Education Awards, Rohel has reinvented her teenage dreams of media stardom with a broadcasting foothold as director/presenter at her own local radio station in the shape of online community station On Your Radio Solihull.
“I work on the radio every Friday doing the Talking Education Show and the Talking Business Show.
“Before lockdown we were involved with a different radio station locally and that shut.
“The need was still there for it, so myself and another two people put this together. We invested some of our own money and decided to launch the station. We had the backing of Tony Elvin, the general manager for Touchwood and were able to base our studio here.
“We have companies advertising, we promote local activities. It’s a small station but it’s big for Solihull. It’s all voluntary, the presenters come in and do different shows. In the past year we had 140,000 listeners.”
To add to her roles as CEO of the Education Awards and her Solihull radio commitments Rohel also sits on the board of Solihull Chamber of Commerce.
“I have learnt so much being part of the Chamber. It became my network and my family. I would ask does anybody know a legal person or an accountant and of course, they do.
“You have to make the Chamber work for yourself. I never thought for a moment that I would ever be on a board making decisions, helping to grow businesses and support businesses in the borough.”
But amidst the successes and recognition over the years, Rohel has fought – and won – her own arduous personal battle after being diagnosed with mouth cancer two and a half years ago.
“It was the most shocking time of my life. It really shook me, and not a lot of things do. I had a realisation that life is too short. I was so fortunate that it was found so early. Now I am 100 per cent over it.”
With her health restored, Rohel is now looking to expand the Education Awards across further cities nationwide.
“We have got the blueprint, it works. It is quite easy to roll out elsewhere. I want the Education Awards to be in every single region. I feel like I am on a one-woman mission. If mouth cancer can’t shut me up, then I think I’m in the right place."
