Alyson has cross-college responsibility for Functional Skills in FE; Apprenticeships and Adult Learning.

Alyson began her teaching career after working in industry for 17 years. She was employed by New College Durham as a lecturer in the Business Department delivering L3 BTEC and GNVQ courses in 1997.

She was drawn to the development of maths and English skills in young people through teaching finance, where she found she had to teach basic maths principles before they were able to work out a profit and loss sheet. Similarly with English, she had to teach basic grammar and sentence structure so that she could make sense of and mark their work. This led to her passion for skills development in all young people and to where she is now.