John McCann has extensive experience in Scottish Education.  Following work as a lecturer and then senior lecturer in Computing, he joined Her Majesty’s Inspectorate in 1992.  Within the inspectorate, he had national specialist roles in Computing, ICT and the use of technology in learning and teaching.  He worked largely in the college sector, where he contributed to the evaluation of provision of vocational education and aspects of college management and made a particular contribution to the development of self-evaluation in colleges.  How work involved advice on policy matters.

He returned to the sector as a senior manager at Glenrothes College in Fife where he was responsible for a number of college operations.  He was appointed Senior Assistant Principal in 2000 and led the strategic and operational planning process.  He retained a national role through membership of a number of national committees including the Learning and Teaching Committee of the Scottish Funding Council.  He was an active member of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which had a UK leadership role in the use of ICT in further and higher education and in research communities.

He was appointed Depute Chief Executive of the Scottish Further Education Unit (SFEU) in 2003 with responsibility for design and implementation of a comprehensive range of development activities for the college sector.  These activities ranged from leadership development, college curriculum provision and practitioner learning. 

 When SFEU was merged with other organisations, he became Director of Next Practice and continued his work in leading professional development activity in Scotland’s colleges.  He left in 2012 to pursue other possibilities.

He has written and presented extensively on the work of the college sector and on vocational education in Scotland.  This has included presentations to international groups and international conferences.  His international work includes a short period in Namibia and, more recently (2013), contributions to the METEK project (Improving the Quality of Vocational Education in Turkey).