Staff Spotlight: The accounting tutor who makes people remember the numbers

If you think accounting is all about numbers, spreadsheets and making everything add up, you probably haven’t been in one of Conal White’s lessons.

You’re more likely to find a pig drawn on the board than a bunch of numbers written down. But this is not just any pig – it’s Porcco, Percy’s Italian brother who has been used to explain accounting errors not revealed by Trial balance.

Keeping on the sweet treat theme, what about the best ever Battenberg used to help students remember a four-stage accounting process?

A pink square is your balance, a yellow one the petty cash. It makes absolutely no sense. Until it does – and you start to associate the act of eating a slice of Battenberg with what you’re doing.

And while neither cake nor bow tie wearing pigs feature in most accounting textbooks, they say quite a lot about Conal’s approach to teaching.

Make it relevant, make it memorable and, wherever possible, make people smile while they are learning.

“Historically, accounting has a reputation for being very dry. My teaching style is different and it’s not everybody’s cup of tea,” he says. “But it obviously works. I’ve seen students drawing pigs in exams. It’s daft but it helps them remember it.”

For a subject built around getting the numbers right, Conal has never been afraid of doing things a little differently. And it’s perhaps fitting that his own route into becoming curriculum leader in accounting and business at University Centre Rotherham didn’t exactly follow a straight line either.

From plumbing to professional services

Despite now leading an accounting curriculum, Conal never set out with a clear plan to become an accountant.

He did an accounting A-level at sixth form after leaving school but then decided to train as a plumber.

It wasn’t a career he particularly enjoyed, despite doing well financially. One experience working on bathrooms at Sheffield’s Hyde Park flats – involving rather more mess than he would have liked – helped convince him that he wanted to do something different.

“I was about 19 and coming home from work with £300 a day but excrement under my fingernails. I’ve also got Crohn’s disease which comes with a lot of emotional scarring because it’s very much a psychological condition as well as a physical one. Plus, there’s nothing worse than ripping out a toilet and then realising you really need to use it.”

Conal decided that he’d be better suited working in an office with access to basic amenities rather than a life spent in the van, so he looked at his options. He had been good at maths at school, so finance seemed like an obvious direction.

“I quickly learned that accounting is bugger all to do with maths,” he laughs.

What it did offer, however, was a route into a profession where he could keep learning, solve problems and work with people.

He studied locally here at Rotherham College, funding his own studies and attending classes in the evenings, before progressing through AAT and ACCA qualifications at Oxford Brookes University.

His career then took him into industry, including almost a decade working in pre-insolvency audit and forensic and fraud work.

It was a world away from the classroom. And, eventually, it was a world he decided he wanted to leave.

The work could involve difficult situations, long hours and constant travel. He recalls being sworn at, spat at and, on one occasion, having somebody try to run him over.

“Everybody hated you,” he says of working in pre-insolvency audit.“You were perceived as part of the problem.”

There were also the ethical challenges. Some clients facing financial investigation tried to wine and dine their way out of an audit.

Conal found himself questioning whether this was really what he had entered accounting for.

It was also affecting his personal life. Conal worked for a national company, so was travelling around the country from Bude to Berwick. Living out of the suitcase for the majority of a decade put a lot of strain on his first marriage.

“I was just never at home. Financially, it was incredible. But I was never in the same bed and it was quite a lonely existence.”

Then someone asked him to teach

The route into education came almost by accident.

Fed up of a life on the road, Conal got a job closer to home working as an in-house accountant at Yorkshire Training in Manvers. When he joined, the company’s accounts were all paper-based, and within two years Conal had completely automated everything to the point where they didn’t need him five days a week.

He was asked by the board of directors whether he would consider teaching accounting apprentices if they paid for him to do his PGCE.

“I said yes but asked if I was to write a bid for some funding from the Maths Graduate Incentive Award, would they agree that I didn’t have to pay back the training costs if I left. It paid off for them as they received two lots of £30,000 and the PGCE was about £6,000.”

Soon Conal was splitting his time between accounting and teaching, which he did for five years before the organisation closed and he found himself looking for his next step.

That led him back to Rotherham College. He applied for an accounting lecturer role, completed a micro-teach as part of the interview process and got the job.

He has been here since 2017 – and education has brought more than just a career change. It was through teaching at RNN Group that Conal met his wife, Emma, and the couple now have a young daughter together.

Alongside being a doting father and husband, Conal has a busy job leading the professional services department at University Centre Rotherham where he teaches students from level 2 right up to the level 4 ACCA, and the finance unit on the business management degree.

He brings his industry experience into the classroom, particularly when teaching ethics which is a topic he never gets tired of.

Accounting is a heavily regulated profession, and Conal uses real-world stories around fraud, money laundering and professional judgement to show students that the decisions they will make in their careers can have consequences far beyond a spreadsheet.

“It’s very much an industry that’s more regulated than medicine, it’s more regulated than law. With plumbing, you could essentially flood somebody’s house. But with accounting, you could get somebody sent to prison,” he says.

“With the way of the world at the minute with people embezzling money and doing things they shouldn’t be doing, you can talk about a story, Jimmy Carr, Lionel Messi, whoever, and bring it to life and you’ve instantly, straight away, got people’s attention.”

Making accounting feel like it belongs to everyone

Conal’s route into education has been anything but conventional. From plumbing to accounting, industry to teaching, and eventually to leading a team of accounting lecturers, his career has been shaped less by a masterplan and more by recognising opportunities when they appeared.

But there is a thread running through all of it: a belief that education should give people choices.

“Without sounding like Samuel L Jackson in Coach Carter, I think it’s very much about informing people’s lives and giving them choices.”

It is a philosophy that comes from experience. Conal knows what it feels like to take an unexpected route, to challenge assumptions about where you belong and to discover that your starting point does not have to determine where you end up.

He remembers feeling hugely out of place when he studied in Oxford. As the son of a steelworker and a cleaner from Rotherham, his background was far different than most of the others on the course who’d come from generational wealth or a family of accountants.

That experience has stayed with him and is one reason he’s keen to make accounting feel accessible.

“People thought ‘Oh god, he’s from Rotherham.’ And there’s still a big stigma associated with this place. So I try to give my learners that sense of ambition that they can achieve something no matter where they come from.”

Finance is one of the area’s economic priorities, but for every five skilled jobs that are available there is only one suitable finance professional. This means doing the right course, at the right place, is important for those looking to upskills and find employment.

The level 4 ACCA has a good employment success rate, with 88 percent of learners last year securing a job after graduating.

He talks about one young lad he teaches called Brandon who has recently secured a job as a financial executive with a blue-chip printing company in Sheffield. Before he came to University Centre Rotherham, he had dropped out of university after spending all his maintenance loan in the pub and unexpectedly becoming a young dad.

“He just needed some guidance. I wouldn’t say he necessarily got that entirely from me, but his attendance is impeccable, he loves to come in, and he thanks me after every lesson. We have a laugh and he’s just a really nice lad.

“Have a conversation with any of my students and they’ll be like, ‘Conal’s setting the bar really high for us.’ And I do because you need to break the cycle at some point.”

The students behind the qualifications

For Conal, spending almost a decade at RNN Group has taught him that the best part of the job is more than just helping learners understand how to prepare accounts or financial reports. Some of the most rewarding moments happen when students begin to see themselves differently.

That can be particularly powerful for adult learners, many of whom arrive at college having already experienced setbacks, changes in direction or years away from education.

Most of the adults on his courses have children, but many find that coming to University Centre Rotherham is where they can rediscover who they are outside of their other responsibilities.

One student, Amy, recently told Conal that studying had changed the way she thought about parenting and had made her want to become a better role model for her children.

Students may come in thinking they are working towards a qualification. They can leave with a new career, a new sense of confidence or simply a different idea of what they are capable of. And Conal gets to see that happen.

“There’s a teaching theory called the medal or mission student. Most 16 to 18-year-olds are medal students because they want the shiny bit at the end. Whereas adults are generally mission students. They definitely bring more baggage into the classroom, but they embrace college life not necessarily for the pursuit of happiness but the happiness of the pursuit. They learn who they are on this journey, they re-establish their identities and they develop as human beings. Seeing that is one of the best parts of the job for me.”

His favourite course is the level 4 ACCA diploma because he gets to see students through a much longer journey, from starting their studies to completing professional examinations and eventually graduating with letters after their names.

Conal’s proudest moment so far came at graduation, when the first students he had taught through three years of study completed their professional examinations and graduated.

“My grandad used to tell me that if I was ever to become a teacher, it wouldn’t be a job it would be a vocation. I never really got what he meant until about two years ago. It isn’t just a job. Yes the admin can be awful, you’re marking at night and working weekends, and there are weeks where I don’t see much of my daughter. But I don’t think there’s any question that teaching staff here want to make a difference. If all teachers disappeared tomorrow, we’d have a very different nation of people.”

Find out more about Accounting, Business and Management at University Centre Rotherham.