Opinion: Great for East Kent College, but not so Great for A Levels and IT

East Kent College, fresh from taking over bits of the hopelessly failing K College, has ridden in on their proverbial white charger to save Canterbury College.

Canterbury College has great potential. It's near the centre of a vibrant student City, and has had significant sums spent on redeveloping its crumbling site into a 21st Century campus. Leaving aside the fact that the architects seem to have erred towards a Legoland Prison look for the new buildings, it's got some great facilities, not to mention having one of the best Students' Unions in the country, and of course some brilliant teachers and support staff (I used to be one of them, so I may be a little biased).

It also has a massive block of debt to repay as a result of all that building work. When the LSC capital programme turned out to be built on quicksand, the College's Corporation acted quickly to secure private finance to ensure that their master plan survived. Unfortunately, delivering that master plan, along with the huge cuts to the FE budget, has left them with a black hole that is now being plugged with the bodies of the staff. It would also appear that the body of the Principal is being thrown into said hole, unless I've mis-read what is meant by "retiring" (at an age that would make most senior Civil Servants jealous).

Sadly, part of this bloodletting involves closing both the A Levels Department and the IT Academy. To be clear, I'm sad about the other cuts too, but I'm sad about these for specific reasons.

I was lucky enough to go to a Grammar School, but it had its failings. One of those failings was that it didn't prepare you for dealing with people in the wider world. That failing, in my view, is true of virtually every school sixth form. At best they expose you to maybe 300 fairly similar people studying maybe 30 subjects. Canterbury College however exposes you to up to 10,000 people, studying everything from Creative Writing to Motor Vehicles. The closest you can come to that kind of wider exposure is one of the larger academies. And it's that kind of exposure that opens your mind to people outside of your personal comfort zone.

The loss of A Levels at Canterbury College represents the continuing propagation of an educational divide. Those who are "academic" stay in the comfort zone of their school environment, whilst everyone else goes to college, and never the twain shall meet. The loss of this mixing in Further Education, at school or at a College is, for me, something that reduces our ability to be creative and to innovate as a nation. I think it also makes us that little bit more insular in our mindset, at a time when we can ill afford to be.

I'm sad about the loss of the IT Academy for a different reason. School aged IT education in this country has long suffered from being too narrowly focussed on the use of IT based software, such as Office, rather than programming and the creative side of IT. That's something I've seen changing recently, with Scratch being used regularly in Primary Schools, along with the BBC Micro Bit and the incredibly popular Raspberry Pi. Coding, App Development, Machine Learning, and Web Design are all industries that will benefit from this change, and the IT Academy was perfectly placed to capitalise on this.

Unfortunately, unless I've missed something, IT qualifications have been slow to adapt, with companies like Zend offering far more relevant coding qualifications than most Colleges. Even so, there is going to be a need for massive expansion in IT teaching as more and more industries shift to automation, and more and more roles require the ability to programme, at the expense of so called "low skilled" jobs. That makes ditching the IT Academy at Canterbury College a terrible decision, even if it results in short term savings and slightly improved results / OFSTED ratings.

So, taking over Canterbury College is a great opportunity for East Kent College. They get great facilities, a great student union, and even more great staff. Unfortunately they're getting this at the expense of at least some creativity and innovation, as well as failing to focus on the longer term trend towards automation. Here's hoping that both A Levels and the IT Academy return to the Canterbury Campus one day. Until then, I'm hoping that at least the staff that lose their jobs will very quickly be snapped up by other employers.