A BRIEF HISTORY OF BILSTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE 1984-1999

Education in the Community 1964-1983

During the 1960s and 1970s a few lecturers and governors associated with Bilston College of Further Education and Bilston Sixth Form Centre became involved with educational projects in Black Country communities. These projects were initiated and managed by voluntary organisations, which included Wolverhampton Council for Community Relations and Bilston Neighbourhood Advice Centre. Most of the funding was from charities such as the Barrow and Geraldine Cadbury Trust and the Gulbenkian Foundation.

The main purpose of this community activity was to provide basic skills support for unqualified working-class people excluded by schools and colleges. Amongst the excluded were a disproportionate number from ethnic minority communities, mainly Afro-Caribbean and Asian. It became apparent from involvement with these communities that the existing education system did not provide suitable education for the majority of working-class, especially ethnic minority, citizens.

Bilston Community College 1984

The large number of people excluded from education, and therefore from obtaining qualifications and jobs, became increasingly serious as unemployment rose during the 1970s. Bilston was particularly affected by the closure of its British Steel plant which resulted, directly and indirectly, in thousands of redundancies. It was in this context that Wolverhampton Metropolitan Borough Council, under pressure from councillors aware of the success of the community projects, took the decision to close the two existing post-16 institutions (Bilston College of Further Education and Bilston Sixth Form College) and establish a community college.

The new college was established explicitly as a community college and, equally explicitly, not as a traditional college of further education. Its brief was to give priority to developing suitable education for people whose needs were not met by the traditional institutions. This required the provision of education in communities in partnership with voluntary organisations, especially those which had been involved in the successful schemes already mentioned. A high profile equal opportunities policy, with particular emphasis on education for the unemployed and ethnic minorities, was an inevitable element of the college's strategy.

Development of Community Education

The areas served by Bilston Community College had some of the lowest rates of participation in post-16 education and training in the country. The governors, managers and staff who had been involved in the community before the college opened knew that the main reason for exclusion was the elitism and narrow vocationalism of the further education curriculum. There was no suitable provision for the unemployed and unqualified, especially those from ethnic minority cultures.


They also knew that the people excluded by the system, especially as a result of its racism, were alienated from educational institutions. The solution, obvious to them as a result of their community experiences 1964-1983, was community education - organised, managed and provided in partnership with voluntary bodies which had roots deep in communities.

Open access and Equal Opportunities

The key to involving people previously excluded was Bilston's explicit equal opportunities and anti-racist policies. As a result of involvement in the community it was discovered that most working-class and ethnic minority groups organised education for their members - to compensate for the denial of a reasonable education in schools and colleges. Hundreds of thousands of people, of all ages, are involved in this community education. The work is supported by the resources of the voluntary groups, and its scale is unknown to the Department for Education and Skills.

Bilston Community College entered democratically-operating partnerships with these groups. Working with their leaders, the curriculum they offered was developed to create access to nationally recognised academic and vocational qualifications. As a result of experience in these partnerships the managers and governors of the college were aware that people denied education, in some cases from the age of 11, needed basic skills tuition over extended periods - before they were able to enrol on programmes leading to the nationally recognised qualifications.

Annual enrolment rose from under 5,000 1984/85 to over 50,000 1996/97. In addition to opportunities for so many working-class and ethnic minority people, Bilston Community College's achievements included heading the National League Table for vocational qualifications in 1995 and increasing the proportion of ethnic minority managers and staff from under 1 % in 1984 to over 30% by 1997.

The Destruction of Bilston Community College

The college's policy of education for all, with especially emphasis on provision for working-class and ethnic minority people, conflicted with the elitist and narrowly vocationalist curriculum imposed by the Further Education Funding Council, which was given responsibility for further education in 1992. In 1997 the Council changed its funding rules to exclude the funding of community education. It then, quite improperly, back-dated these rules to render ineligible for funding much of the work Bilston Community College had been doing since 1995.

Despite appeals by the governors to the Further Education Funding Council and to the Secretary of State, Council officers were allowed to undermine, destabilise, and then close, the college. Despite the submission of evidence of enormous need for further education, and the inevitable racist consequences of closing the college, the Secretary of State failed to intervene and Bilston Community College was closed in 1999.

The decision to destroy the college ignored all democratic and legal procedures and all opposition was silenced by threats, intimidation and manipulation of the media.