Cardinal Newman College: Preston's sixth form college

A single-purpose institution in a city whose other colleges do several things at once.

Cardinal Newman College is Preston's sixth form college. It sits south west of the city centre and it does one thing: post-16 academic and applied study for school leavers, principally at A level and equivalent, as a stepping stone to higher education or employment.

That single purpose distinguishes it from the city's other post-16 institutions. Preston's College carries a general further education remit spanning apprenticeships, adult study and the trades; Myerscough is land-based; UCLan is degree level. A sixth form college does the narrowest job of the four and does it at scale.

Cardinal Newman College Preston is the sixth-form college of the group, and the distinction matters when comparing it with the general FE campus.

What a sixth form college is

Sixth form colleges are a distinct part of the English system: standalone institutions taking students at sixteen, where the alternative is a sixth form attached to a school. They are larger than a school sixth form, which allows a wider subject range, and they are more academically focused than a general FE college.

For a student the practical difference is choice and scale: a standalone sixth form college can offer subject combinations that no single school could staff, in an environment closer to a university than to a school.

The Catholic foundation

The college's name is that of John Henry Newman, the nineteenth century theologian and cardinal, and the institution has a Catholic foundation. That is a substantive part of its identity, and nothing like a historical residue, and it places the college in a Lancashire tradition.

Lancashire remained the most persistently Catholic county in England after the Reformation, and the county's institutional Catholicism is a real thread through its history — the recusant gentry houses at Samlesbury and in the Ribble valley are the older end of the same story.

Where it sits

The college is south west of the city centre, which puts it on a different side of Preston from both the university to the north and Preston's College to the east. The three institutions are spread across the city, nowhere clustered, and the local bus network is the practical connection between them.

The travel sheet covers the network. Nothing about a college visit needs a car, but nothing about it is a short walk from the station either.

The city's education picture

Preston puts a very large post-16 and higher education population into a compact city: a large university, a general FE college, a sixth form college and a substantial land-based college in the district. That is more provision than a city of this size would ordinarily carry, and it is one of the genuinely distinctive things about the place.

The study index sets the four out together, which is the useful way to read them.

Where the annual detail lives

A sixth form college's offer and its results are annual, and repeating either here would be quoting a year nobody named. What is on this sheet instead is structural: what a standalone sixth form college is, why England has them, and where this one sits in relation to the other two institutions.

What it records is what kind of institution it is, where its foundation comes from, and where it sits in the city.

Why the three sit on three different sides

The geographic spread of Preston's post-16 institutions is an accident of history, and nobody's plan: the university grew out of a town-centre institution and stayed there, the FE college occupies a site on the eastern approaches, and the sixth form college sits south west. Nothing coordinates them spatially, and the result is that a student population of considerable size is distributed across three separate quarters.

That is one reason Preston does not feel like a student city in the way its numbers suggest. Only the university's cohort is visible in the centre, on the streets between the campus and Fishergate; the other two populations move on different axes entirely.