Preston's College: the city's general FE college and what it does

The institution that does the widest range of work in Preston's education picture and gets the least attention for it.

Preston's College is the city's general further education college. It sits east of the city centre and it carries the broadest remit of any institution in Preston's education picture: vocational and technical qualifications, apprenticeships, adult and part-time study, access routes into higher education, and academic qualifications alongside them.

That breadth is why an FE college is harder to describe than a university. A university has students; a general FE college has school leavers, adults retraining, apprentices employed elsewhere, and people taking a single evening course, often in the same building on the same day.

The college is written both ways in the city, Preston's College and Preston College, and both refer to the same general further education campus.

What a general FE college does

The core of it is technical and vocational education: construction, engineering, health and care, hospitality, business, digital and the trades. Those courses are taught in workshops and working environments, where a university would use lecture theatres, which is why an FE campus looks more like a works than a university.

Alongside that sits the adult and part-time provision, which is the least visible and arguably most important part of what these institutions do. It is also the part that has been squeezed hardest across the sector over the past two decades, in Preston as everywhere.

How it relates to the other institutions

The three post-16 institutions in the city do different jobs and are not alternatives. Cardinal Newman is a sixth form college, taking school leavers into academic qualifications. Preston's College takes the vocational and mixed cohort. UCLan takes degree-level study, and progression from the college into the university is a well-worn route.

Myerscough is the fourth and sits outside the city entirely, covering land-based and sports subjects that need land.

Where it sits, and getting there

The college sits east of the city centre, out on the side of Preston that carries the district's residential streets and the eastern approaches. It is a walk from the centre but not a short one, and the local bus network serves it; the travel sheet covers the connections.

That eastern position is worth noting because it puts the college's student traffic on a different side of the city from the university's, which is part of why the two populations are less visible together than the numbers suggest.

The Victorian inheritance

Preston's technical education has a long lineage. The institution founded in the town in 1828 for the diffusion of useful knowledge is the ancestor of the university, and the same municipal conviction produced the Harris with a public library inside it in 1893.

A general FE college is the modern successor to that impulse more directly than a university is: it exists to give practical education to people who need it locally, which is exactly what the 1828 institution was for.

What belongs to the college's own pages

Further education provision is reshaped by funding and by local employers on a cycle of a year or two, and an inspection outcome is a snapshot with a date on it. Both are the college's to publish. What does not move is where the campus is, what an FE campus of this kind looks like, and who it serves.

What it records is what kind of institution it is, what it does, and where it stands in the city.

Apprenticeships and the employer link

The part of a general FE college's work that is least visible from outside is its employer relationships. Apprenticeship provision means the college is contracted to train people who are employed elsewhere, which makes it a partner to local businesses as much as a provider to students. In a city pursuing the procurement strategy Preston is known for, that link is more significant than it looks.

It also means the college's shape follows the local economy. Construction, engineering, health and care, and hospitality provision exists in proportion to the demand for those skills in central Lancashire, which is why an FE prospectus is a reasonable index of what a district actually does for a living.