CASH STRAPPED COLLEGE FACES AXE - Kingsway College's Peter Street campus set to close
Published: 4 June 2010
by JAMIE WELHAM
THE future of one of Soho’s oldest colleges is hanging in the balance because of government funding cuts.
Staff and students at Westminster Kingsway College have vowed to fight proposals to close its campus in Peter Street – where a school has stood since 1880.
They say closing the site would be a “devastating loss” to the community, ending Soho’s long tradition of language teaching, as well as landing a major blow to educational opportunities in central London.
The college has around 1,800 students enrolled on its courses – a mixture of English language and vocational courses for over-16s – and employs 28 full-time teaching staff.
Its resources committee is looking at ways to plug an immediate £1million funding gap.
Westminster Kingsway’s principal, Andy Wilson, has assured students that courses will be protected and, while making no guarantees, said staff redundancies were “unlikely”. If it were to close the college would become the second high-profile education casualty of the recession in Westminster – after the council’s plans to build a flagship adult education centre in Marylebone were put on indefinite hold last year.
Alessandro Giovanneto, who has been studying English at the college for three months, said: “It’s a brilliant place. I am here so I can have the skills to go to university. It helps lots of people get jobs and continue with their education. To close it would be a terrible shame.”
Fellow student, Turkish-born Cafer Polat, said: “I could barely speak a word of English when I came. Now I can. The place is great. The teaching is very good. I don’t know what I will do if it closes.”
One member of staff, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “We have helped hundreds of students gain the skills they need to find jobs or go on in higher education. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be a priority at the moment. The school has always helped people assimilate, and still teaches refugees from places like Russia, Somalia and Kurdistan.”
Westminster Kingsway runs a number of further education colleges in King’s Cross, Victoria and Regent’s Park, but the courses that have suffered the biggest cuts are in Soho.
Funding comes from the Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). The school was originally called Pulteney College, formed with a tradition of helping immigrants and teaching languages, before being renamed Westminster College in 1974. It was taken over by Westminster Kingsway in 2001.
In a statement, Mr Wilson said: “The courses which have received the biggest funding cuts are those providing English and basic skills teaching for adult students and it is these that are found at the Soho Centre. However, the college recognises the need for this type of training for many people who live and work in central London and will continue to support them for as long as funding allows. We all know that the next few years will be difficult for the public sector and, unfortunately, colleges like Westminster Kingsway will not be protected from these pressures.
“We will continue to try to find ways of reducing costs while protecting the offer we make to students.”
A spokeswoman for BIS said: “The closing of a campus or a decision to halt building work would be a decision for the college itself.
“We just allocate the funding, we don’t decide how it is spent. It is unlikely a funding agreement that has been signed off will be reversed, but there will be more detail in the funding for the whole sector at the budget on June 22.”