Hackney UTC: A fragile flagship

Students and teachers ‘geek out’ at Hackney UTC. Photograph: © Vic Phillips.

If the state-of-the-art campus of Hackney University Technical College (HUTC) is empty today, it is because the new term is yet to start.

The college’s cool, bright website is still promoting the excellence of its learning environment: “No boring classrooms for our students! Digital studio; live broadcasting facilities, green screen, lighting and sound system…nothing else like it in the area”.

Students will be returning in September, but they will not remain at HUTC until they are 19, as was originally planned. For all that its facilities are excellent and built to last, and for all that its founders and sponsors were committed to the college, HUTC will close in less than a year’s time.

HUTC is not closing because of the poor Ofsted grading it received earlier this year: indeed, according to an interim inspection, the college was making progress fast. It will close because not enough pupils have chosen to attend it.

Schools are funded according to the number of pupils they have on roll. HUTC offered 75 places for the 2014-15 academic year and only 29 pupils applied. As HUTC said in a statement, such numbers were “unviable”. And that was that – it was announced in June that HUTC would close in August 2015.

In engineering terms, this is the catastrophic failure of the first University Technical College to be set up in London.

Transition

University Technical Colleges (UTCs) are a special kind of Free School. They do not have to follow the National Curriculum and are funded directly from the Department for Education.

Free from Local Authority control, their aim is to prepare their students to enter a particular industry, with a curriculum centred on teaching the technical skills which that industry requires.

Groups looking to set up a UTC team up with a higher education institution – in HUTC’s case, Hackney Community College – and a clutch of employers, who provide training for staff, mentoring for pupils and specialist equipment for their studies.

Unlike other Free Schools, pupils join in Year 10, aged 14. These teenagers commit to a certain kind of career and, as a result, receive specialised schooling much earlier than they otherwise would.

According to Anthony Painter, Chairman of Governors at HUTC, this was why the college struggled to recruit applicants. He said: “It has become clear that provision commencing in Year 10 rather than Year 12 does not fit well in local circumstances unique to this project, where students are unlikely to change course until sixth form.”

For those in favour of opening more UTCs, this is a disturbing thought. It’s hard to see how students’ being “unlikely to change course until sixth form” is a unique local circumstance: rather, changing schools at 16 is the norm across the country. Since the transition at 14 is a key component in the way UTCs are set up, is the reluctance of Hackney pupils to make that transition a sign of problems to come for the UTCs project?

Certainly not, according to the Baker Dearing Educational Trust, which handles applications to open UTCs and licenses the UTC brand to successful applicants. The Trust points to successful UTCs in Liverpool, Sheffield and Bristol which are “proving they can attract a large number of students at year 10.”

The Trust contends that low recruitment at HUTC was indeed due to local conditions. “There are many factors that may affect local recruitment,” the Trust said, “such as the number of school places available, the support of local authorities and secondary schools in the area, and the ease with which parents and young people understand the technical specialism on offer.

“We’ve found that more than 90% of students who join a UTC do so because they’re keenly interested in the technical specialism and attracted by the chance to get real experience of the workplace.”

World of work

UTCs have a great strength in their integration of work experience into the curriculum, which at many schools can take the form of a bring-your-child-to-work jolly towards the end of term.

Annie Blackmore, the founding principle of HUTC, who left the college in June, pointed this out in an interview she gave the Hackney Citizen shortly before HUTC opened in 2012. “At most schools, at the most you might get a two week work experience placement,” she said, “and work experience when you’re at school is pretty random; you very rarely get work experience in the sector that you are interested in.”

In contrast, she said, HUTC – with its high-class facilities and 8.30 to 5 o’clock day – was a “mirror” of the world of work. The college’s partner employers – including BT and Cisco – provided its students with work experience placements.

Critics of UTCs highlight the extent to which prospective students have to make an important choice about their future at a relatively young age. The decision to go down a vocational route can be seen as limiting. Pupils at UTCs continue studies in core academic areas – English, maths, science – but while the Btec qualifications they receive on graduation are at least nominally equivalent to A-levels, it can be challenging to insist on that equivalence to admissions tutors at top universities.

Practical education

But UTCs are about rethinking our concepts of prestigious education and about finding alternative routes into rewarding employment.

They have taken on the challenge of redeeming technical education. As Blackmore put it, “vocational education has always been a dirty word” in the UK. She compared the situation to Germany, where “you can be the chief exec of Volkswagen and you could have come through a technical route.”

HUTC’s relationships with its partner employers will continue. HUTC received 60 applications from 16-year-olds who wanted to join in Year 12, so 16 – 19 provision will continue as the Tech City Education Hub, supported by Hackney Community College.

Which suggests a real mystery in the closure of HUTC: 60 pupils is viable, while 29 is not. For the want of 31 teenagers, a flagship school, representing a flagship policy, established at considerable expense, is to close. Would the shortfall really have been replicated year after year?

And there was an impressive list of people who spoke out in the statement released after the news HUTC was to close: Ian Ashman, Principal of Hackney Community College; Andrew Campling, BT’s London General Manager; Ian Foddering, the Technical Director of Cisco; John Joughin, Vice Chancellor at the University of East London.

With so much backing and investment, it is remarkable that HUTC proved so fragile. If its closure truly is an isolated case, it is a case of something that seriously needs to be very much better understood.