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.