Students switching from Met

May 6 2008 by Liam Murphy, Liverpool Daily Post

THE principal of a college in Cheshire has said they are already benefiting from talks about the closure of Wirral Met, in the south of the borough.

Head of West Cheshire College, Sara Mogel, said they had always attracted many students from south Wirral areas such as Eastham, Bromborough and Heswall but this trend had seen a noticeable increase this year.

It follows the announcement earlier in the year by Wirral Metropolitan College that it intended to consult on the future of its Carlett Park campus, in Eastham, and expected to focus more heavily on its sites in Birkenhead.

South Wirral MP Ben Chapman has already launched a vigorous campaign to save the Eastham college site from closure.

But Sara Mogel said: “We are getting a lot of applications from the south Wirral area.

“We could become their nearest college, although we always took a lot of people from south Wirral, which I think is one of the reasons Wirral Met is looking at closing down Carlett Park.”

She said the train line and bus routes made the journey particularly easy for those in south Wirral to access the West Cheshire College campuses, particularly at Ellesmere Port.

Around 1,000 students from Wirral attend the college, although because West Cheshire provides so much training in workplaces, only 40% of those actually visit the college sites.

The West Cheshire College is undergoing a £70m redevelopment which will see its campuses at Ellesmere Port and Chester radically re-modelled.

The rotunda at Ellesmere Port is based on the Guggenheim building, in New York, and will be used for courses related to the service industries, such as hospitality and catering.

The new Chester building will focus more on science and engineering, and the college’s planning applications were recently approved by the local planning committees.

The college also commissioned a report on its contribution to the local economy – which revealed some surprising results.

Sara Mogel said, so long as funding plans progress as expected, the Chester campus should be completed in 2010 and Ellesmere Port the year after.

Research carried out by specialists in economic modelling, EMSI, found that the Cheshire economy receives £117.1m in added income from the college’s annual operations.

Sara Mogel added: “We have been amazed at the size of our own contribution.

“We won’t be resting on our laurels, but will continue to work hard to make West Cheshire a stronger economy and society.”

Economists usually assume a 4% rate of return on government investments, but when EMSI looked at West Cheshire College the rate of return was 17%, and is based on a breakdown of the impact that the college has on learners, businesses, and taxpayers and society in general.

The findings say students can earn 38% higher annual salary if they get an advanced level qualification at the college, relative to someone with no qualifications.

liammurphy