Two decades strong: building on a 20-year partnership to grow the region’s future workforce

Over the last two decades, UWE Bristol and the City of Bristol College (CoBC) have been working in partnership to improve education pathways for learners across the city. As practice-led education providers, our collaboration with CoBC has been rooted in providing opportunities for the city’s young people to access university level education through a local further education college.

Now, 20 years on, we’re strengthening our commitment to these combined efforts between our two organisations through a Learner Commitment Pledge. Created to add purpose to our future partnership with CoBC, it will empower learners from every background to follow their ambitions, developing skilled workers to drive economic and societal needs of the region.

We know that policymakers want to see greater collaboration between colleges and universities to support the ambitious growth plans in the region and national industrial plans. Bridging the gap between further education (FE) and higher education (HE) with CoBC has always been underpinned by addressing regional skills gaps and creating relevant educational pathways, and that hasn’t changed in 20 years.

Our foundation programme in Professions for Health and Social Care, delivered jointly at City of Bristol College’s Ashley Down Centre and our Glenside Campus, is an example of this approach in action. It offers a seamless transition into higher education with a programme that can adapt flexibly to changing skills needs and sector demands.

But we’re aware that FE providers, particularly at Level 3, are often working with curriculums that are prescribed and can be slow to change – that makes it challenging to keep pace with evolving employer skills needs. This is exactly why our longstanding partnership with CoBC matters, to better understand how we can enhance and add value to the curriculum and shape progression routes that are more responsive to the evolving skills landscape.

CoBC is a key partner in UWE Bristol’s Future Quest programme, set up by the university in 2017 to tackle educational inequality for young people in the region. UWE Bristol and CoBC work together to understand the needs of young people across Bristol and South Gloucestershire to build progressive and sustained initiatives for the college, including coaching, careers guidance, presentations and webinars.

While Bristol has made good progress in the last decade, it still has some of the lowest HE progression neighbourhoods in the country. And as the needs and experiences of today’s students evolve, with an increasing number of commuter students – those who study while living at home – it’s more important than ever for students to know local progression routes are there for them.

We believe our collaboration with CoBC is making an impact, and it shows in the figures too: 22 per cent of all CoBC higher education applications are to UWE Bristol, which is ten percentage points higher than the university with the second most applications.

As well as providing young people with university progression routes, our partnership also works to break down barriers to industries with poor representation. We’ve worked collaboratively with CoBC on the Women Like Me programme, a peer-mentoring scheme for women in male-dominated STEM fields, created by UWE Bristol academics. The Women Like Me team have attended CoBC careers fairs at the college’s Parkway campus to promote higher and degree apprenticeships to their Level 3 engineering students. This is a natural progression from this qualification and is contributing to efforts across the region to address skills shortages while building a more inclusive STEM workforce.

As we look ahead to the next decade of partnership with CoBC, we want to go further. Deepening our partnership and building closer strategic and academic ties to strengthen our offer to learners, employers and civic leaders so they can be confident that our skills system is joined up across the levels of study across the city.

This will see us explore new and emerging subject areas such as digital and media, community practice and aviation, while enhancing our established progression routes in healthcare and education. 

But it also goes beyond programme delivery and into our roles as civic anchor institutions - harnessing our research, innovation, skills and enterprise ambitions and capabilities for the good of the city.

With CoBC, we want to shape an education and skills ecosystem that is inclusive and transformative, and fuels Bristol’s future as a thriving, adaptive and resilient city. More than ever, at the heart of our partnership with CoBC is opportunity: ensuring learners locally have skilled and valued career opportunities that, in turn, boosts the economic prosperity for the region.

This feature was first published on Bristol 24/7.