The Education Quarter links the Town Centre and the Waterfront. This area has already been the focus of more than £150m investment in order to bring a brand new university to Suffolk, with its main hub based in the heart of Ipswich.
The Education Quarter is mainly in the ownership of three major landowners, Suffolk New College, Suffolk County Council, and Ipswich Borough Council.
Ipswich Borough Council has been a strong supporter of the UCS project from its outset and has added further support in the form of the transfer of a piece of Waterfront land to UCS. Ipswich Borough Council took ownership of 1.94 hectares at Orwell Quay in a landswap with Associated British Ports, who in return acquired 5.78 hectares of land at Cliff Quay and some riverbed down stream to further their port operations.
By bringing all the land assets together on the Waterfront, the Education Quarter will be able to accommodate a new Suffolk College and the future growth of UCS for many years to come. It will provide the biggest boost ever to economic development in the short and long term and is a key objective in meeting the target of 30,000 new jobs in Ipswich by 2021.
The development of this brand new higher education establishment has also meant that major regeneration for Suffolk New College is now possible. Both these new education facilities will change life in Ipswich, encouraging new growth in the town for education, business and commerce. These new institutions will also enable new opportunities to link education with business, encouraging exciting developments for Ipswich's economic future.
The creation of University Campus Suffolk (UCS) was enabled by an innovative partnership between the University of Essex, the University of East Anglia and partner colleges - Otley and Suffolk New Colleges in and near Ipswich, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft Colleges and West Suffolk College in Bury St Edmunds. The universities, building on their established reputations in teaching and research, are collaborating with the colleges to offer a professionally and vocationally relevant curriculum for Suffolk.
The new establishment, which has the backing of the East of England Development Agency, Ipswich Borough Council and Suffolk County Council as well as many Suffolk businesses, celebrated its first official day of working on 1 August 2007, and officially launched in September 2007, growing from a small start-up to a fully operational higher education institution. It's new Waterfront 'hub' opened for business in September 2008 and work is under way on phase two of the development.
UCS will provide more local graduates to local employers in Suffolk and the region and is committed to working with the business community. It provides value added services including research, consultancy, knowledge transfer and continuous professional development alongside its undergraduate and postgraduate provision. UCS will be a strong contributor to Suffolk's economic and cultural success in the 21st Century and is keen to involve local businesses in its development, building collaborative working relationships with the business community across the region.
An additional benefit to the development of UCS is that it has also enabled increased growth and improvement for Suffolk New College.
With the launch of UCS on 1st August 2007, Suffolk College became Suffolk New College (SNC) and transferred all Higher Education provision to UCS. SNC students can still access the same high quality Further Education courses as were previously available, but additional post-graduate level courses and a range of business and professional consultancy services are also now available.
The development plans for the college site, which are now well under way, will see a £63.5m further education college opening on the current college site in 2009. The 22,000 sq m. new build will be situated in Rope Walk, to the north of the existing College. Once complete the new FE College will include facilities open to the general public including a top quality restaurant, hair and beauty salons and a performance theatre.
These new buildings and facilities will help meet the increasing demand for vocational education and training and the continuing growth in 16 – 19 year olds who wish to study further education. Full-time further education student figures at Suffolk New College have expanded to more than 2,400 over the last three years, with at least an additional 3,500 students taking part-time further education courses.
The Business Development Unit (BDU) is the business support arm of Suffolk New College. It was established to develop clear and distinctive services addressing the needs of employers by providing access to a wide range of training and business related services.
The team at the Suffolk BDU work with businesses in order to:
- Identify and respond to skill shortages;
- Provide a central point of contact for employers looking to find solutions to training needs;
- Identify and bid for opportunities that may be relevant and beneficial to local employers;
- Develop a flexible range of programmes and tailored services relevant to local business need.
Also part of the Suffolk BDU, i-CoVE is the face of technology training at Suffolk New College. This developing Centre of Vocational Excellence in Information and Communications Technology focuses on IT and IT Professionals' skills development, offering a range of part-time and short courses that are highly practical, focused and relevant to business today.
i-CoVE offer specialist training tailored to customers exacting requirements and have vast scope. Training offered ranges from technical training including Cisco CCNA and many of the Microsoft advanced technical skills courses, to training in desktop technologies including Microsoft Office.
i-CoVE is all about forming partnerships in order to better serve the training needs of local and regional employers and a recent partnership with IBM brings high quality training, previously only found in London, to the centre of the local Ipswich business community. i-CoVE and IBM jointly announced the partnership at Adastral Park at the first IP-City Network and BT Networking in the 21st Century event.
In addition to the education provision focused in the central Education Quarter, the town also benefits from a well-established dedicated technology postgraduate school on the outskirts of Ipswich at Adastral Park.
London's global university in Suffolk, University College of London (UCL) aims to become a recognised world leader in research related to understanding and facilitating web transactions as well as providing a focus for research interactions between Departments at UCL and companies in the Ipswich-Cambridge corridor. It helps serve as a catalyst for industry-industry collaboration by providing a neutral participatory environment for research and also links the Brightstar incubator facility at Adastral Park with researchers in UCL and UCL Ventures.