There is a certain type of college that never quite makes the national news—no glamorous controversy, no famous alumni mentioning it in interviews—but manages to continue turning out individuals who are capable of doing things. It seems like one of those places at North Herts College. With an administrative base in Letchworth Garden City and campuses in Stevenage and Hitchin, it operates with the quiet confidence of an organization that has figured something out, even if it hasn’t made that fact clear enough.
There was no single founding vision for the college. As a result of Hertfordshire’s larger restructuring of higher education, Stevenage College, Hitchin College, and Letchworth Technical College merged into one on April 1, 1991. Such mergers can be disastrous. Resources are scarce, cultures collide, and the resultant institution frequently feels like no one’s home. At least it doesn’t appear to have occurred here.
When you stroll through the Stevenage Centre, which is the biggest campus and was inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003, you get a sense of scope that is initially difficult to appreciate. Childcare is situated next to social and health care. Higher education courses and GCSE programs are housed in the same building. Offering that breadth from a regional college in Hertfordshire seems almost counterintuitively ambitious, and it’s possible that ambition has been the silent driving force behind much of what came after.
More hands-on activities take place at the Engineering and Construction Campus, which is located nearby on Fulton Close. No matter how many times tech evangelists said otherwise, trades like carpentry, plumbing, bricklaying, and electrical work never truly disappeared. Skills Minister Matthew Hancock commissioned the establishment of a welding training facility there in 2011. The people leaving that building with genuine, marketable skills probably don’t worry about the lack of coverage because it’s the kind of development that seldom makes news outside of local newspapers.
Then there is the Hitchin Centre, which was renovated between 2012 and 2014 and offers business, tourism, creative arts, and sports courses. The Retreat, a campus-based hairdressing and beauty salon manned by both qualified professionals and students, functions as a real business rather than a mock one. The same reasoning is used at the Meadows restaurant, where students create menus, prepare food, and serve real patrons. That strategy has a refreshingly honest quality. It’s training that doesn’t act as though the real world isn’t there.
The most notable addition occurred in January 2017 when NHC and Airbus collaborated to open the Foundation Discovery Space, a STEM education facility supported by the Hertfordshire LEP and the Airbus Foundation, which was inaugurated by astronaut Tim Peake. The disparity between the college’s comparatively low public profile and that degree of institutional ambition is difficult to ignore. The majority of organizations would have created a whole marketing campaign centered around Tim Peake cutting a ribbon.
North Herts College has an Ofsted Grade 2—Good—with outstanding features in traineeships and higher needs provision. In 2012 and 2014, it received Investors in People Gold. And now it’s moving once more, with a new Town Centre Campus taking the place of the former Stevenage Indoor Market and a £2.25 million investment in T Level facilities. It’s still unclear if that momentum will result in broader recognition. However, it appears that the work is still ongoing.
