I received this newsletter update yesterday from the Co-operative College:
“As you may be aware, the College has operated for several years without core or government funding. Despite everyone’s best efforts over the last 10 years to implement cost saving measures and diversify income generating work streams, the College has been unable to reach financial sustainability. Therefore, the Board have taken the decision to cease all learning delivery as of 1 August 2026, and transition to an unstaffed operating model which will allow us to optimise our remaining funds to continue to meet our charitable objects.”
More information can be found in the attached information pack.
Although I was aware there were financial problems at the College, the announcement that all staff will be made redundant by 31st July and that the continuation of the ‘Co-operative College’ name is uncertain, came as a surprise to me. I’ve not been involved in the College’s work since the centenary book chapter was published. It was a way of consolidating my involvement and moving on, while Mike Neary continued to work with them until he became ill. That was shortly after the College submitted an application to the OFS for degree-awarding powers in 2019.
The detail in the OFS application demonstrates that it was a sincere and serious attempt to re-orient and restructure the College towards a federated model of co-operative higher education. At that moment at least, the College was willing and felt able to put everything it had into the plan, but I understand that the pandemic created too much uncertainty for the College and the application was withdrawn. It would be a useful set of documents to make available for archival research and to enable open discussion about why the plans failed. What can we learn from this? In fact, the rise and fall of the Co-operative College is a PhD waiting to happen.
The new model for the Co-operative College is not the model those of us envisaged a decade ago, but the decent, charitable intentions are still there to create some kind of legacy and I hope the remaining staff at the College are able to move on to less precarious and more hopeful work. The last few years can’t have been easy for anyone.
Fundamentally, the reasons why we felt the need for co-operative higher education and the critique that a co-operative university was meant to institutionalise, have only become more evident and necessary in light of the predictable structural problems in UK higher education. The crises of capitalism continue to intensify and the scenario of ‘dissolution’ that we proposed seems to be happening without any effort, but not towards a more co-operative model of higher education or society as a whole.