Playing Truant? The strange case of Birmingham’s ‘HS2 Academy’
Dear Patchers — how does a national college dedicated to high speed rail work when its senior management doesn’t know anything about trains? Short answer: it doesn’t.
Today’s story follows the byzantine ins-and-outs of a failed further education college in Birmingham. The National College for High Speed Rail opened in 2016-2017 in a blaze of positivity, excitement and, crucially, government and local funding. Back in 2017, the then Secretary of Education, Justine Greening sung the college’s praises as it opened: “It is part of how we are steadily transforming technical education in this country, training up a new generation of skilled young people.”
Yet, eight years later and the college has disappeared. At least £57.9 million was spent by both the central government, South Yorkshire’s combined authority and Birmingham’s local enterprise partnership. And yet, by the time the college closed in 2023, across both Birmingham and Doncaster, it had less than 20 students left. How could both the government and the college’s leadership team get it so wrong? How could the seemingly simple project of training young people to be railway engineers turn into a fiasco of legal challenges, rising budget deficits, harassment claims, and disproportionate executive pay?
