Morley College London: a key partner in improving Londoners’ skills
Morley College London is the capital’s largest provider of adult learning, with teaching sites on both sides of the Thames: near the country’s busiest train station London Waterloo, at the heart of the buzzy North Kensington community that Portobello Road Market also calls home, and in the creative zone defined by Chelsea’s King’s and Fulham Roads.
The college was founded by social reformer and suffragette Emma Cons back in 1889 to provide lifelong educational opportunities for diverse communities in London, and that mission is as important to us in 2023 as it was to Emma Cons in the 19th century.
But if the destination remains the same, of course the journey is somewhat different…
The course list for October 1897 offers up classes in Steam, Botany, Heat and Elocution…in 2023 you’ll find Esports, ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), Creative Discovery and Health and Social Care.
In 1893, our inaugural “Penny Lecture” (available to the local working community for just 1p) was “The Telephone, or How to Talk to a Man 100 Miles Away”; in 2022, a summer Penny Lecture (which still costs only 1p) dealt with “Soil to Soil Textiles, Regenerative Agriculture and Community”.
In our past and in our present, we pride ourselves on the relevance of what we provide to the capital’s adult learners. With the future in mind, we’re delighted to be working in lockstep with Business LDN to better the skills of Londoners via the LSIP (London Skills Improvement Plan).
“We are delighted to be working with Business LDN as we continue to broker new conversations with employers,” said Dr Andrew Gower, Morley College London Principal and CEO. “The LSIP’s ability to bring definition to what otherwise might be an ambiguous agglomeration of skills needs will act as a powerful motivator for our sector as we look to equip Londoners for future success.”
We’ve configured our business to make it as easy as possible for your business to work with us.
Each of our teaching centres has a Stakeholder Advisory Group led by the Centre Principal. This is a focal point for matching skills demand with skills supply, and we’d love for you to become involved (including by attending an event at our newly-renovated Morley Gallery in February; see below)
At the North Kensington Centre for Skills, our curriculum is being designed around the needs of the local community. We’re delivering courses for budding Market Traders, childcare specialists, music industry moguls and emerging artists. And the Department for Educations has spent £13m on radically upgrading our building to make it as inviting and as flexible as possible.
The Chelsea Centre’s focus is explicitly on the Creative Industries, and our constituency is any Londoner with an interest in this booming sector. Creative discovery is at the heart of our offer here, with the opportunity to specialise in Art, Media or Design…but always in a multidisciplinary and collaborative context, because we know that’s how the real world works.
And the Waterloo Centre for Adult Education offers a kaleidoscopic range of provision at all levels. Our facilities here are unrivalled: a large performance space (the Emma Cons Hall), a chamber music hall (the Holst Room), a state-of-the-art music recording facility and radio studios, a semi-independent and newly-upgraded art gallery, and specialist spaces for skills development across arts, humanities, music and social sciences.
The key to our offer is partnership – and so we invite you to be in touch to discuss how together we can deliver skills development that all Londoners can be proud of.
Join us at the Morley Gallery (3 minutes’ walk from Lambeth North tube) from 6.30pm on Thursday 23 February. We’ll celebrate all things artistic at Morley, but it’s also an opportunity to get to know us a bit more. Register here.