History
In 1862 the Dudley Public Hall and Mechanics Institute was built. In 1896 this was expanded to become the Dudley Technical School, which became Dudley Technical College in 1926. Dudley College was opened in 1936 as a single-site establishment on The Broadway, located in the shadow of Dudley Castle.
During the 1970s, Dudley College took over the former Coseley UDC offices in Sedgley Road West and converted them into an annexe. This facility closed in July 1993, as Dudley College had taken over the former Mons Hill School on the Priory Estate in September 1990 and had now opened a multi-million pound extension on the site which contained replacement facilities for those at Sedgley Road West.
In September 2002, Dudley College took over the bulk of University of Wolverhampton's redundant Castle View Campus in the Eve Hill area of Dudley. The newer buildings were retained as part of the college, but the oldest building (dating from 1905) was demolished and is now occupied by a development of private houses and flats.
An expansion to the main campus was completed in 1991 to accommodate increased student numbers that were the result of the establishment of tertiary education in the Dudley area. The extension became known as the Jack Wilson buildings in honour of long-serving local councillor John "Jack" Wilson, who had taken part in the digging of the extension's foundations in August 1990.
This reorganisation saw most of the sixth form facilities at secondary schools closed in a similar move to the one in Halesowen that had taken place in the early 1980s. It was also necessary to free up space in three nearby secondary schools for 11-year-old pupils starting secondary school in September 1990, after 18 years of a system which had seen children transferring to secondary school at the age of 12.
Despite this reorganisation, Dudley College opened a sixth form centre at Dormston School in Sedgley in September 1996 and six years later opened similar facilities at the nearby High Arcal School.
In 2007, plans were unveiled to merge Stourbridge College into Dudley College. If the merger did go ahead, the current buildings of Dudley and Stourbridge Colleges would have been retained, and an extra campus would have been opened in Brierley Hill.
In 2009, plans were unveiled for another campus of Dudley College to be built on a car park in Priory Road which was once the site of Dudley Girls High School (later part of The Dudley School and later Castle High School).
Read more about this topic: Dudley College
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“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)