Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills visits the College

27/04/2010

Mr Willetts and Mr Smith get hands on in the Professional kitchen!

Central Sussex College welcomed David Willetts, Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills and Henry Smith, Crawley's Conservative Parliamentary Candidate, to the Crawley campus on Monday 26th April.

College Principal Dr Russell Strutt gave Mr Willetts and Mr Smith a tour of some of College's facilities, providing them with the opportunity to meet some of the staff and students and see them in action. They visited a Level 3 Professional Cookery class where students were working on a poultry unit of their qualification, and followed this with a visit to the Intuition Hairdressing Salon, which is open to the public, where first and second year Hair and Beauty students were busy providing salon services to clients.

Mr Willetts spent twenty minutes talking to students about their courses and plans for the future, Chef Lecturer Terry Pugh said of the visit "Mr Willetts was really interested to see how the students work through their qualification and how they demonstrate the skills they have developed on their course".

The tour concluded with a discussion with the Principal concerning how Conservative education policy could affect the College in the future. Dr Strutt, Mr Willetts and Mr Smith discussed the significant volume of young people involved in Further Education in colleges locally, the need for government to maintain a focus on apprenticeships through increased flexibility and employer incentives, the call to reduce the regulation, inspection and bureaucracy within the Education and Further Education sector and the funding of places for the proposed University Centre, Crawley.