This former Church of England college started branching out well before university status arrived in 2005.

There is a network of campuses right across Kent, the most populous county in England but, until recently, one of the most sparsely provided with higher education.

At the purpose-built campus at Broadstairs, for example, the university offers subjects as diverse as commercial music, digital media, business, police studies, photography and child and youth studies.

There is also an imposing country house and one-time convalescent home outside Tunbridge Wells, mainly for postgraduates, as well as a newly-expanded Medway site at Chatham, operated in conjunction with Greenwich and Kent universities, and a new University Centre at Folkestone, offering performing and visual arts, also developed in partnership with Greenwich.

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The Medway campus hosts health programmes in nursing, radiography, occupational therapy and operating department practice and education programmes in childhood and early years studies.

Main campus

The majority of the 15,000 students, however, are at the university’s Canterbury headquarters. The main campus, which dates from 1962, is a few minutes walk from the city centre, but the university has several buildings in other parts of Canterbury.

One is being developed as a £30-million library, learning and student services centre, with specialist teaching and IT facilities, to open in 2009. It will have a café, two garden terraces, an atrium and multipurpose floor space for public events, conferences, exams, teaching and exhibitions.

A new sport centre, a short walk from the main campus, is also due to be ready in 2009 and planning permission has been given for a purpose-built music venue to open in 2011.

The Church of England link was underlined with the installation of the Archbishop of Canterbury as the university’s Chancellor in 2005. Religious studies is available as a single-honours degree or as part of the modular scheme, which covers the arts and humanities, business and management, social and applied sciences, education, and health and social care.

The large health and teacher training programmes make the university the largest provider of higher education to the public services in Kent. Canterbury is one of the few Grade 1 providers of teacher training offering the full range of courses from early years to primary, secondary, further and higher education. Policing studies and a new law degree are other big recruiters.

Religious studies registered the best teaching quality grades, but all the assessments were good, as have been the results from successive national student satisfaction surveys.

Staff

Canterbury Christ Church was one of the new “teaching-led” universities, but still entered staff in seven areas in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. The best grades came in education and music, both of which had 10 per cent of their work assessed as ‘world-leading’.

Nearly 97 per cent of the undergraduates are state-educated and more than a third come from working-class homes. The dropout rate of around 15 per cent is around the national average for the university’s courses and entry qualifications. The university’s applications were up by more than 10 per cent at the start of 2009, the third successive year of big increases.

Facilities

All the campuses are connected by a microwave link, which provides fast access to teaching and learning materials, as well as email. The new Drill Hall Library at Medway provides 147,000 items, 370 computers and 250 study spaces for Canterbury, Greenwich and Kent students.

Social and sports facilities naturally vary between the campuses, although the students’ union is present on all of them. Residential accommodation is not plentiful, but first years are given priority. The pressure is eased to some extent because two-thirds of the students come from Kent, many of them among the 7,000 taking part-time courses.

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