A big university at the heart of England’s newest city, UClan does not dominate Preston to the extent that Cambridge or Durham do their cities, but students account for a sixth of the population during term time.

The modern, town-centre campus has seen considerable development, as the university has doubled in size, and still the building continues.

The new £5-million dental school was one of the first to open in over a century, while the £15- million Media Factory, with its facilities for music, theatre, dance, film, photography and media studies, has prompted a surge in applications for arts and fashion courses.

An extended and refurbished students’ union boasts one of the largest student venues in the country, and well-equipped new buildings have opened recently for science, health and business subjects.

Employability

The Centre for Employability through the Humanities follows a major theme for the whole university, which encourages all students to develop their CVs, engage in course-related employment during vacations and to draw on the experience of local employers and alumni.

Amid the expansion, the university has revamped its pioneering credit accumulation and transfer system, allowing undergraduates to mix and match from a menu of more than 3,000 courses. Electives are used to broaden the curriculum, so that up to 11 per cent of students’ time is spent on subjects outside their normal range.

There is particular encouragement to include a language as part of the package, and more than 2,000 students do so. UCLan won The Times Higher Education Supplement’s 2006 award for the best support for overseas students for its language programme for Chinese students.

Strengths

The former polytechnic has acquired a high reputation in some apparently unlikely fields. American studies, psychology, education and nursing all achieved perfect scores for teaching quality. Journalism, which also scored well, is sufficiently popular to be able to demand the equivalent of three Bs at A level.

Astrophysics, which benefits from two observatories in Britain and a share in the Southern African Large Telescope, saw applications increase by a third by the official deadline for courses beginning in 2008.

The subject was one of the successes of the last research assessments, which were a definite improvement on 1996, although only history and law joined physics and astronomy in the top three categories. The university has since invested £10 million in ten research centres in areas as diverse as philosophy and nuclear science.

Scores improved in the latest National Student Survey, when UCLan was joint top for sociology. The Cumbrian campus has been transferred to that county’s new university, but UCLan is developing a £10-million campus in Burnley, which will open in 2009.

A partnership with Burnley College already offers a number of the university’s degree and Foundation degree courses. A new Centre for Outdoor Education being developed at Llangollen, in north Wales, which will be fully operational by September 2008, when the university is launching a degree in the subject.

Access

More than a third of Central Lancashire’s students come from working-class homes. A high proportion are local people in their twenties or thirties, many of whom come through the well-established lifelong learning networks run in colleges throughout the North West.

No fewer than 14 per cent of the university’s students are taught in colleges but, unlike some institutions involved in “franchising”, Central Lancashire has won official praise for the quality of its external programmes.

Applications were down only marginally at the start of 2008, when other universities suffered much more from the switch from six choices per applicant to five. UCLan actually increased its share of north-west England’s total applications significantly. The social scene in Preston may not compare with Manchester or Liverpool, but neither do the security risks, and the cost of living is low.

Both cities are within easy reach, and the student union’s “Feel” club nights have won national recognition. Although still not the most fashionable university, UCLan commands great loyalty among its students. Rents for the nearly 1,500 places in university accommodation are among the lowest in Britain and the 60-acre Preston Sports Arena is among the best in any higher education institution.

Three miles from the main campus, the centre is available to clubs throughout the region but there are reserved periods for students, who can also book at peak times.

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