A series of mergers has altered the scale and character of Thames Valley, which is aiming to become the country’s leading university for employer engagement, with an accent on the creative industries and entrepreneurship.

The university now has 33,000 students, two thirds of whom are part-timers and more than half taking further education courses. There is even a sixth-form academy.

The three main campuses all have distinctive missions. Reading, where the former college campus is being redeveloped, mainly offers further education with locally focused higher education.

In Slough, where there is an award-winning learning resources centre designed by Sir Richard Rogers, the university will concentrate on the needs of the town’s large business community, while the Ealing campus, in west London, has a more traditional university feel and is being upgraded at a cost of almost £10 million.

Multimedia

• The Times University Guide table

Related Links

• Thames Valley University

Multimedia

• Thames Valley University home page

In addition, a landmark building in Brentford, not far from the Ealing campus, houses one of the largest healthcare faculty in Britain and contains 850 residential places.

Unrecgonisable

It is all a far cry from the end of the 1990s, when barely 30 degrees were left, after a tumultuous period in which academic standards were criticised and student demand collapsed.

The university is virtually unrecognisable from those dark days, but there was a hitch in its development when a failure to hit previous recruitment targets led to cuts of nearly 12 per cent in its budget for 2009–10. Applications were up at the start of 2009 by 4 per cent, but the university was shedding staff to balance the books.

Courses

Courses are now concentrated in three faculties – arts, professional studies and health and human sciences. Many further education programmes are being extended into degrees or professional qualifications. Amid the reconstruction, new honours degrees have been launched in areas such as video production, 3D design, entrepreneurship, computing and information systems.

The portfolio of two-year Foundation degrees is growing, with employers such as Compaq, Ealing Studios and the Savoy Hotel Group helping to provide courses. Some are run in conjunction with Stratford-upon-Avon College – one of a number of partner institutions.

Nursing courses are popular and well regarded, while the School of Hospitality and Tourism is recognised by the Académie Culinaire de France for its culinary arts programmes. The London College of Music, which is part of TVU, has some of the longest-established music technology courses in the country.

The university has improved its scores in the National Student Survey, but was still close to the bottom ten in 2008. Only business courses achieved a satisfaction rate of more than 85 per cent, while fewer than half of the final-year undergraduates in film studies, photography and other creative arts were satisfied overall with their course.

Access

A policy of open access puts the university at a disadvantage on other measures in our ranking. The projected dropout rate, for example, has been climbing alarmingly and, at almost 29 per cent, is now among the highest in the country. Three quarters of the students are over 24, and about 60 per cent are female. Four undergraduates in ten come from working-class homes.

TVU improved its ratings considerably in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, but entered only a small proportion of its academics. Only nursing and midwifery was judged to have world-leading research.

The town-centre sites in Ealing, Brentford and Slough are linked by a free bus service. The busy Ealing base is within easy reach of central London without the metropolitan hassle that students encounter at some institutions in the capital. Almost half of the students are from London or Berkshire, and there is an unexpectedly large contingent of international students.

Residential accommodation is growing and the new Paragon building, in Brentford, won Building magazine’s Major Housing Project of the Year award. However, students who rely on private housing find the cost of living high. There is a football ground and cricket pitch close to the Ealing campus, but otherwise sports facilities are limited.

Times recommends

• Oxford releases sample interview questions
• Britain takes over in world’s Top Ten
• Students face anxious wait for loans