Partners in Milton Keynes
At this time of year staff in Milton Keynes particularly appreciate the pleasant external environment of the Walton Hall campus. Spending part of the lunch hour sitting around the Mulberry Lawn, playing cricket, or walking by the River Ouzel reminds us of the benefits of our semi-rural setting. It also compensates, to a small extent, for the exigencies of the internal space on the main campus, of which I am well aware. Building and refurbishment has not kept pace with the growth of staff at Walton Hall and I apologise that some working space is not ideal. We know, in principle, that we should expand our accommodation to match the underlying growth trend of staff numbers. Unfortunately, the sharp decrease in the OU’s state funding back in 1996 did not appear to be temporary. To have launched two projects the size of the Berrill Building at that time would have seemed foolhardy. However, I am glad to say that the Finance Committee has now approved the construction of Offices VIII, which will accommodate 350 staff.
It is harder to generalise about the external and internal working environments in the OU’s regional centres but I express my appreciation for the patience that staff around our many locations have shown during various office moves and building work. The overall standard of our regional office accommodation has improved substantially in this decade.
Although a relatively new town, Milton Keynes now displays, like some much older cities, traffic signs directing motorists to ‘Universities’. These refer, of course, to our own Walton Hall campus and to the Kents Hill centre of De Montfort University (DMU) opposite our East Gate. There is regular consultation and co-ordination between the OU and DMU about the Kents Hill centre but those discussions have now been given a sharper focus by the government’s lifelong learning strategy.
Our joint response is to propose that the Kents Hill centre become the Milton Keynes Lifelong Learning Centre and offer an even wider variety of higher education and training opportunities to the people of this fast-growing region. Already some 2,000 residents of greater Milton Keynes study with either the OU or DMU but both universities feel that these numbers could be expanded, and the opportunities for learning enhanced, by organising the Milton Keynes Lifelong Learning Centre as a distinct entity and inviting other universities (such as Oxford University which already teaches locally) to offer courses there as well. We intend to create an environment where students can move seamlessly between classroom courses, home study, and online learning with the ability to combine credit from different institutions in pursuit of their individual educational and training needs.
Planning for the Milton Keynes Lifelong Learning Centre is being handled by a project team in the Development Office under Professor Peters’ leadership. The team would be delighted to hear from members of staff with ideas about how to put such a Centre at the cutting edge of the lifelong learning movement.