City of Liverpool College has defended its decision to cancel A Level courses on the day students expected to start enrolling. The college announced yesterday, on GCSE results day, that it was scrapping all first-year A Level enrolments, leaving around 40 students scrambling to find a different course or place elsewhere. A college spokesperson blamed “declining volumes” of A Level applications and “record growth” in students taking vocational and technical courses. But according to staff speaking to local newspaper the Liverpool Echo, the timing of the announcement has left students who expected to start at City of Liverpool College in the next couple of weeks “distressed” at having to find a new school sixth form or college at short notice. In a statement to FE Week, a college spokesperson said the decision was “not taken lightly”, with management waiting as long as possible in the hope of having more “firm enrolments”. “At the same time that we were looking at very small numbers for A Levels, we were facing substantial waiting lists from young people wanting to study programmes directly connected to Liverpool’s future workforce needs,” they added. “Maintaining very small A Level classes inevitably means resources cannot be deployed to accommodate young people waiting for those other opportunities.” The college considered other factors such as overall student capacity to deliver “exceptional” teaching and learning, staff utilisation and wellbeing, and the “high level of availability” of 30 alternative A Level providers across the city. ‘A Level bias’ The college took aim at society’s “unfortunate tendency” to view A Levels as “gold standard” qualifications while technical and vocational qualifications are “somehow regarded as second best”. Without giving any details of courses or timings of decisions, the college claimed that a decision to close some vocational courses last year due to viability was not met with a “comparable media reaction” to this week’s news. About 40 students had applied for City of Liverpool College A Level courses this year, with about half now understood to have enrolled on “alternative qualifications”. The college said second year A Level students would be able to finish their course and that there will not be any staff redundancies as a result of the decision. Speaking to BBC News, principal Elaine Bowker said the City of Liverpool College is 500 “oversubscribed” in construction engineering students and 250 oversubscribed on health and social care courses. She apologised for “causing any upset” but said staff have done their best to “put a really warm blanket” around disappointed A Level applicants to ensure they have the best advice on their next step. University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady said students have been “badly let down” by the sudden decision to scrap A Levels. Grady called for stable, long-term funding to help colleges respond to changes in demand without long-lasting consequences for students and communities. She added: “A dip in applicants one year cannot justify undermining academic provision. “The government is rightly promoting technical and vocational education, but that must not come at the expense of academic routes. Students deserve a broad choice of high-quality courses and colleges need the funding and support to provide it.” Sign of the times? College capacity is straining under growing pressure from a bulge in the population of 16 and 17-year-olds. Last month, FE Week reported that colleges in West Yorkshire are turning away teenagers, with waiting lists of hundreds hoping to train as electricians, joiners and bricklayers. But closures of A Level programmes continue to prove controversial, with staff at a London college campus striking last year over plans to ditch A Levels in favour of other level 3 courses. According to its most recent Ofsted inspection report, from early 2024, City of Liverpool College offered 16 A Levels and had about half of its 3,500 16 to 18 students on level 3 courses. The college, which has been run by Bowker since 2011, raised its overall effectives grade to ‘good’ in 2017, following two ‘inadequate’ grades in the mid-2010s. Its financial health rating is ‘outstanding’, according to the college’s latest set of accounts.