“Bradford’s proper sexy”, says Bradford College CEO Chris Webb. “Everyone wants to come to Bradford. But when I first arrived here in 2019, no one did.”
In a city with one of the highest rates of universal credit claims in the country, the college has drawn visits from both Charlie Mayfield and Alan Milburn while researching their respective reports on getting more people into work.
But the city is also basking in the afterglow of its year as UK City of Culture 2025, and the college is cultivating a reputation of its own for innovation and creative thinking.
Webb and vice principal of recruitment and communications Sarah Towan show me around the David Hockney building, the biggest of its ten campuses. Opened in 2014, its £50 million price tag ultimately contributed to one of the largest financial rescue packages in FE history, the effects of which the college is still working through today.
The building was named after the famous Bradfordian artist and former college student who, like Webb, was never afraid to court controversy.
“Shall I go down the slide?” he grins at Towan while posing for a photograph in the mock forest school used by early years T Level students.
Bradford College CEO Chris Webb in the college’s mock forest school playground
He may be a CEO, but Webb is still at heart a mischievous boy from Romford, and his cheeky wisecracks occasionally draw exasperated looks from colleagues.
But Webb’s tomfoolery masks his sharp intellect and fierce determination to widen his learners’ horizons.
While some colleges have therapy dogs, Bradford has an emotional support honey badger – a cuddly toy chosen because the animal is “fairly cantankerous”, Webb explains, and “isn’t frightened of anything. It’ll have a go at lions.”
The honey badger in Webb comes out when our conversation turns to funding.
Webb took charge in March 2019, inheriting a college that had already spent more than two years in government intervention and was rated ‘requires improvement’ by Ofsted. On his second day in the job, he signed off on a £45 million rescue package with the Department for Education.
Although around £20 million was later written off, he still bristles at the suggestion that Bradford was ‘bailed out’.
The college, he points out, had originally been refused capital grant funding by the Learning and Skills Council, so had to borrow to build the Hockney building.
“There’s a little bit of the honey badger in me that asks, did DfE really bail us out? Or did we simply get the money we should have had in the first place to keep educating some of the country’s most deprived young people?”
Bradford’s Chris Webb with its honey badger mascot
Bursting at the seams
Bradford emerged from government intervention in 2022 and from bank intervention three years later. But with £12 million to £14 million still owed to the bank, even today the college has to provide regular financial updates to both its lender and the DfE.
Bradford’s latest accounts, due in January, have yet to emerge, pending a decision from the DfE on “anomalies” found during an internal audit, says Webb.
But he stresses this issue “doesn’t place the college in any financial risk” and its financial health forecast is ‘good’.
The irony is that Bradford’s earlier troubles arose partly from recruiting too few learners to service its debt. Its biggest problem now is over-demand.
The college’s 16-18 cohort is expected to total 5,000 next year, roughly double the number when Webb arrived. Hundreds more entry-level, level 1 and level 2 learners have enrolled since Aspire-igen and Qube Learning, two large providers with city bases, collapsed in 2023.
That “completely changed the demographic of our college”, says Webb. Only one in four applicants can now secure a place on its construction courses.
Meanwhile, Towan says there is an “over-sufficiency” of level 3 provision in a city where schools are grappling with poor attendance and high exclusion rates.
Plans for New College Keighley were scrapped, while the Brit School North, once scheduled to open this year, has yet to break ground.
“The system feeding into post-16 is broken,” she says. “The Brit School will be lovely for people from Manchester to Leeds who want to do a level 3 course, but it’s not going to help Bradford.”
Inside Bradford’s David Hockney building
Webb says he has warned the DfE for five years about rising demand for lower-level courses, but the college has no further capital projects planned as the local 16-to-19 population continues growing towards 2030.
“Why do I feel I’m just left on my own trying to fix a problem that seems to be quite systemic? It’s not like they don’t have all the information.”
Sixth forms and universities can respond to overcrowding by raising entry requirements, he says. Colleges instead always try to “squeeze them in somewhere”.
“We’re the place where everyone comes because no one else wants them.”
Demand for T Levels is also rising. Applications have doubled this year, with about 30 per cent coming from internal progression at level 2. Engineering is the most popular, while adult nursing attracted 80 applications for 20 places.
Webb sees that as evidence more young people are choosing vocational routes over academic pathways to university. He worries, however, that those who stop short of higher education may later encounter a “glass ceiling” when a degree becomes necessary for promotion.
Bradford College’s David Hockney building
Beyond Bradford
Night-school A Levels and a degree in sport science and IT “made all the difference” to Webb’s own career.
Before entering FE as a sports teacher, he stacked supermarket shelves, installed loft insulation and worked in a betting shop. He later held senior roles at Newcastle, South Thames and Barnsley colleges before coming to Bradford.
But his life chances as a young man were nonetheless impeded, he believes, by his own lack of cultural capital.
Webb once turned down a trainee underwriter role in the marine division of Lloyd’s of London because he did not understand the job and could not afford the train fare from Romford into central London.
“I could have been a millionaire, sitting on a yacht in Monaco,” he jokes. “I didn’t have the social or the cultural capital to understand. They’re the barriers you face that aren’t about the qualifications.”
But then, he also dismisses money as the “root of all evil”; his staff, he says, were “very happy” to see he was on the second page of FE Week’s list of the highest paid CEOs, rather than the first.
Webb is determined to provide opportunities for his students to build up their own cultural capital. The college prioritises trips overseas, because “you can’t aspire or dream to do stuff if you’ve never seen it”.
Bradford College students’ view of the Artemis II rocket launch
Students have this year travelled to Nepal, Cambodia and Albania. In America, a group saw the Artemis II rocket launch and sat in Apollo’s control room.
Only 10 to 15 per cent travel abroad, but shorter journeys can be just as revealing. Curriculum manager Gary Bradwell recalls public services students “staring at sheep and livestock” during a visit to the Yorkshire Dales because it was “all very new to them”.
Nearby, head of science Andrew Ridley-Ellis stands among backpacks, preparing to take 30 students on one of the college’s six annual camping trips.
“I want every one of our youngsters here to experience what you would get if you’re in a leafy middle-class suburb – that’s what drives us,” he says.
Turing scheme funding has been cut this year and frozen next year, but Towan says Bradford will keep the trips going “any which way we can”.
Bradford students on their trip to the US
Communities united
Enrichment activities within the college are another key focus for Bradford. In the students’ union are engagement team Mohammed Nawaz (Naz) and Mohammed Azeem, who run workshops about online misinformation and helping people understand tensions in the city the college serves.
Azeem has worked for the college for 18 years and is a community youth worker, which means he often already knows the college’s young people before they arrive. One of his family members was involved in the 2001 Bradford riots, which were sparked by anger following a city centre march by far-right activists.
Reform UK is now the largest party on Bradford Council and dominant on almost all of West Yorkshire’s other councils, and recent protests against immigrants elsewhere in the country have prompted concern among the area’s migrant communities.
With most of the executive team commuting from outside Bradford, Azeem recently briefed them on the riots and the risks of renewed division. He nevertheless believes the city has learned from its past.
If far-right groups return, he says, “the people of Bradford, including the college community, would come together and say, ‘this is what Bradford really means to us’”.
Bradford student engagement team Mohammed Nawaz and Mohammed Azeem
No one left behind
Bradford College is also trying to ensure its learners are not left behind by technology. It hosts the annual Innovate North conference and is developing AI tools to support lesson planning and provide digital learning companions.
Webb cannot resist another swipe at Whitehall, saying: “The greatest opportunity for AI will be the ability to take the stupid people who make policy out of the loop.”
Yet the city’s labour market exposes the limits of policy ambition. Digital T Levels have struggled to secure placements because Bradford has few software companies. Remote placements are now permitted, but Towan questions whether learners with social, emotional and mental health needs have the “resilience and focus” to work alone from a bedroom for 45 days.
Bradford has therefore funded an on-campus hub that recreates an office environment for them to work in.
Towan fears the shortage of good local jobs will leave colleges in places such as Bradford disadvantaged if Alan Milburn’s proposal to judge them more heavily on learner outcomes is adopted. The college is increasingly preparing students to seek opportunities in Leeds and Manchester, with a proposed tram link potentially making that easier.
Webb is equally sceptical about incoming V Levels, which he believes will resemble the old AVCE (Advanced Vocational Certificate of Education) vocational A Levels introduced in 2000 and phased out seven years later. He suspects V Levels are partly designed for “middle-tier sixth forms” affected by the removal of BTECs, but says those institutions will struggle to replicate colleges’ practical environments, adding: “Infrastructure is expensive.”
Bradford College’s Sarah Towan Gary Bradwell Chris Webb and Jake Painter
Bradford has received substantial government capital investment for T Levels. Its £1.5 million early years facility includes the mock forest school and a nursery classroom where students can take turns role-playing children in workplace scenarios.
Webb suggests other college chief executives could be invited to play the children.
“The trouble is, they’ll be really poorly behaved,” he says.
But beneath Webb’s jokes is a college transformed. When FE Week last visited, Webb had been in post for barely a year and wanted Bradford to become “one of the best colleges in the country”. Seven years on, that ambition looks much closer to being realised – although success has brought a capacity crisis of its own.
Webb is now eyeing retirement. He jokes, or appears to, that he wants to “go out on a scandal” before retraining as a stand-up comedian.
“Can I throw a McDonald’s milkshake over anyone?” he asks his ever-patient colleagues.