Tom Peterkin: New campus offers politicians a sobering moment to ponder the real future of college jobs

THE leafy suburbs of Broughty Ferry are a far cry from the Ivy League, but my travels yesterday took me to what seemed to be a pretty substantial educational institution.

The Gardyne Campus of Dundee College was the venue for the National Convention on Youth Employment – an event that took place the day after jobless figures revealed that 103,000 young Scots aged between 16 and 24 are now out of work.

There was a distinguished list of speakers at the convention including the UK government’s work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and the Scottish Government’s finance secretary John Swinney.

Like me, they would have observed a thriving community of students studying in thoroughly modern surroundings.

Open-plan class rooms with computer hubs, interactive whiteboards (whatever they are) and plasma screens all over the place were features of a campus that has been transformed over the last few years.

Plans that have been a decade in the making came to fruition last year with the opening of this new £48 million facility with its swimming pool, fitness suite and recently revamped Gardyne Theatre.

These days it is truly an impressive establishment.

At first it seemed entirely appropriate that the campus, which with its sister campus on the Kingsway makes up Dundee College, should host politicians facing the challenge of getting more people off the dole queue and into the work place.

After all, Dundee College plays an important part in producing an educated workforce with the sort of vocational and academic qualifications that are so vitally important when it comes to making a start on to a career ladder.

But when one looked beyond the state-of-the-art facilities, it was possible to detect some unease among those working at the college. On the day that Duncan Smith and Swinney came to Broughty Ferry, there was a news story highlighting the fact that college jobs in Scotland have dropped by 10.8 per cent in the last year.

Apparently this included 126 jobs shed by Dundee College. The education secretary Mike Russell has announced that cuts to the college sector for 2012-13 would not exceed 8.5 per cent. But already, colleges have endured 10.4 per cent cuts this year.

Cutting jobs and course choices saw Dundee College make £4m worth of savings, while continuing to offer the same number of college places. Now the college is faced with making savings of just under £2m. Apparently, this could result in teaching activity cuts of 8.5 per cent, which could represent a loss of around 450 full-time student places.

The irony that the political elite had come to a college sector feeling the pinch to talk about boosting employment was not lost on some members of staff.