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The School of Lifelong Education and Development is really a School which is different to all
the other Schools. Our School is really looking at providing a way for people to access the
University, so we're looking at people throughout their lifespan. So it's not really as focused,
as many Schools are, on young people straight out of school. We have lots of mature students
and we really encourage mature students. We also work a lot with employers with people
who are already in work to try and provide qualifications that they can get whilst they're
working. We have the Bradford Foundation Year which is a course that people can take as
a stepping stone onto a degree. If it's people who are mature students and haven't got formal
qualifications and it gives them an opportunity to develop the skills they need and also prove
to the University that they can operate at the level that they need to, to be able to
take a degree. So we have those courses. We do some Foundation Degrees, which are short
degrees if you like, they're two years. And people going on those courses do a lot of
work-based learning. So they're very vocationally orientated. There's about 25% of the course
is on work placements. So those have been designed with employers to make sure that
they've got work specific skills. As well as Foundation Degrees we have a combined studies
programme. This is a really innovative programme where students can design their own degree
course. There are some standard modules which they do, but most of the modules they will
pick and choose from modules from across the University. So if they want a degree that's
not out there, but all the participant parts exist within the University of Bradford there's
no reason why they can't design that themselves. So they work with a tutor to pull together
those modules and design their own course. For undergraduates we have Foundation degrees
which are very vocationally focused programmes, with employers in mind and specific job roles
in mind. What's really important to us is that we've not just got classrooms, it's about
how students interact with each other, it's having the right spaces, not just the right
spaces for learning and teaching but how students work together in terms of having social spaces,
having social study spaces, which is something which we've got lots of. It used to be quite
defined. We had classroom areas, we had library areas and we had cafe bars and now a lot of
those lines have blurred, because what we've found was students were using the cafe bars
to do their studying. So why are we making it difficult for them. So we make social spaces
where students can study. We want to encourage people into university and we want to find
something that will work for them.