GovWire

DCoT is a large general further education college based in the West Midlands.

It has:

• an annual college turnover of 50 million
• 12,000 students
• learners consisting of 16 to 19 study programmes, full and part-time adults, apprentices, and higher education students
• been awarded Good by Ofsted at its last inspection in 2023
• invested over 80 million in its estate including a number of major new builds that comprise the Dudley and Brierley Hill Learning Quarter

The college offers both technical and academic programmes, with vocational pathways in almost all sectors and a dedicated A level centre at Dudley Sixth. The college is the lead body for the Black Country and Marches Institute of Technology and is also the sponsor for Dudley Academies Trust, which is responsible for 6 schools in the local area.

The colleges strategic plan from 2024 to 2027 affirms the mission to provide outstanding technical and professional learning, which raises aspirations, develops skills and changes lives.

Key information is on Dudley Colleges website, including their:

• strategic plan 2024 to 2027
• annual strategic impact assessment
• dashboards of the colleges performance across its key client groups and additional cross college strategic areas

The college operates from 15 campuses and venues located across Dudley and Brierley Hill, including the main campus building in Broadway. The majority of facilities are clustered around Dudley town centre in the Dudley Learning Quarter.

The colleges extensive estate accounts for some 59,000 square metres of floorspace. The majority of this is assessed to be in category A or B thanks to a continuing programme of investment in new build and refurbishment projects.

The total annual running cost of the estate is 5 million.

Space utilisation is high in many individual campuses and is reported to be over 40% averaged across the whole estate.

Student numbers at the IoT have continued to grow each year, with over 1,100 student attending training in the centre in its last academic year. The plan is to be at capacity, with all new programmes rolled out, by the 2025 to 2026 academic year.

Integrated project insurance (IPI) is in essence a collaborative model for procurement and delivery of major capital projects in place of traditional competitive tendering approaches and design and build methodologies. This new approach was piloted from 2014 and seeks to achieve cost, time and carbon savings and helps to minimise exposure to cost overruns.

Dudley College was one of the very first bodies to trial the Cabinet Offices IPI model for the construction of their Advance II construction and engineering centre. Based on the positive experience from this project, the college adopted the same approach to the IoT centre and just successfully completed trialling the approach on a smaller project for refurbishment of animal care facilities.

Further guidance on IPI is on the Integrated Project Insurance guidance page in the IPI Procurement and Delivery guidance.

The scheme is intended to manage financial risk for projects in the 12 million to 25 million range. It represents the purchase of insurance which sets a limit on liabilities for additional project costs as part of a new model of integrated project delivery. This offers greatly increased certainty in cash flow planning. It could be helpful for many colleges undertaking projects in this value range, but particularly for any with critical cash flow risks which cannot be exceeded.

The IoT vision emerged from the colleges overall strategic plan and vision for expansion of 