About the college

Sandwell College is the largest provider of 16 to 18 education in the West Midlands and is the most successful College in the West Midlands.

Welcome to Sandwell College, a landmark for the development of education and training in the Black Country and Birmingham! Our iconic, £77 million Central Campus towers over the centre of West Bromwich and attracts students from across the region, with young people on our more specialist programmes coming from far afield.

The majority of our full-time students are aged 16-18, studying courses designed to give them skills for the modern workplace (such as Automotive Engineering, Beauty Therapy and Web Design). Many of our vocational courses for school leavers have 100% pass rates, while a very high proportion of our students get straight into university.

We also welcome thousands of adult learners on to an extremely wide variety of full time, part time and short courses. These range from Entry Level tasters to Foundation Degrees, Level 5 vocational programmes and Continuing Professional Development courses.

A major feature of our provision is an expanding apprenticeship programme and a broad range of training courses designed to meet the needs of regional and local employers. A specialist business team offers work-based learning, bespoke training and short courses to suit the demands of individual businesses.

Our state-of-the-art Central Campus includes a specialist automotive centre, beauty and hairdressing salons, computer suites, construction workshops, engineering and science laboratories, fashion and photography studios, a sports hall and a 170-seater theatre – among many other facilities. Trainee dental nurses practise in a simulated surgery, while Travel and Tourism students train in a real aircraft fuselage.

Diversity is our strength at Sandwell College, and we’re proud to have over 90 languages spoken at our college. Our results are above national average and our state-of-the-art facilities are purpose built to offer you industry standard learning environments. We are proud of the health and wellbeing support services we offer, ensuring that every student has access to the guidance they need within a safe and nurturing environment.

We are also proud to provide a supportive and inclusive environment for our colleagues to work and thrive in. We are dedicated to providing the best support possible and continuously improving our offerings to those that work with us. Our culture of wellness, learning, development and inclusiveness shines through in all that we do. Everything we do is to provide great opportunities for our learners.

The way we do this is to ensure we have the best staff to support their journey.

Sandwell College has been praised for its relentless efforts to improve teaching and learning quality by Ofsted inspectors, who have awarded a second Good grading.

Principal Graham Pennington commended staff and students for their hard work in achieving such a fantastic result. He said: “We are delighted that Ofsted recognise the very good progress we have made since our last inspection and that we have many strengths. “We are also delighted they recognised our relentless focus on improving quality.”