FREE accommodation, mum's cooking, the chance to be with all your old school friends – the list of advantages of going to university in your home city are endless.

However, for the many thousands of would-be students here in Peterborough, until fairly recently this was not an option.

Higher education meant going away, and in many cases, not coming back, meaning that our fair city was losing many of its bright young things.

But fast forward just a few years and we could find ourselves living in a vibrant university city, with the boost to the economy that students bring, and a pool of educated, skilled labour for our many businesses.

Because the plans to create a university in Peterborough are well on track.

Although higher education courses have been offered for some time through Peterborough Regional College (PRC), this year, for the first time, a prospectus under the branding University Centre Peterborough has been produced.

Courses available
See a list of what is currently on offer at University Centre Peterborough. There are still places available on some courses, admission will close in mid September. For more information, visit www.anglia.ac.uk/ucp or call 0845 271 3333.
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Currently the University Centre can cater for 400 "full-time equivalent" students, which means there will be slightly more heads than that because of the way that part-time students are calculated.

Overseeing their studies will be the centre's new academic director, Paul McDermott, who started this week.

A new dedicated university building on the PRC site will hopefully be open from next September, and before that, a centre at Lynchwood Business Park should be up and running later this year.




This latter centre will offer traditional degree courses with January start dates but also masters courses.

A new centre for health courses, located in the city centre should be announced soon and should be open from January, so as you can see, things are moving forward, and there are bigger things to come.

Degree courses taken through the university centre will be accredited by Anglia Ruskin University, but it is hoped that in time Peterborough will get its own university status.

To do this, it will need to have 4,000 students, and the earliest predicted date for this is 2013.

The university centre's executive director Linda Jones is more than happy with how things are going.

"I would say it's gone at a phenomenal pace really. I wouldn't have thought one could have done much more than what we've done. Hopefully, by next year everything will up and running and we will have doubled our students, and I would say that will be a real test of the foundations we've laid this year," she said.

Although Linda has her eye on the bigger picture, and would eventually like to attract students nationally and internationally, right now she has her sights set firmly on the city and surrounding area.

She said: "Our number one aim is to attract local people, and there are two group of students within those local people. There are the 18 year olds coming from school, people who are in education that can progress.

"We want to drive that up because Peterborough is significantly under-participating in higher education. The UK average is 30 per cent, and Peterborough is currently at 20 per cent.

"The other people we want to engage with are people in the workplace. Lots of companies tell us they want to grow, they want to expand in Peterborough but have a skill shortage, particular at degree level."