| Summary: | This final report of the Church Colleges Research Project was published in 1986 and was the culmination of a four year collaboration between eleven of the twelve surviving free-standing Church of England colleges of education and the Culham College Institute [a research institute founded out of the closure of a Church college in 1979]. The research took as its question “what justifications can validly be put forward for the retention of the Anglican colleges in the 1980s and beyond?” The views of a wide constituency were canvassed including college staffs and students and, externally, heads of teaching practice and church schools, members of the Church’s General Synod and diocesan Directors of Education. Over 7,600 questionnaires were sent out and a response rate of 69% was achieved. Interim reports were published on the views of each of these groups which were summarised in this final report. Overall, there were three major expectations which emerged, namely that the colleges should continue to be pre-eminently concerned with teacher education, that they should be recognisably Christian institutions, and that as far as the external groups were concerned they should have an important role in RE training and in relating Christian insights to the curriculum as a whole. Following publication and the resultant press publicity, the Minister for Higher Education, the Chief Inspector for Teacher Training and the Chair of the National Advisory Board for HE each visited Culham for a substantial briefing on the results and implications. Thirty-six years on, all these colleges have become either part of a university or a free-standing university in their own right. This report provides a firm empirical staging post for assessing their on-going journey.
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