HE in FC or ‘Football? Bloody Hell!’
Before Christmas, I published a short post about football analogies in English higher education.
Today we had the announcement that London School of Business & Finance has teamed up with Liverpool FC to launch LFC E.L.I.T.E.S. The latter stands for ‘Education & Learning Initiative Training Entrepreneurs in Sport’.
It will introduce you to the unique coaching philosophy of ‘The Liverpool Way’ as opposed to the glories of the club’s recent decade of corporate management.
This might be the first Premier League club to enter the HE field, but LFC E.L.I.T.E.S is trailing behind UCF Burnley. What does the UC stand for? Nothing yet, but you can guess the intention from the tagline, ‘university degrees and executive education in football’. Degrees are validated by Buckinghamshire New University and include various BAs in Football Business and Sports Business.
UCF Burnley has now announced its new ‘campus’ at Wembley, with the first students turning up in 2014/15. UCFB aims to have 1,500 students there by 2020.
UCF Burnley degrees at Turf Moor are ‘designated’ for student support, meaning that students can access student loans for tuition fees and maintenance and are also eligible for grants.
Designated courses face no caps on recruitment, nor on fees though an upper limit on tuition fee loan is in place at £6,000 per year. (UCFB tuition fees will come in at exactly that mark in September 2013.) With around 400 institutions holding this status, in addition to the 160+ established HEI’s, we are beginning to see a saturated market where no individual can operate as a ‘rational consumer’.
Critical Education 
Is this actually HE provision, though? From what the website shows it’s purely short courses, linked with LSBF’s School of English. This is probably going to be a fuss over nothing as it emerges it’s no difference to a training centre offering courses with Liverpool.
Im not too sure this should be dismissed as being like anything else…as somebody with years of experience of teaching, training and programme design, this is actually very unique from what I have read. To have an EPL join forces with an education instiution – and a global one at that – to deliver a range of education and training programmes, is no fuss over nothing really.
These first programmes look pretty cool – and to have the football and business worlds merge to deliver insight and strategies on team building and leadership, would seem to me to be the perfect partnership and make them the obvious leaders in their field…not to mention that hanging out at an Academy for a week would beat any classroom, conference room or boardroom for me!
I don’t normally allow anonymous postings. Could you identify yourself or provide me privately with a genuine email address? Thanks.