City Technology College

A CTC is governed through an operating agreement made between the Secretary of State for Education and whoever is responsible for establishing and running the school.

The programme has been successful in the long term with all the CTCs being considered strong establishments with consistently high academic results.

[3] Plans to establish schools or colleges for technology in major urban areas were first reported in an article from The Sunday Times in December 1985.

Among the attendees were Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Employment David Young, who chaired the meeting, and sixty other business leaders and politicians, twenty of whom were invited by Taylor.

[11][12] The twenty business leaders explained to Thatcher that the cause of youth unemployment was schools teaching the wrong skills to their pupils.

[18] In addition, schools for general technology were expected to give pupils the correct skills for employment,[19] which supported the recommendations made some months prior by Cyril Taylor and his business leaders.

The policy for the schools proposed in January's meeting, dubbed City Technology Colleges or simply CTCs, was developed in the five months following Baker's appointment.

They were Chris Patten, Cyril Taylor,[20] George Walden, Virginia Bottomley, Alistair Burt and Tony Kerpel, all of whom served as ministers or advisers to Baker and his predecessor at the Department for Education and Science, Keith Joseph.

Thatcher supported the policy on these grounds, alongside the belief that it would improve education and give schools increased autonomy from their local authorities.

The original intention was to improve education inside cities, but the programme was hampered by the refusal of local authorities in the targeted areas to provide suitable school sites.