Proposals to wind up the UK’s Co-operative College will bring to a sad end a vibrant history spanning more than a century.
One consolation comes in the form of a Lottery-funded project with the Co-operative Heritage Trust, which will open up a collection of materials covering this history for researchers and the community.
The College was founded by the Co-op Union in 1919 as “a centre for higher education in the specialised subjects required for the full equipment of the co-operator and the further development of efficiency in the Co-operative Movement”, and went on to work with students around the world.
Announced last year, the Seeds For Change project was awarded £131,653 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to fully catalogue and open up the College’s archive over two years. Now half-way through, the project is in its core delivery phase, led by project archivist Dani Bool.
“A lot of the work so far has been about getting control of a large and complex archive that hadn’t previously been catalogued,” she says.
“The cataloguing of the collection is now well under way, with a clear structure in place, supported by volunteers. Alongside this, items are being identified for future digitisation, outreach activity, inclusion in an exhibition.”
Seeds of Change is working with Back on Track – a local organisation which helps people to develop different skillsets, experience and confidence – to source volunteers for the work.
Currently, three volunteers are focused on box listing the collection: Rob Kelly, Louise Green and Vic Aspbury.
Kelly got involved in Seeds of Change to build up his confidence in a work environment after a period of unemployment, and his previous experience made him a good fit for the project.
“I love history,” he said. “I worked in a library before, so I quite like cataloguing, going through stuff and sorting stuff, and making sure everything is nice and neat and orderly.”
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Green is also a fan of history, and volunteers with Manchester Museum, Manchester Cathedral and Manchester Histories. But the co-op movement holds a special place in her heart, as her grandmother used to work for the Co-op Group. “I feel like I’m carrying the family tradition on,” she says.
Aspbury, who wants to study archiving and librarianship, is enjoying learning new skills.
“The first box I opened was full of reports about the cost of living,” she says, “and that was back in the 1950s, so it seems like not much has changed.
“I’ve been trying out a couple of recipes from one of the cookbooks. Some of them I daren’t try though – I wouldn’t know where to get a small rabbit, so I’m not going to try that one!”
Two more volunteers will join the project soon to help with the digitisation of the collection.
For Bool, much of the compelling material in the collection captures “voices that don’t always come through in official histories, such as students, overseas learners, and women, which adds texture to how we understand the movement”.
“What really stands out is how much the archive shows co-operative education as a lived, social experience – not just courses and policy papers, but student scrapbooks, photographs, and creative work that give a sense of daily life and community at the College.”
Bool also highlights the international dimension of the College’s work, particularly in the post-war period, with material relating to students from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. ”
“Engagement has also been building,” she says, “with public talks, growing online interest, and exhibition planning now progressing towards a launch in January 2027.”
Creative workshops, including a co-op pub quiz, are being developed around selected material from the collection, such as student magazines and scrapbooks. These will take place this summer and autumn.
The project will also involve an oral history element, for which a steering group of previous College staff members has been put together.
Though the collection is now in the process of being catalogued, the materials have already proven useful to a number of researchers.
“Since the project has been in full swing, we’ve taken a fairly standard archival approach in not opening uncatalogued material to active researchers,” says Bool. “The focus at this stage has been on creating proper access through cataloguing and conservation.
“That said, as we’ve been working through the collection, researchers visiting to consult other archives have shown a lot of interest, and we’ve been able to show them relevant material.”
Some researchers had used the archive before the Seeds of Change project was proposed, and this early research helped to demonstrate the significance of the collection and prompt the funding bid, she adds.
Tom Woodin, professor of the social history of education at the UCL Institute of Education, used the archive for images in his book The Co-operative College and a Century of Social Change, co-written with Keith Vernon and Linda Shaw and published last year.
“It was fascinating,” he says. “When you look through an uncatalogued archive, you never know what will show up as you open each box – I think there were at least 50-60 boxes of College material as well as other publications and archive material. Sometimes things were ordered, other times just a mix of things thrown in which can raise questions and dilemmas.”
Woodin highlights the range of educational ideas and practices at the College. Over the years these included vocational education, liberal education, education for social change, and what was called ‘colonial’ education, which eventually became international development.
This area of the College’s history is of particular interest to Professor Mo Moulton, another supporter of the Seeds of Change project.
Moulton’s work includes histories of agricultural co-operatives, particularly in the context of decolonisation. He has researched the Co-op College from this perspective, looking at the students from around the world, especially from across the British Empire.
“It’s a fascinating history,” he says. “The Co-op College was diverse and cosmopolitan: you had people coming to British co-ops and doing, say, the accounting course, but you also had students from across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In my research I mainly used the student publications, which are vibrant and often very funny sources. It’s clear that student social life was thriving.”
In the middle of the 20th century, the College worked with the British government to design courses in ‘colonial co-operation’, which trained workers in the co-operative departments of colonial administrations in British colonies, dominions, and territories. But at the same time, says Moulton, there were students at the College who were very critical of the imperial project – and who saw the British co-op movement as a potential ally in building just post-colonial societies.
“The work the trust is doing now to catalogue the wider collection is very exciting,” he adds. “It promises to shed lots more light on who was attending the College and on the topics covered in the classroom, which can help us understand the relationship between co-operation and the end of the British Empire better.”
Earlier this year, the College announced it would be moving to an unstaffed model, following a period of instability over recent years. It’s future now looks uncertain as members have been invited to an emergency general meeting on 13 May to vote on a resolution to dissolve the charity completely.
Against this backdrop, work to preserve the College’s legacy is becoming ever more important.
Sharon Clancy, associate professor in education at the University of Nottingham, used the archive as part of her work to explore the meanings and memories associated with ‘lost spaces’ of adult education in the UK.
Clancy highlights the historical importance of the co-operative movement and adult education, and describes the Seeds for Change project as “absolutely vital”.
“I call it ‘wilful remembering’,“ she says. “Not just remembering in some nostalgic way, but actually remembering what is very easy to lose, in the face of very hostile environments that many of us have experienced over the last 20, 30, 40 years – this kind of shift to a neoliberal lens.
“[Projects like Seeds of Change] enable us to remember, and also enable us to think about the future with an alternative perspective. This has happened before, this kind of real, collaborative movement – it’s important.”
Main image: Rob Kelly, Dani Bool, Louise Green and Vic Aspbury looking at Co-op College materials
