Jacqui Thomasen is Co-operative College’s last CEO. The College survived a world war, global economic crises, and a century of change in education and co-operation. It provided world class training to co-operators in the UK and abroad, and many in the movement fondly recall its residential centre Stanford Hall.
I ask Thomasen, via videocall, if she’ll be the last person working for the College when it fully winds up in October. She’s silent for a few seconds, eyes wide. “To be honest, I’m not quite thinking about that aspect.”
There’s a lot of sadness in the movement around the College’s upcoming dissolution. But some people are also confused, and others frustrated.
One decade ago the College was breaking even, with £4.4m in assets. A decade later and revenue had fallen over 80%, and staff numbers halved. By October 2026, just three or four hundred thousand pounds will remain, to be distributed in grants.
Post-2015 the College’s revenue began dropping quickly – but expenditure didn’t reduce as quickly, with most going towards staff costs. Its annual reports from 2017-25 show deficits of £3m.
What led to the College’s financial downturn?
Before 2015, Co-operative College broke even under Mervyn Wilson’s 14-year leadership. It largely preserved the assets from Stanford Hall’s sale in 2001 for £5m, which he describes as a “war chest”.
Wilson says the College prioritised building strong relationships, finding out what the movement needed and “making damn sure we had first class products” worth spending money on, which was essential after the consolidation of co-ops in recent decades which saw societies bring most training in-house. Russell Gill from the Co-op Group, and a former College trustee, says it was “vibrant, innovative and entrepreneurial”. Linda Shaw, vice principal until 2015, adds that the College was always on fragile ground financially and had to be “agile” to bring in grants and work.
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In 2013 the Co-op Group crisis saw many budgets shrink across the movement, and in 2015 the College concluded its conversion into a charitable incorporated organisation (CIO), untethering it from Co-operatives UK, whose umbrella it had come under. While this reduced oversight of the College within the broader movement, both organisations agreed it was a positive step for the College.
So it wasn’t a straightforward organisation for Simon Parkinson to take over in 2015, as the first new CEO since 2001. He was the first of five CEOs from 2015-2025.
Under Parkinson a lot changed. He reduced some areas of work that weren’t considered profitable – for example, income from work with co-operative schools fell from £400,000 in 2013 to £0 in 2020. While it had been making a loss, former staff say it’s the kind of work they’d previously have found funding for. Former schools lead Julie Thorpe, made redundant in 2017, says the decision likely left many headteachers with a poor impression of the movement. She adds, “I don’t think the CEO maintained good relationships with the wider movement, and that’s the way the college has traditionally been funded”.
Relationships also became tense with the Co-operative Heritage Trust. The College had for years provided management services to Heritage, but it proposed to significantly raise the fees. Wilson, chair of the board of trustees at Heritage at the time, says the Trust felt the College was in financial difficulties and trying to pass a “disproportionate amount of those costs” onto Heritage. Heritage’s manager Liz McIvor says the price rise triggered them to switch providers in October 2019. The College lost around £70,000 per year from this.
Simultaneously, a large and ambitious idea was developing – setting up a co-operative university. Cilla Ross was vice principal from 2015, and by the time she became CEO in 2019 the university idea was the College’s key focus. Ross says grants were “drying up” and training needs had declined, and trustees hoped the project could help create a financially sustainable future after initial investment. Trustees released an extra £180,000 into the project from 2018-21. A full figure including management time of investment into the university has not been published.
The Co-operative Group was critical of the university project. Gill says he “made it very clear that the university idea did not have the support of the Co-op Group”, which he perceived as “doomed to failure”. He says the College was losing hundreds of thousands of pounds per year, and while it invested significant management and financial resources into the university idea, the quality of its other work had become “mixed”, and that the College stopped “delivering things that the movement wanted.” In 2020 the Group pulled its annual fund of £87,000 to the College: “we were pouring money down the drain by giving it to the College”.
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When the pandemic hit, it was clear the university idea couldn’t work. The College had been hopeful of attaining degree awarding powers, but with the pandemic these stopped being issued, Ross says. She also points to the increasingly challenging environment for higher education over those years, saying that while the university idea was a gamble it was realistic and had significant support from trustees and academics. She resigned in 2020.
Current CEO Thomasen thinks there probably wasn’t demand for a specialist new provider, and a former trustee told Co-op News that not enough market research had been done.
By this point, assets had fallen by £1.5m and revenue had halved in five years. Seven employees were made redundant in a 2021 restructure, costing £135,000 in payouts. A three-year plan to try to make the College financially sustainable was unsuccessful. Neil Calvert held the CEO role from 2021-24, during which time assets reduced a further £1m – most going to staff costs. From 2020-25, staff salaries alone exceeded revenue by over £1m. Calvert told Co-op News, “I was only with the College a short time”.
I ask Thomasen where the College’s assets went over the decades, and she points to staff costs, investment in the university idea, and some centenary celebrations. She says societal issues like shrinking training and development budgets, plus reduced funding for adult education, made generating revenue difficult. And that in this context, it was aligned with the College’s mission to use reserves to find charitable purposes – this allowed it to deliver “high quality” research, youth work and international development programmes throughout the period of financial decline.
John Nott – who served on the board from 2015 and was board chair from 2020-24 – says the College pursued “ambitious projects with huge potential”, but these were “over-reliant on support from outside the movement” and the whims of government policy. He says the College was aware that if reserves reduced to a certain threshold it would need to wind down, “but everyone involved can be proud of the fantastic contribution the College made and the legacy it leaves behind.” Nott believes dissolution was caused by “long-term challenges in the co-operative movement beyond the control of the College, its board or staff”.
Wilson is more critical, saying: “Those responsible, those who served as leaders and trustees for that period, should be asked to justify their actions. It represents an abject failure of leadership and governance”.
Ross and Thomasen both point to a lack of financial support for the College from the broader movement. Was it the movement’s responsibility to keep the College alive?
Thomases says: “Co-ops UK, Heritage, Co-op News… we are all integral to the fabric of the UK co-op movement, and if we’re the first to go I would hate to see others follow but if the support isn’t there, there is a real risk”.
In late 2025 the College spent £100,000 consulting Co-operatives UK to explore ways to save the College. The College says “we just couldn’t find a model that worked”.
Co-operatives UK disagrees: “Co-operatives UK did not conclude that no model was possible. On the contrary, it believed there was a credible option to explore bringing much of the valued work of the College back into Co-operatives UK.”
Its CEO, Rose Marley, says it developed a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which it considered “financially viable” and would have protected learning provision and preserved jobs. “However, the College’s trustees reached the view that it would not work for them.”
Thomasen says the proposed SLA didn’t address the College’s underlying financial position or rate at which funds were being drawn down, and that the board had to consider legal responsibilities under charity law. She says, the “level of underwriting and financial support required from the College” by Co-operatives UK would have “created a level of financial risk that trustees did not consider sustainable”.
One big question remains – what will happen to the Co-operative College’s name, website domain, logo and other assets? Marley says these “are not simply administrative assets. They carry more than a century of history, trust and international recognition. We believe their natural home is Co-operatives UK”.
Thomasen says the decision about what will happen to the assets should conclude in July. “Hopefully there is a route for the work and assets to continue at a time that is right.”
The closure of the Co-operative College is “a sombre moment for the co-operative movement,” says Marley. “We should recognise the rich contribution it has made for more than a century to our movement, but we should also reflect on our collective responsibility to support our infrastructure organisations through value and exchange.”
Shaw says: “It’s amazing the College survived as long as it did.” The UK’s Co-operative College outlasted its European counterparts, while surviving colleges in the Global South rely on government support.
Several projects the College helped develop internationally continue independently, and its learning materials will be shared on the Open University’s free learning platform.
The College’s legacy is documented in Tom Woodin and colleagues’ book, The Co-operative College and a Century of Social Change.
