Warwickshire College

Warwickshire College is a large further and higher education college in England. It provides National Curriculum courses and vocational education in a broad range of subjects to students aged 16 and over. Through a series of mergers over a period of 12 years, it has over 20,000 students a year in six locations, with a wide network of outreach centres throughout Warwickshire and one in Worcestershire, making it one of the largest General Further Education (GFE) colleges in the country. It was formed in 1996 with the merger of Mid-Warwickshire College in Leamington Spa and Warwickshire College for Agriculture, Horticulture, Equine & Related Studies (formerly Warwickshire College of Agriculture) in Moreton Morrell. In a further expansion the college merged with Rugby College in 2003, followed shortly by a new campus opening in Warwick called the Trident Centre. It then merged with a fifth site at Henley-in-Arden. In August 2007, Warwickshire College merged with Pershore College, Centre of Horticultural Excellence, in Worcestershire, spreading Warwickshire College across the two counties. The college has Centre of Vocational Excellence (CoVE) awards in engineering, equine, farriery, maintenance and construction, and leadership and management. Following a March 2008 inspection, an Ofsted report accorded the college an overall Grade 1 (outstanding) for its performance. The college is a member of the 157 Group of high performing colleges.

Warwickshire

Warwickshire (ⁱ/ˈwɒrᵻkʃə/ or /ˈwɒrᵻkʃɪər/) is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare, George Eliot, & Aleister Crowley. Commonly used abbreviations for the county are Warks or Warwicks.

The county is divided into five districts of North Warwickshire, Nuneaton & Bedworth, Rugby, Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon. The current county boundaries were set in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972. The historic county boundaries also included Coventry and Solihull, as well as much of Birmingham.

For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region (code UKG13) and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region.

Geography

The county is bordered by Leicestershire to the northeast, Staffordshire to the northwest, Worcestershire and the West Midlands to the west, Northamptonshire to the east and southeast, Gloucestershire to the southwest and Oxfordshire to the south. The northern tip of the county is only 3 miles (5 km) from the Derbyshire border. An average-sized English county covering an area of almost 2,000 km², it runs some 60 miles (97 km) north to south. Equivalently it extends as far north as Shrewsbury in Shropshire and as far south as Banbury in north Oxfordshire.

Warwickshire (UK Parliament constituency)

Warwickshire was a parliamentary constituency in Warwickshire in England. It returned two Members of Parliament (MPs), traditionally known as knights of the shire, to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, elected by the bloc vote system.

History

Boundaries and franchise

The constituency, which seems first to have returned members to Parliament in 1293, consisted of the historic county of Warwickshire, excluding the city of Coventry which had the status of a county in its itself after 1451. (Although Warwickshire also contained the borough of Warwick and part of the borough of Tamworth, each of which elected two MPs in its own right for part of the period when Warwickshire was a constituency, these were not excluded from the county constituency, and owning property within the borough could confer a vote at the county election. This was not the case, though, for Coventry.)

As in other county constituencies the franchise between 1430 and 1832 was defined by the Forty Shilling Freeholder Act, which gave the right to vote to every man who possessed freehold property within the county valued at £2 or more per year for the purposes of land tax; it was not necessary for the freeholder to occupy his land, nor even in later years to be resident in the county at all.