Nepean College of Advanced Education was an Australian higher education institution (College of Advanced Education) from 1973 to 1989.
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country by total area. The neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and East Timor to the north; the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east. The population of 26 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard. Australia's capital is Canberra, and its largest city is Sydney. The country's other major metropolitan areas are Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide.
The College of Advanced Education (CAE) was a class of Australian tertiary education institution that existed from 1967 until the early 1990s. They ranked below universities, but above Colleges of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) which offer trade qualification. CAEs were designed to provide formal post-secondary qualifications of a more vocational nature than those available from universities, chiefly in such areas as teaching, nursing, accountancy, fine art and information technology.
It was formed on 5 November 1973 by the amalgamation of the Westmead Teachers' College, which had opened in 1969, and the under-construction Kingswood College of Advanced Education, which had only been incorporated that March. It had two campuses: one at Kingswood and one at Westmead, the latter divided into two sites 500 metres apart. It initially operated from the Westmead campus while construction continued on the Kingswood campus, which eventually opened in February 1977. It expanded beyond its original teaching offerings, introducing a School of Business in 1976, and offering its first degree qualification, a Bachelor of Business, in 1977; a diploma of visual and performing arts was also introduced by 1980. A co-operative program in applied science, conducted in partnership with the New South Wales Institute of Technology, was established in the 1980s. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Kingswood is a suburb in western Sydney, in the state of New South Wales in Australia. It is 49 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Penrith. There are various other locations within the state of New South Wales that are also called Kingswood, and is often confused with the nearby suburb of Kingswood Park.
Westmead is a suburb in Greater Western Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Westmead is located 26 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of Cumberland Council and is part of the Greater Western Sydney region.
By 1984, it had four divisions: the School of Business, School of Teacher Education, School of the Arts and Centre for Applied Science, and a student population of about 2,100, rising to 2,900 in 1986. [5] A School of Nursing opened in 1984. The college acquired the former St Vincent's Boys' Home at Westmead in 1985; thereafter the previous Westmead campus became "Westmead South" and the new buildings "Westmead North". In 1986, the college purchased additional land at Westmead from the Marist Brothers, after which it sold the original ("Westmead South") campus, which was now in a deteriorating state, to the Department of Education. [6] In the years prior to its amalgamation, it faced conflict over various merger proposals and problems caused by rapidly rising demand in Western Sydney for its courses met with inadequate funding. A shortage of campus space had forced it to lease commercial premises to accommodate 100 visual arts students. By its final year, 1988, it was being threatened with losing its Australian Society of Accountants accreditation due to severe staff shortages. [7] [8]
In 1985, Premier Neville Wran initiated a Higher Education Board inquiry into higher education in Western Sydney, headed by Ron Parry. The report recommended the amalgamation of the Nepean College of Advanced Education and the Hawkesbury Agricultural College to form a new university. The state government gave effect to the report's recommendations in the University of Western Sydney Act 1988, and the college formally amalgamated into the new University of Western Sydney from 1 January 1989. It thereafter became the university's Nepean campus in UWS' federal structure. [9] [10] [11]
Neville Kenneth Wran, was an Australian politician who was the Premier of New South Wales from 1976 to 1986. He was the national president of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) from 1980 to 1986 and chairman of both the Lionel Murphy Foundation and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) from 1986 to 1991.
Hawkesbury Agricultural College was the first agricultural college in New South Wales, Australia, based in Richmond. It operated from 1891 to 1989.
Western Sydney University, formerly the University of Western Sydney, is an Australian multi-campus university in the Greater Western region of Sydney, Australia. The university in its current form was founded in 1989 under the terms of the State Legislature "Western Sydney University Act 1997 No 116", which created a federated network university with an amalgamation between the Nepean College of Advanced Education and the Hawkesbury Agricultural College. The Macarthur Institute of Higher Education was incorporated in the university in 1989, and in 2001 the University of Western Sydney was restructured as a single multi-campus university rather than as a federation. In 2015, the university underwent a rebranding which resulted in a change in name from the University of Western Sydney to Western Sydney University. It is a provider of undergraduate, postgraduate and higher research degrees with campuses in Bankstown, Blacktown, Campbelltown, Hawkesbury, Liverpool, Parramatta, and Penrith.
