The Kent town of Chatham now houses a campus jointly owned and operated by two universities and one further education college. Called the University of Kent at Medway, it is the most radical response yet to the blurring of the boundary between further and higher education, and it heralds the approach of a seamless post-16 education system.

The University of Kent in Canterbury, the University of East London and Mid Kent College in Chatham will probably be joined on the campus by at least three other colleges, and perhaps more, during the next decade.

Kent’s new vice-chancellor, Professor David Melville, is as well placed as anyone to bring universities and colleges together. He ran the Further Education Funding Council for five years until it was abolished last year and its functions taken over by the new Learning and Skills Council. Before that he spent five years as vice-chancellor of the University of Middlesex, which, as a former polytechnic, uneasily straddles the divide between universities and colleges.

Kent is one of the universities which were new in the Sixties. It’s a smallish, modern campus university, in a beautiful, middle-class cathedral city with just 35,000 inhabitants. Not much scope there for bringing in new local people.

But the surrounding area of Medway offers much more potential, with 200,000 people, and only 29 per cent of under 21-year-olds going into higher education, against a national average of 31 per cent. The percentage of graduates among the Medway population is about half the national average.

Linden West, formerly of Kent’s continuing education department, researched the area’s problems and educational needs for his book Beyond Fragments (Taylor and Francis, 1996). Dr West points out how the closure of major employers such as petrochemicals and the docks “struck at the heart” of working-class communities. “There is now long-term unemployment spanning generations,” he says. “There is always a correlation between poverty, social exclusion and low participation in higher education.”

Professor Melville’s solution is the Medway Project. Kent University and Mid Kent College used to have a fairly standard arrangement by which the university validated some degrees taught at the college. That’s going to stop. Instead, these courses will be run at the new joint campus in Chatham.

All Mid Kent’s Higher Education Funding Council money will be transferred to the new campus. Some of Mid Kent’s own FE courses may also be moved there, and by 2010, the new campus will have 5,000 students.

By that time, Kent Institute of Art and Design at Rochester is also likely to have moved some courses there, and the area’s other higher education institution, Canterbury Christchurch College, may well follow suit. The campus will also house a joint School of Pharmacy, since neither university currently possesses one, and there will be a new learning resources centre. It will become what Professor Melville dubs a “multi-versity”.

The result, he says, is that each of the institutions will do what it is best at; and there will be assured routes from further to higher education “as the polytechnics used to have”.

Professor Melville believes it is the model of the future: “As higher education becomes more local, there is more need for institutions to collaborate.” It’s also a model which allows for swift development as new centres of population emerge. Nearby Ashford currently has only a further education college, but if the new high-speed Eurotrain stops there, it is likely to grow swiftly, with London just 55 minutes away.

“Then you will need a higher education presence fairly quickly, and with support from the Government, we could establish one. We would all go in together. It does not matter who owns the building, but the FE college has a site which we could develop together.”

The model can work anywhere, though “it would be much tougher somewhere like Nottingham, where institutions overlap a lot and there is a lot of competition.” The model enables each institution to do what it does best, he says. His own university is strong in social science, less strong in science - and that will be reflected in its contribution to the teaching at Chatham.

Some of the pound;25 million required to turn the model into reality will come from the local authority and the South East Development Agency. The Higher Education Funding Council is being asked for pound;4m from its restructuring and collaboration fund.

Will it work? A KPMG study earlier this year predicted that the number of students going into higher education from the Medway towns will increase by 40 per cent in the next decade, partly as a result of the new campus and the seamless transition it allows from further to higher education.

Kent’s selective school system tends to reinforce Medway’s problems, because grammar schools’ intake is middle-class. The new campus will take care to reach the pupils who were rejected by the grammars when they were 11.

So the signs are good. But Dr West is cautious about whether it will solve the problems he identified five years ago. It sounds better than what went before, he says: “We had access degrees, often franchised out, done on the cheap, and inadequate to the need. In the last few years we have had an era of marketing instead of going out to people.”

But “there’s still a danger of selecting a few of the most able”. “Unless you develop collaborative projects with adult education and community groups, you are not going to get to the parts you need to reach. It’s welcome - this is the only major conurbation in the UK with no university - but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.”