A New Jewish Sixth Form College offering vocational qualifications is to open in north London within the next three years.

The college will offer 16-to-18 year olds the Government’s new T-level technical-based certificates.

Details of the plans were revealed by the former head teacher of the Jewish Community Secondary School (JCoSS) who stood down after ten years last week. Patrick Moriarty, 56, who has overseen the expansion of the Barnet-based school, announced the new project in his farewell message to parents.

He said the new college would focus on the new two-year courses designed to prepare students for work.

The move to the new kind of qualifications has hailed as the biggest overhaul in technical and vocational education in generations.

“The vision is an environment dedicated to this new kind of study, with all the strengths of the business and community links that this community can provide,” he said.

He added that he hoped it would open in time to offer Year 9s — those now aged between 13 and 14 — “a high quality alternative to the A level provision that is already such a strength of Jewish schools”.

The highest T Level qualification, a starred distinction, is worth the equivalent of three A*s at A Level.

Mr Moriarty, an ordained Church of England priest, said a feasibility study was being carried out viability, examining how it will be funded and to identify a suitable site with the college likely to open in either the Finchley or Barnet areas in 2025.

He added that while the college was not a JCoSS project, several of its staff, governors and trustees were involved in the plan and that it was where it had been “gestating for several years.”

Funding for the new institution is being made available by leading Jewish educational charities including the Charles Wolfson Charitable Fund, the Gerald and Gail Ronson Foundation and the Maurice Wohl Charitable Foundation.

The college, which also reportedly has the backing of Barnet Council, hopes to provide an alternative route into top jobs including in artificial intelligence, law, finance, architecture, nursing, teaching, and social work without the need for an expensive university education.

Speaking about the plan to the JC this week, Mr Moriarty explained: “At the moment too many kids go to university who don’t really need to and rack up thousands worth of debt - that seems a shame.

“If we can just create alongside that brilliant route that the Jewish community does well, another brilliant route where we can also do well and provide a pipeline of talent,with skills they need to go into paid employment.

“The genesis of the idea was seeing so many students, at age 16, who we told ‘we love you but sorry we don’t have a course for you’. and when grandparents (of pupils) at JCoSS would say ‘well you know I left school when I was 14 and didn’t do university and I made my way in the world’.

“I think two or three generations ago the Jewish community had this massive diversity and it’s a shame it’s shrunk down to one or two preferred routes. ”

“In a sense I want to connect back to the roots of the community and a whole diversity of employment focused on entrepreneurial, practical, study mixed with work that will genuinely reconnect the community with its roots.”

T-levels are the replacement for BTECS and other technical qualifications and were brought in after a number of government consultations on how best to provide teenage school-leavers for work.

Mr Moriarty said his experience running a Jewish school had convinced him that there was a need for a college specialising in the new qualifications.

He went on: “The Jewish community, it seems to me, is well placed in terms of its size and inter-connectedness to really make this model work and if it does work then in a sense we go back to the wider society and government and say, look, you wanted T-Level colleges this is what we did, we made it work, now maybe other people can go and roll this out in other contexts.”