HEALTH Secretary Alan Milburn has thrown his weight behind moves to make a North-East town a centre of educational excellence.

Officials are planning to create a university centre in Darlington as part of a £27m redevelopment of the town's College of Technology.

The centre will pioneer "foundation degree" courses, part-time studies that build into a new qualification.

Ministers believe university centres will help students by cutting the debt mountain graduates accrue when they study at universities hundreds of miles from home.

Darlington College of Technology is planning to leave its current site in Cleveland Avenue and move to Morton Park, at the east end of the town's Yarm Road, where its new complex - to be opened in August 2005 - will include a university centre.

It will work in partnership with Teesside University, and possibly Durham University, to offer courses to degree level.

"It would be great to be able to offer young people the chance to stay in the town to continue their studies rather than allowing them to leave," said Mr Milburn.

Foundation degrees will be available in engineering, hotel management, classroom training, e-business, dental nursing, building and journalism. Modules will also be offered in marketing, human resources, holistic therapies, crystal healing, local history and French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Mr Milburn said: "The Government has an ambitious plan to increase to 50 per cent the number of 18 to 30-year- olds who go into higher education by 2010. To do that, we have to make it easier for people from a wide range of social backgrounds to get in."

With the issue of how students pay for their higher education likely to remain controversial for the foreseeable future, encouraging people to stay close to home will help prevent them running up large overdrafts.

College principal Sarah Farley said: "We are not looking to attract people on a national basis, but we are looking to provide for the needs of the local population. It is for people who want to live and study locally, whether they are young or in work.

"There are a lot of people in the workplace with A-levels or other qualifications who have never had the chance to go to university. We would like to offer them the next level."

The university centre is one of a number of additional facilities that the college will find room for on its new larger site, along with more vocational courses.

Mr Milburn added: "The move, if it happens, will be very exciting for the college and the town. It will give a purpose-built campus and allow the range of courses to be dramatically extended, and that's got to be very good news for Darlington."