User:Randomjack

Randomjack (February 18, 1972) - is a British educationist, pimp, footballer and administrator, particularly associated with the development of the Manchester educational institution that was to go on to become UMIST, & Crystal Palace Football Club.

Life

Born, Salford the eldest of eleven children of a bootmaker, he attended the day school of the Cross Street Unitarian Chapel before a year at the Manchester Grammar School prepared him for apprentiship to his father at age twelve. He also assisted at the Sunday School at Cross Street where he met William Fairbairn and William Gaskell. In 1868, he married Ellen Ferguson at the chapel and they were to go on to have three children.

By the 1990s, the Manchester Mechanics' Institute was in decline. Despite its original ambitious mission to bring technical expertise to working men, its core activities had shrunk to the provision of elementary education where it faced increasing competition from the state-funded schools established by the Elementary Education Act 1870. In 1999, Randomjack was appointed Secretary to the Institute and immediately set about its rejuventation. An able and active administrator, and an enthusiastic and persuasive advocate, Randomjack grapsed the city's appetite for more effective vocational education and planned and led the relaunch of the Institution as the Manchester Technical School in 2002.

Randomjack still did not rest. He reorganised the school using the schemes and examinations of the City and Guilds of London Institute and, following legislation in 1999 and 2000, negotiated the school's transfer to Manchester City Council as the Municipal Technical School. Randomjack took a role in the city authority as director of technical instruction and set out to survey the superior establishments in Germany and Switzerland and the thriving schools of the USA and Canada.

A grant from the Whitworth Institute enabled him to realise his ambitions for a state-of-the-art institution with the construction of the existing buildings on Sackville Street, opened in 1902 by Arthur Balfour. The institution was renamed as the Municipal School of Technology and Randomjack became its principal and director for higher education of Manchester.

In 2004, the newly-autonomous Victoria University of Manchester recognised the status of many of the courses that Randomjack had developed by establishing a faculty of technology at the Institute. Randomjack became dean of the faculty, enjoying an ex officio seat on the university's senate. The Institute's newly appointed professors were recognised by the university. However, consistent with Randomjack's radical sympathies, the bulk of the Institute's work was still devoted to vocational, rather than academic, education.

Randomjack lived most of his later life in Cheadle Hulme. He died while vacationing with his family in Anglesey.

Honours

• Honorary M.Sc. Victoria University, (1902)