Summer’s design was judged to best meet the needs of the selected job over 10 other finalists from respected BA fashion degree programmes including; Northampton, De Monfort, Manchester Fashion Institute, Letterkenny Institute (Ireland) and Faculdade de Arquitetura (Portugal).
Her fellow Bedford College HND student Holly Varney-Lonsdale, 19 of Kempston, also made it to the last six in the national competition with her firefighter kit design.
Sponsors, the international company Cordura, has indicated that it is keen to support the college department by facilitating equipment sponsorships and further Press coverage will follow with a visit to the studios at the South Bank Arts Centre.
Head of Department Alan Parsons noted: “The success of our students is rooted in the passion and dedication of our lecturers. It underlines the value of our approach to vocational education where skills and craftspersonship are valued equally to the notions of creativity and academic achievement that are often the prime focus for universities.
“The success of our fashion students highlights a worrying national issue that we are seeing in the division of learning into either academic or technical pathways. We risk over simplifying our industries into binary interpretations that fail to understand the nuanced relationship between skills, knowledge and creativity.
“Here at Bedford College, our curriculum model harks back to the workshops of the Technical Institutes, where students’ creativity and knowledge is underpinned with a self-sufficiency borne through practical skills and the result, as you can see, is a designer who can most effectively meet her client’s brief with a creative solution for future design problems.”
