and closed Crowther Hall. The United College of the Ascension closed in 2006 — some of its work, and that of the Department of Mission, is carried on by a reduced staff in the Selly Oak Centre for Mission Studies, located in The Queen's Foundation, Birmingham, an ecumenical theological foundation close to Birmingham University. The land on which Kingsmead College had stood was redeveloped as a free school, the University of Birmingham School, which took its first students in 2015. The College of the Ascension site was refurbished and expanded as the Al-Mahdi Institute – ironic in that this order of Shia Muslims would, in earlier years, have been the perfect partner for further explorations of the common ground between Christianity and Islam. Fircroft College and Woodbrooke College continue as independent colleges. Westhill College — the largest by far in the federation — was small in comparison to other teacher-training colleges. To get over this, it worked jointly with Newman College, now Newman University, a Roman Catholic teachers training college on a separate campus about three miles away, but full joint-working was not acceptable to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the collaboration ended. Westhill’s educational philosophy of child-centred education was out of favour with the government. Its Principal, Jack Priestley, and governors responded by trying to re-create the college as a liberal arts university and raising money to finance a modern new library, the Orchard Learning Centre — before suddenly agreeing to be taken over by the University of Birmingham in 2001, after which its training of teachers, social workers, and youth and community workers transferred to different parts of the University of Birmingham. By this time the Federation was clearly unsustainable, and in a separate agreement the University of Birmingham took over the central facilities and the staff there. Part of the site was developed for use by its Department of Drama and Theatre Arts. Legacy The end of the Federation was far more than the loss of the individual colleges. It meant the loss of a culture, a way of working, of inclusiveness engendered by small institutions, of contacts overseas and within the churches in this country. It also meant the loss of a leadership role within liberal Christianity, and within the world of religious education. In words of some of those who worked there: The Selly Oak Colleges, it is said, are better known in Bangladesh than