College students help Rochdale Council improve facilities for teenagers

Tourism experts Hayden Burns (student) Frances Fielding, Tim Nuttall and Rachael Lee (student).

Second year travel & tourism students at Hopwood Hall College carried out a market research project to find out what teenagers in the area would like in terms of activities.

Interviewing both college students and pupils at Balderstone High School, they produced a PowerPoint presentation and detailed findings, which they shared with Frances Fielding, of the Council's Regeneration Unit, and Tim Nuttall, Rochdale Council’s Tourism Officer.
The most popular activities that students wanted were football, tennis, badminton, ice skating and going to concerts.

Ms Fielding, who lives in Rochdale, is no stranger to Hopwood Hall College as she has many happy memories of her two years at college and feels that the mix of academic and more practical units on her travel & tourism course was a good combination for her. After this course she completed an honours degree in Marketing at the University of Huddersfield and then gained employment with Rochdale Council.

Ms Fielding is at present involved in an extensive market research survey into people’s image and feelings about Rochdale. The college students learned their market research skills and were able to put them into practice by being interviewed themselves by MR (UK) Marketing Consultants who had been commissioned to carry out this wider research.

Ms Fielding said: “Being an ex-student from Hopwood Hall, I was delighted to return to the college and meet some of the students studying the same course I undertook over 10 years ago. The students have been helping with a market research study conducted by Rochdale Borough Council, (where I now currently work) and took part in a focus group to gather their views on Rochdale Borough as a place to live and work for young people."
The student’s responses will feed into a marketing campaign to improve the way Rochdale Borough is promoted to young people in the future.

As well as taking part in the research study, the students went on to conduct their own market research using questionnaires and focus groups to discover young people’s attitudes towards leisure activities for their own marketing assignment.

Ms Fielding continued: "I was invited by my former tutor, Tricia Swaby, to return and listen to a presentation by the students on their research findings. I was really happy to meet the class and was very impressed with their work, especially some of their recommendations, including a direct bus-route to Sandbrook Park, which I will take forward on behalf of the students.

"I would like to thank the students once again for their hard work and wish them luck with their future careers.”