A £70m scheme to create a new further education college at Oxpens as the centrepiece of Oxford’s West End development is having to be scrapped.

Oxford and Cherwell Valley College is also having to abandon a £16m overhaul of its Blackbird Leys campus and the £33m redevelopment of its Banbury site. The overall scheme would have been one of the UK’s largest further education college projects.

The college had hoped to secure £100m towards its ambitious plans for its three campuses from the Learning & Skills Council. But staff and students returning for the new year have this week learnt of the full impact of the funding fiasco surrounding the LSC.

Plans to redevelop the city-centre campus, with its sprawling collection of dated buildings replaced by an iconic glass-fronted structure, are to be dropped. Instead, the college says it will seek to refurbish some buildings in a drastically scaled-down scheme funded by borrowing and the sale of land.

Stephen McCormick, college vice-principal, said: “It is very disappointing. We had been encouraged to be ambitious and our scheme had even been approved by the LSC area committee. But the money is not now available to proceed.

“We are working to bring together new plans that are feasible. Work may have to be carried out over three phases and it is likely to involve a significant amount of refurbishment. Without the investment, the buildings will be functional. But we will be making them as attractive as we can.”

More than 140 other colleges nationally saw their building projects frozen by the LSC in December as the body ran out of money for ‘capital’ schemes.

Abingdon & Witney College was among the hardest hit. It had already begun demolishing buildings at its Witney site and was paying £40,000 a month to put students in temporary buildings, when news of the LSC’s empty coffers came through. The college has since said it is confident a solution can be found, even if it means that its £30m redevelopment has to be completed in phases.

But at Oxford and Blackbird Leys, it is clear there is no chance of the schemes surviving in their original form.

News that there will be no modern college facing out on to the Castle Mill Stream will come as a bitter blow to those who envisaged the college development as kick-starting the whole regeneration of Oxford’s run-down western quarter. The West End regeneration had already been badly hit by the earlier announcement that the re-development of the Westgate Centre has been put back indefinitely.

The college will be able to raise some funds by selling land on the western edge of the city-centre site for housing and offices.

Mr McCormick said the college was committed to modernising all three campuses.

He said the college would be investing £11m to refurbish a key building at Oxpens, with another to be demolished. Work is expected to start this autumn. But he said the college would need to secure Government support and find new sponsors to fund a second and third phase at some later date.

The Blackbird Leys plan would have involved demolishing all the exisiting buildings on the Cuddesdon Way site, replacing them with a new glass-fronted college and creating new sports facilities.

Mr McCormick said: “The original plan has been cancelled. We will be looking at what we can do to re-develop Blackbird Leys but have not yet started that work.”

At Banbury, the college said it hoped to be able to stick to some of the original concepts for the campus, if money became available.