The course just ended, which has seen 15 youngsters from the Newlands area spending six weeks of their school holidays learning to design a website, is an excellent example of co-operation between the University of Bradford and the broader community.

Congratulations to the University's cybernetics department for coming up with the idea of passing on some of its expertise to young people with the help of undergraduate trainers. The head of the department, Dr John Baruch, says the university is keen to work with the local community in the way it has also worked with small businesses, to help them develop e-commerce.

It is good that a major educational and research establishment should develop links like this with the city in which it is based. Good, too, that the Newlands SRB regeneration board should have had the vision to grasp the idea and come up with the funds needed to run it and help to boost the prospects of some young people from the area which it covers.

The project is helpful in various ways. It has given the trainers an opportunity for valuable work experience which is bound to prove useful to their own development and future careers. It has given the Newlands youngsters, who are obviously well motivated to have been keen to spend their holiday weeks furthering their education, a golden opportunity to acquire the extra skills they need to widen the opportunities open to them in the high-tech world of today and tomorrow.

And it has allowed the University of Bradford to demonstrate, yet again, that it is no ivory tower.