Пожарная академия: история, обучение и современность.

The Fire Service College is responsible for providing leadership, management and advanced operational training courses for senior fire officers from the United Kingdom and foreign fire authorities. It is located at Moreton in Marsh in Gloucestershire, England. It has been owned by Capita since February 2013, having previously been an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Communities and Local Government. The college provides the full range of training for firefighters at all levels, including initial training for recruit firefighters. Scotland closed its own Scottish Fire Service College in 2015 and set up the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service National Training Centre near Cambuslang. As a result many Scottish fire officers go to Moreton in Marsh for more specialist and senior ranking courses. The college has a wide range of facilities for theoretical education and practical training in firefighting, fire safety and accident and emergency work.

Under the Fire Brigades Act 1938, the UK Government set up a training centre at Saltdean near Brighton in 1941, to train National Fire Service personnel. With the return to local authority control after World War II, the British government decided to standardise the way in which the fire service worked. The college at Saltdean became too small and the Home Office opened the Senior Staff College at Wotton House, Dorking in Surrey in 1949, to train senior officers from all over the country. On 4 June 1966, they decided to do the same for the lower ranks and established the Fire Service Technical College at Moreton in Marsh on a disused RAF wartime airfield about outside the town. In 1981, the Staff College in Dorking closed and amalgamated with the Technical College to form the Fire Service College on the Moreton in Marsh site. RAF Moreton in Marsh was, as the home station of 21 Operational Training Unit, RAF Bomber Command responsible for the training of aircrew to fly Wellington bombers. In June 2001, the responsibility for the college transferred from the Home Office to the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions and just one year later to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and then to the Department for Communities and Local Government. On 16 May 2009, a fire broke out at one of the appliance bays in the college, destroying 11 fire engines at a cost of £116,000 each. The blaze was not suspicious. In April 2011, the Government announced it was studying different options for private investment in the college to allow it to achieve its full potential and in March 2012 it was concluded that the best option was full privatisation. In December 2012, Capita was selected as the preferred bidder and the sale was completed for £10 million on 28 February 2013.

Educationally, the college has lecture facilities and specialised areas such as IT suites, a chemistry laboratory and hydraulics laboratory. The tutors are drawn from both the academic world and from officers serving in fire and rescue services around the country. Courses available range from firefighter recruits through junior officer development to senior officer management courses right up to chief officer level. To support the educational side, there as a large administration complex and a library of fire related literature. Students come mainly from the UK but several countries also send students.

The college site is also home to the Fire Protection Association (FPA). In 2003, the BBC used the location to film the docudrama The Day Britain Stopped about a series of catastrophic transport accidents. For the purposes of the programme, the motorway was temporarily rebranded "M91". The college has been on occasions shut over weekends and used by the military and police for training, as the live fire buildings and complexes allow training in certain operational areas that cannot easily be carried out or reconstructed elsewhere. In November 2016, the site was used by HTIS for an Airsoft Military Simulation event called Blue Fox II. On 8 December 2018, the first Fire Service College parkrun was held on the site. The parkrun no longer takes place as it did not resume following the restarting of parkrun's during the COVID 19 pandemic due to new security restrictions on the site.