A new home in Coventry: MTS opens its doors at Earlsdon Park, Coventry

At the start of September 2026, MTS moved its Coventry exam centre to a new home: the 7th floor of Earlsdon Park, Coventry.

It's a step up in every sense. The new centre gives MTS 48 computer-based exam workstations across three exam rooms of varying sizes, letting us run everything from small professional sittings to large-volume test days without candidates ever feeling crowded. The whole venue is fully wheelchair accessible, from the entrance foyer through to every workstation.

Why Earlsdon Park

Earlsdon Park is a landmark mixed-use scheme sitting just off the Coventry ring road, less than a mile from the city centre. It's around 0.7 miles (a pleasant 17 minutes’ walk) from Coventry railway station, with excellent access to public transport links and local amenities, and a total of 484 parking spaces in a dedicated underground carpark on-site. The building is served by an impressive entrance foyer with several passenger lifts for access, which matters a great deal when you're getting test takers in and registered on a busy morning.

For anyone travelling from a little further out, the connections are hard to beat: Birmingham New Street is around 21 minutes by rail, London (Euston) just over an hour, and Birmingham Airport roughly 20 minutes away. There's a Premier Inn hotel on site too, which is genuinely useful for candidates travelling long distances for an early start.

A city worth being in

Coventry has become one of the most compelling places in the Midlands to run a service like ours.

Its population stood at 345,324 at the 2021 census, making it the tenth largest city in England and the second largest in the West Midlands after Birmingham.  

It's also a strikingly young city. The median age is 35, five years below the England and West Midlands averages, and 13% of residents are aged 18 to 24, compared with 8% nationally. Much of that comes down to education: Coventry University and the University of Warwick between them had around 60,000 students and a combined annual budget of roughly £1 billion, and by the 2010s had become the biggest drivers of the city of Coventry’s economy.

For an exam centre serving international candidates, one figure stands out above all: in the 2021 census, 45% of Coventry's population identified as an ethnic minority, up from 33% in 2011 and higher than both the regional (28%) and national (26%) averages. Coventry is a genuinely international city, and our test taker base and staff in Coventry reflect that diversity.

And of course, Coventry was UK City of Culture in 2021, a celebratory year for the city, capping a long recovery from the devastation of the Blitz.

The sound of Coventry

Which brings us to one of Coventry’s most quietly influential daughters: Delia Derbyshire was born in Coventry on 5 May 1937. She grew up amid the Blitz, and later acknowledged that her unique sonic palette was shaped by the air raid sirens that surrounded her as a child, as the wailing sirens rang out across Coventry and bombs fell from the sky. Later on in her life, she won a scholarship to study maths and music at Cambridge University. Then when looking for work, she was told by the music label Decca that the label did not employ women in its studios, so she turned to teaching, and eventually found her way to the BBC. In 1962 she joined the experimental BBC Radiophonic Workshop, where she transformed Ron Grainer’s written score for the TV Series called Doctor Who into one of the most recognisable pieces of electronic music ever made.

She built the musical piece note by note, cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing down tape recordings of a single plucked string, white noise and test-tone oscillators, then editing the results together on quarter-inch tape. No synthesisers. No computers. Just mathematics, sound, tape cutting and tape splicing, patience and an extraordinary ear. Delia died in 2001, still largely uncredited. However, in November 2017, Coventry University awarded her a posthumous doctorate of arts, and in 2024, the university opened the Delia Derbyshire building, a high-tech teaching centre containing a range of teaching and learning spaces including hack labs, virtual reality (VR) and extended reality (XR) technology, gallery space and studios for fashion, art, music, photography, film, gaming, animation, architecture and more. Her legacy is now more widely known, and her fame as being an early electronic music pioneer is becoming more acknowledged.

There's something fitting about running a computer-based exam centre in Delia Derbyshire’s home city. Delia proved what could be achieved when you combine technical rigour with careful, meticulous execution. That's not a bad description of what a good exam centre does either.

Come and see it

The new centre is open now at MTS, 7th Floor, Earlsdon Park, 53-55 Butts Road, Coventry CV1 3BH. We run IELTS tests, ACCA on Demand, sessional ACCA exams, AAT assessments and many other professional exams from our Coventry venue. If you’re a business client and interested in our test centre in Coventry, get in touch via info@mtsglobal.uk.com and we'll be glad to show you the space.