Project now underway, giving up to 4 million learners access to specialist training.
Work has now begun at Waltham Forest College to deliver improved green and digital skills training, after it was part of a consortium of London colleges that successfully bid for £6.5 million of Government funding.
The investment will see 23 further education providers in north east and south east London benefit from new state-of-the-art facilities, along with development of new courses and qualifications, new approaches for collaborative teaching, and digital and green skills training for staff.
Waltham Forest College will benefit from a new retrofit training centre, while Waltham Forest Adult Education Centre will launch a virtual reality retrofit suite. These hubs will be home to “house in a box” training facilities, equipped with all the technologies you’d find in an energy efficient home, including heat pumps and solar panels, so that learners can practise installation, commissioning and maintenance in a “live” environment.
The project is being delivered to more effectively respond to the needs of employers in the Local London region, made up of nine London boroughs, and put local learners in the best possible position to secure jobs in the green and digital sectors.
The Local London Skills Network, led by London South East Colleges, successfully bid for the £6.5m as part of the Government’s Local Skills Improvement Fund. The partnership is made up of 23 collaborative delivery partners, with eight FE colleges, two Sixth Form colleges, three higher education providers, and a number of London Borough adult education and independent training providers.
Of the total fund, £3.6m has been carved out for delivering new green skills training facilities.
Approximately £1.5m of new investment has also been made in installing a new digital network which will connect up to 30 training sites across the London boroughs, including Waltham Forest College. This will enable specialist teaching on one site to be broadcast across the whole network, meaning students can access learning from a location that is convenient for them.
This digital infrastructure, which will be operational by September 2024, will make the London college group one of the biggest collaborative networks of further education providers in the country, and significantly broadens access to learning.
As an example, London’s first fully-funded windfarm operations training centre, located at Capital City College’s Enfield site, will now be accessible to over 4 million learners in the Local London catchment area – including students in our local area.
Examples of training facilities the partnership is delivering include:
- Retrofit training centres at London South East Colleges’ Holly Hill construction skills campus, Waltham Forest College, Newham College, and New City College
- A green construction training centre at Barking and Dagenham College
- A horticulture and land-based training centre at Capel Manor College
- A windfarm operations training centre at Capital City College
- Green and digital skills hubs at Redbridge Adult Education and Greenwich Adult Education Centres
- A virtual reality retrofit suite at Waltham Forest Adult Education Centre
Hassan Rizvi, Deputy Principal, Curriculum and Quality of Waltham Forest College, comments:
“We are proud to be working collaboratively with other colleges to meet employer needs for Green Skills across London. We continue to develop exciting new courses which will be taught in state-of-the-art facilities, enabling our learners to secure jobs in the green and digital sectors.”
London’s green economy is currently valued at £48 billion and is rapidly growing, making up approximately 5% of the workforce, while around one in five jobs in London are in the digital sector.*
Recent research from Local London revealed that, among employers in the sub-region, 27% report skills gaps in their existing workforce and 70% of those with hard-to-fill vacancies attribute that to skills shortages more widely.
