College Construction Courses Vital to National Affordable Housing Pledge
As Chancellor Rachel Reeves unveiled the biggest investment in social and affordable housing in a generation, colleges like ours are preparing to play a crucial role in delivering the skilled workforce needed to make it happen.
The Chancellor’s announcement of £40bn worth of grants to be spent over the next decade for local authorities, private developers and housing associations, as part of the target of building 1.5million new homes, has provided a major boost to the housebuilding sector. However, the question remains: who will build them?
Phil Sayles, Principal and CEO at Bournemouth and Poole College, discussed the development with BBC Radio Solent this morning, stating: “The feedback from industry is that more skilled people are needed across the board in terms of what is needed to actually do this building. Certainly, colleges are standing by to help by doing everything that we can to increase the number of trained people coming through.”
Bournemouth and Poole College is already a key regional hub for construction training, with 270 full-time students and 380 apprentices currently studying trades including bricklaying, carpentry, plastering, plumbing and electrical work.
“We are the biggest provider of construction training in the BCP area,” Sayles continued. “And we are also adding Green Skills. We’ve got a Green Energy Centre that has just been completed and will be up and running from the new academic year in September.”
This further investment highlights the college’s focus on equipping students for the future, not just in traditional trades, but in emerging ones too. The centre will offer training in renewable technologies such as heat pumps, solar installations and electric vehicle charging systems.
“We’ve actually got a whole range of different technologies. We’ll be offering specialist training so that people already working in the sector can upskill and keep ahead of industry trends.”
Key to this, is the college’s close links to industry: “We work really closely with businesses in the sector… They’re advising us so that we can make sure that we’re delivering something that is as up-to-date as possible.”
Yet, as the construction sector braces for a generational skills gap, with an estimated 250,000 new workers needed in the next five years to replace those retiring from the sector, more government support will be essential.
“We do have some courses, particularly electrical and plumbing, where we have waiting lists. We have been striving to increase our physical space and increase our capacity,” Sayles added. “We are at a point where we do need some more investment from the government to be able to do that.”
As the country gears up for the government’s housing pledge, colleges like our own will be vital engines for training the skilled workforce needed.
