A skills academy is set to be built on the site of a new 800-home Nottinghamshire village with hopes that it could eventually boost the number of local tradespeople. Outline planning permission was granted in April 2021 for the Top Wighay development near Hucknall, with proposals for the village also including a new primary school.
Nottinghamshire County Council says the new village is expected to boost the economy by £873 million over 10 years and the new skills academy agreement is now set to bring local jobs to the development. Countryside Partnerships, which will take on the building of the homes as part of one of Nottinghamshire County Council’s biggest ever development contracts, will be working with the Chameleon School of Construction.
Chameleon offers courses in skills such as bricklaying, plastering and tiling at its centres across the region, including in Pinxton. It will now be offering these services at a site on the Top Wighay development if the new village receives the final planning permission needed from Gedling Borough Council.
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Andy Reynolds, the MD of Countryside Partnerships East Midlands, said that students at the construction school would eventually be able to work on the building site once they had reached a certain level of qualification. Mr Reynolds said: "Doing that training on a live construction site provides lots of further opportunities that they wouldn't get in a classroom.
"We can provide foundations in classes like bricklaying and then they can go and do it in a real environment. Once those candidates have gone through their training, there are opportunities to get a local job there and then.
"We'll be looking to locate the skills centre in the middle of the development, set the environment up and then at that point people will be able to get stuck into their training straight away and then depending on what level they're at, it will be the right time to work alongside experienced people.
"The site will be running for several years so it provides quite a long platform in terms of developing skills and providing employment opportunities. We will be encouraging all of our supply chain to employ locally."
Chameleon focuses on bringing unemployed people into the jobs market and as well as offering its courses to young people, it also teaches skills to adults of all ages. Steven Crossley, Operations Manager at Chameleon, said: "This is the first kind of project that we will be working with and it's very exciting to get the learners some real site experience, which is invaluable.
"We take people who may not be able to get into mainstream college who may have additional learning needs and we put extra support in to support those learners. We've had really good feedback and people have referred to us as a safe and happy environment to learn in."
Councillor Keith Girling, the Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Asset Management at Nottinghamshire County Council, said the new skills academy could provide better access to local tradespeople in the long term. Councillor Girling said: "We didn't want to just build an estate and that was it, we wanted to bring in jobs and create some sort of local ownership to it.
"The idea is that you'll be bringing people in learning bricklaying, then they'll be doing the training here and end up building the houses that are going to be on this site. That's a good approach to doing it rather than getting a builder from wherever in the country to come and build it, we're getting local people to come and build it.
"You've only got to walk around Hucknall to see that people need a job with worth and value. People don't want to be lazing about and if we can provide jobs for them, the more the better.
“These are trades and once you've got that trade you can always keep going. There will always be something being built, demolished or renovated so if you've got those skills it's an asset.
"You try get an electrician or a plumber at the moment, it's really difficult and you need the people with those skills to be out there. I've wanted an electrician to put an outside socket on my house for months and it's just getting somebody to come and do it because it's not a big job. There's a shortage of those trades and so people have to prioritise the bigger paid jobs."
The Top Wighay development will be based off Annesley Road and if approved, a new county council office will also be based there. Outlining planning permission granted for the site was for 805 houses set to be built over six years and with 17 percent of them being affordable.
The brownfield land had been purchased by the council in the 1950s and rented out for farming. Councillor Girling added that the reserved matters planning application which still needs to be approved by Gedling Borough Council would be submitted to that authority shortly.
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