The magazine for Aycliffe Business Park | 11
South West Durham Training chief
executive Lee Childs with the firm’s
new higher education and BTEC coordinator Brian Corker.
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Training firm launches HNC
engineering courses to provide
route to higher education
A Newton Aycliffe training firm is providing local young people and employers with a route to higher
education thanks to new Higher National Certificate (HNC) courses in four key areas of engineering.
By Martin Walker
South West Durham Training (SWDT) on
Aycliffe Business Park, which celebrates
its 50th year in 2017, is now delivering HNC
programmes to a number of major firms in
the area including Cummins, 3M and Nifco.
SWDT has taken on experienced
engineering lecturer Brian Corker, who has
worked in the engineering education sector
for more than 25 years, to deliver the courses
covering the mechanical, manufacturing,
mechatronics and electrical elements of
engineering.
It’s part of a long-term plan for the Aycliffe
organisation to eventually provide local
employers with the full route to degree
qualifications through HND and higher
apprenticeship programmes.
SWDT, which employs 27 staff, has
recently committed to spending £150,000 on
its learning resource centre and new state-ofthe-art IT infrastructure.
Chief executive Lee Childs said: “Part of
the rationale behind our recent investments
was to accommodate HNC programmes
while improving our current BTEC level 3
provision.
“The HNC is also a natural progression
from the BTEC course and so we designed
an HNC provision which can meet the needs
of our local employers, by covering four key
areas.
“We’re looking to introduce quite a lot
of new curriculum over the next few years.
From September 2017 we’ll be offering
full-time electrical installation courses,
with the aim of offering full apprenticeship
programmes.
“So we have a very clear plan to start
offering more to our local employers. Now
we’re already delivering the HNCs, next
year it’ll be electrical installation and in two
years we’ll be looking at HNDs and electrical
apprenticeship programmes
“We’ve taken a pragmatic approach to it
so we can ensure we maintain the levels and
standards of our existing programmes. We’re
taking it one step at a time to make sure we
maintain quality as