14 | Tees Business
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn with
engineering apprentice Liam Stokes at
Middlesbrough College STEM Centre.
College is working with employers
to tackle skills shortages
M
iddlesbrough College is going
from strength to strength.
More than 1,000
apprentices are being trained
there, the college is working
with a growing number of employers and
its new £20m training facility for science,
technology, engineering and maths is
attracting international attention.
It’s a far cry from 2010 when the future
looked bleak.
Faced with a 20% reduction in the number
of school leavers by 2018 and government
funding about to decline in unprecedented
proportions, the college was forced to give
serious consideration to cutting back on the
delivery of education and training.
Zoe Lewis, principal and chief executive,
says without drastic action the management
team was facing an annual drop in turnover
from £30m to £24m.
At the time former accountant Zoe was
deputy principal.
She played a key role in developing a
strategic plan for the college called ‘Shaping
Our Future’.
She said: “The management team decided
not to lie down and accept the situation, but
to find a way to secure an alternative future.
“We knew the government was set to
reframe education and training, along with
other public services, so we decided to
invest heavily to ensure that we could help
employers recruit people with the skills they
need to prosper.
“Our determination to work with
employers and respond to the Local
Enterprise Partnership priorities to support
regional economic growth resulted in the
college setting out a new programme of
investment of more than £20m in STEM
facilities, which included plans for a state of
the art engineering skills centre.”
That centre was opened by Professor Brian
Cox at the end of last year and has already
attracted trade delegations from Oman and
Mexico.
It’s been visited by skills minister Nick
Boles and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn,
who praised the free training being delivered
there to support those directly affected by
the closure of the SSI steelworks.
Zoe said: “The centre is a major
investment that’s been developed and
modelled on real workin