World beating’ skills made available to tens of thousands

Centre of Excellence Combats Covid Crisis

A breakthrough approach to training young people was launched today, bringing world class skills to tens of thousands of apprentices and students at colleges across the UK, in a game-changing development aimed at combating the economic impact of Covid - 19.

WorldSkills UK, the education and skills charity, has joined forces with NCFE, a leading provider of educational services, to use its unique insights in global skills systems and track record of training young people to world-class standards at the ‘skills olympics’ to help more young people throughout the UK and their employers succeed.

Speaking at the Centre of Excellence’s national launch at Trafford College, Dr Neil Bentley-Gockmann OBE, CEO of WorldSkills UK said:

“Make no mistake, this is a milestone moment.  Governments have asked leaders in further education to fast track change and recalibrate to deliver a skills-led recovery and we have answered the call.

“This is a radical new way of working with college leaders to bring global best practice to local economies and level up skills across the country – ensuring that we can embed international standards into training programmes and deliver what employers need in order to kick-start the economy.

“This is just the start – our ambition over the next three years is to lead the way in developing world-class skills and tackling vocational snobbery head on. We will be  delivering higher quality training to  create more prestige for apprenticeships and technical qualifications for all young people, including in areas of social and economic disadvantage to help boost career aspirations and social mobility.”

A team of high-performance skills coaches, who have all worked at the highest international level, have been brought in to drive forward the programme.

The initial three-year project saw over a quarter of all FE Colleges apply to be part of the first year of the Centre of Excellence, which will see over 40,000 young people benefit from this training, boosting their employability skills and potential.  In total 160 colleges and independent training institutions are set to benefit from the injection of international standards in the first three years of the Centre of Excellence.

A further 35 colleges from across the UK have been invited this year to join the new WorldSkills UK Innovation Network and will have access to international best practice and benchmarking to drive up standards and embed curriculum innovation with the opportunity to access further development support from the Centre of Excellence in year two and three of the pilot.  

Dr Neil Bentley-Gockmann OBE, CEO of WorldSkills UK added:  “There has been such appetite from college leaders to mainstream excellence in their training that we have set up this new network to enable us to help ensure even more young people can benefit from the highest international standards of training.”  

The WorldSkills UK Centre of Excellence will cover four strands of work:

• Train the Trainer: a team of high-performance skills coaches will work with college staff to deliver a professional workforce training programme to transform the quality of teaching, learning and assessment embedding world-class practices and techniques.
• Digital Workshops: Learning library to translate lessons from world-class practices to educators to raise capacity developing technical excellence in young people will be available to all FE Colleges and Independent Training Providers throughout the UK.
• Developing Standards: WorldSkills UK’s unique insights into global skills systems will be used to influence change in higher technical standards across qualifications and assessment development
• Dissemination of global insight: WorldSkills UK will conduct independent research to explore how other countries embed teaching excellence in their skills systems, with an emphasis on policy and practical lessons which can be adopted in the UK to improve standards.

Colleges selected to be part of the first year of the WorldSkills UK Centre of Excellence