David Willetts, Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, visited VT’s engineering academy today. This is his first visit to the HMS Sultan based academy, where he saw first hand the facility that trains around 500 apprentices each day.

 

VT’s engineering academy provides apprenticeship programmes for large organisations, including Network Rail, BVT and British Energy.  It delivers a unique training offering, tailoring programmes to individual customer industry needs and blending the role-specific training with personal and team skills development. The learners also benefit from using Royal Navy facilities at HMS Sultan, HMS Collingwood and HMS Raleigh.  Network Rail hosted the morning part of David Willetts’ visit at its specialist rail-specific training facility at the naval base. The afternoon offered a tour of the academy including the new Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) machining facility.

 

Said Simon Withey, VT’s Group Managing Director: “The academy has proved a great success story. The quality of training and facilities delivered here has attracted some of the country’s biggest engineering organisations and certainly the impressive levels of retention and achievement achieved by students reinforces the academy as a national centre of engineering excellence.”

 

Iain Coucher, Network Rail chief executive added: "A bigger and better railway needs the very best in engineering skills to succeed. The advanced apprenticeship scheme we offer at this purpose built facility will put over 1,000 young people on-track for a career in a business which provides a vital service to millions of people every day."