Last week I visited Vision West Notts College’s Engineering Innovation Centre, based just off the A38, which is about to become the home of the UK’s first Gene Haas Foundation Centre for Advanced Manufacturing.
This is a globally renowned brand and a Formula One team too, so it’s brilliant they’ve chosen our area for their first UK Centre.
In the US they’ve already opened more than 60 of these to help develop skills in advanced manufacturing and engineering, so I’m really pleased to see them take an interest in expanding to the UK, starting right here in Nottinghamshire.
For West Notts College, this is yet another fantastic partnership on top of their fairly recent partnership with Nottingham Trent University - establishing Mansfield as a university town with one of the UK’s top universities.
I’m pleased our local college continues to go from strength to strength, particularly around post-16 education, and providing more access for young people across the county to access higher education.
We’ve had amazing success with sites like the WNC/Nottingham Trent University partnership, and also the new post-16 centre on Chesterfield Road which was made possible through a UK Government capital grant.
I’m proud that North Notts continues to be the place to invest in and develop skills, with an ever-growing package of investment into training that will lead to new well-paid jobs for our area. Huge credit to West Notts College for taking a lead in that.
This part of the world is also benefitting from a massive Government Towns’ Fund investment into education, with £30 million of funding to support the expansion in research and production of new automated technologies.
This continues to ensure that Mansfield and North Notts increasingly becomes a more competitive place to do business for technology and manufacturing sectors, finally starting to catch up with other parts of the country. We’re going to offer local people amazing opportunities, and offer global businesses a skilled workforce.
Continued investment into our area remains one of my main focusses as Mansfield’s MP, and we’ve come a long way as a town with a proud coalfield past to a bright future in innovative and high skilled jobs.
Just down the road our world first STEP Fusion project continues to take shape, with a Skills Academy also planned for the site at West Burton. This will ensure we can grow and develop the talents of local people as Nottinghamshire once again powers the UK for decades to come
In Newark, we will soon have an amazing air and space training facility right on our doorstep, opening as early as next year. This will bring amazing opportunities for people to train to become pilots, engineers or even create paths for people to enter our amazing and rapidly growing UK space industry. It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s on our doorstep.
There’s loads of investment coming to our region, particularly for North Notts, to be excited about. And along with our Freeport, Devolution deal and investment zone all worth over £1 billion of further investment and business incentives, we’ll be in a fantastic place to grow our area into an economic powerhouse for future tech and cutting-edge industries in the years to come. That means exciting news jobs, new training and career opportunities, and better life chances for local people.
