More than 3,500 food and drink employees have benefited from training delivered through the National Skills Academy (NSA) for Food and Drink Manufacturing during its first 12 months of operations.
The figure has comfortably exceeded the target of 3,355 businesses set for year one, and Justine Fosh, director of the NSA, is pleased with progress. “This year, we have laid firm foundations upon which to build,” she said. “Our key objectives are to drive up skills in the industry by boosting the number of food and drink employees undergoing relevant, high-quality training. These figures show that we are already making an impact. Over the next 12 months, we aim to double learner numbers to 7,000, by opening up more opportunities for training.”
The NSA operates through a series of training provider networks that specialise in a particular industry sector. By continuing to build and strengthen these networks through the accreditation of more training providers, the NSA plan to further expand its offering, and make courses available to a greater number of companies.
“We started off with six extremely high calibre training providers, which are all leaders in their fields,” said Fosh, “but the courses they offer obviously don’t extend across the full range of the food and drink industry. We now have 24 accredited providers across eleven specialist networks, with representation in every English region and in Wales. As we continue to build the networks, bringing in new providers that offer skills development solutions in different disciplines, we are opening up the options available to employers.”
The latest 12 training providers to be accredited, which have all joined the NSA over the past month, are Liverpool Community College, Leeds Thomas Danby, Brooklands College in Surrey, and University College Birmingham, which have joined the bakery and confectionery network; Hartpury College in Gloucestershire (meat and poultry network); CQM Training and Consultancy in Sheffield and the Industry Forum in Birmingham (lean manufacturing network); and Arfon Dwyfor in Caernarvonshire, Sheffield Hallam, and Sunderland College (food and drink network).
Loughborough College is the first training provider to have been accredited as part of the leadership and management network, while the Environmental Academy in Gateshead is the first in the sustainability network.
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