Sixth Month Celebration

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be here at the Lowry today. This is an impressive building, and we are celebrating an important milestone for our industry, six months into the Construction and the Built Environment Diploma. I am delighted to see members of the Consortia here.  I look forward to speaking with you later and hearing your ideas on how we can continue to promote the Diploma. I am also particularly delighted to see so many of our Diploma students here today. You have just been through your first year.  So, many congratulations for seeing it through.  I look forward to talking to you all later and finding out what you thought about it.

Before I start, I would also like to extend a warm welcome to the students who are with us today who will start to study the Diploma in September. I hope that you enjoy your construction and built environment education and that it will give you an idea of how exciting and different a construction career can be. I can promise you it will be enjoyable, challenging and rewarding in equal measure. I have worked in the construction industry since 1967, in one form or another.  I have always found it a serious, demanding but also very fruitful 42 years.

So today is a milestone for our industry. This event brings together everyone who has helped to make the diploma a success.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your hard work and commitment to getting a qualification of this scale off the ground. I know that has been no mean feat.

The diploma has taken years of hard work from the partnership – which includes ConstructionSkills and our Sector Skills Council colleagues from ProSkills, AssetSkills, Energy and Utility Skills and SummitSkills, and our partners from ECITB. You have all worked hard to make sure that the qualification has value to both our students and our employers. Well done, all of you.

When we launched the diploma last September, we all agreed that this was a good step forward towards helping people between the age of 14 and 19 into a career in construction. Traditional routes into our industry – like apprenticeships or Further and Higher Education - are crucial in helping to steer you into a career.  But the diploma helps us to appeal to a younger audience, and it gives 14 year olds the opportunity to see whether a career in construction is right for them.

When we launched in September, we did so against a period of economic uncertainty. The effects of the recession were just beginning to bite and the media started to question whether there would be enough construction jobs to go around and cater for the students who were embarking on their diploma. Well, there are enough construction jobs. Yes, times are hard.  Construction companies are feeling the pain of the recession, but results from our Construction Skills Network report shows that we still need to find 37,000 construction workers every year for the next four years to complete the demanding projects that are still in the pipeline. What’s more, we know that in the coming years the demographics of the UK will change and we will get a significant reduction in the number of career ready 14-19 year olds. We need to make sure that we have diplomas and qualification pathways like this in place so that we can continue to recruit the best and brightest talent to our industry. 

The Construction and the Built Environment Diploma heralds a major change for our industry. It is the best opportunity that we have ever had to shape 14-19 education. It helps to ensure that school age people are educated about our industries and can learn the skills that will help them to find a job when they finish their studies. This diploma will prepare students for success in employment and further education. It offers a new style of learning which blends practice and theory and it is relevant to a variety of sectors.  What’s more, it also helps us to open up and attract a wider pool of potential new recruits.

We are often told that our industry does not give a good impression to students, their parents or their teachers. But, we have made great strides in recent years in showing the benefits and the opportunities associated with construction careers. The diploma helps us to take this one step further.  It gives young people the opportunity to see for themselves what construction really is, what opportunities are available and what skills and training that they can learn and access, to help them carve out a successful career for themselves. 

The diploma is a real step forward. In the last six months, we have worked together to help provide an alternative to traditional education for the young people who are in the room today. This is an opportunity for us to attract more people into our great industry. The last six months have delivered some successes for us, but we must not be complacent. We still have a major job to do. These are challenging times, and more challenges will arise. The pool of bright, new recruits is diminishing and it will continue to do so. We need to be alive to this. We need to work together and we need to make sure that this diploma is a tremendous success. We have one opportunity and this is it.

As Chairman of ConstructionSkills, I am delighted to be here to in Salford and welcoming again the Construction and the Built Environment Diploma. Construction is a great and important British industry. As employers, skills councils and training associations, we have a moral obligation to improve the standards within our industry and continue to attract and retain the best young people wanting to join us.

I want to leave our diploma students with one serious message. Construction is a great, historic industry, dating back thousands of years to the pyramids and beyond.  But it is also a modern industry, changing continually year by year, with new skills and techniques, which reflect new requirements from clients, designers and constructors.  In years to come people who have studied for a Construction and the Built Environment Diploma and gone on to work in a construction related career will be able to take their grandchildren to an iconic building and say, “I built that”. These buildings will be here as our testimony long after our passing. This is an industry which has, quite literally, built Britain. It is only by working together and formulating the relationships and partnerships we have, that we can continue to construct our nation. This is our opportunity to provide our students, the construction people of the future, with the right technical skills, so like their forebears over the centuries, they can build a lasting legacy for us all.