A MAJOR drive to expand apprenticeships for a post-Covid world has been launched by Bordon’s Future Skills Centre.

It opened in 2017 as a way of recruiting local teenagers into the construction industry to work on the building sites springing up all around them.

Coronavirus slowed the momentum, but with restrictions lifted centre manager Steve Gilder is determined to kick-start a new wave of bricklayers, carpenters and plumbers.

Last Friday he called a meeting at the centre of companies and organisations which might take on apprentices.

Representatives of Hampshire County Council, East Hampshire District Council, the Whitehill & Bordon Regeneration Company, the Enterprise M3 Local Enterprise Partnership, Royal Holloway University, Places for People and Taylor Wimpey turned up to see what it had to offer.

Addressing his audience, Mr Gilder said: “We have had to face varying levels of challenge over the past 18 months, and due to the obvious reason – and a few others – the apprenticeship provision at the Future Skills Centre isn’t where I, or those that have been part of its development, want it to be.

“The centre currently has 48 full-time construction students and a healthy 14-16 cohort, thanks to our recent partnering with the Waverley Federation. A number of those full-time students would make excellent apprentices, they just need the opportunity.”

Despite the problems, Mr Gilder still believes in the vision that created the centre.

He said: “When I started as manager in the spring of 2017, the centre and surrounding regeneration held all the potential and opportunity I could have asked for.

“One of the main straplines around the concept of the centre, linking it and the development together, was ‘The Town That Built Itself’. That, for me, is still doable. Everyone involved wins, it is just going to take a bit of refocusing, commitment and enthusiasm.”