John Hayes launches National Skills Academy for Environmental Technologies

John Hayes, Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning, has announced a new National Skills Academy (NSA) for Environmental Technologies.

The new Academy will play a key role in enabling over 600,000 technicians in the UK, which include plumbers, electricians and heating engineers, to upgrade their skills in environmental technologies.

Mr Hayes said: “The Prime Minister has set an ambition for this to be the greenest government ever and the Skills Academy will boost the UK’s green and renewable industries.”

It is a nationwide network of accredited training provision for low carbon and renewable skills, with a central administration and co-ordinating function based in Milton Keynes.

Mr Hayes added: “By giving the industries that design, install and maintain green solutions for homes and buildings access to world class training, the Academy will help ensure that the UK not only meets its emissions targets but leads the world in innovation.”

It is believed that the NSA will receive up to £2.5m of funding over three years, matched by employers. And the Academy aims to deliver around 2000 publicly-funded and over 200,000 privately funded training courses in its first 5 years.

The network will provide training in the design, installation and maintenance, and technologies such as repair of photovoltaic panels, solar thermal and biomass products, ground source heat pumps and water harvesting and recycling.

NSA will develop a network of 14 specialist training provider “hubs”, based in Further Education colleges across the country and the training delivered by NSA will be approved by SummitSkills, the Sector Skills Council for building services engineering.

Aastha Gill