Eastwood training provider celebrates 'good' rating by inspectors

MP Skills – also known as the Mineral Products Qualifications Council – based on Meadowbank Way in the town, provides a range of training, assessments and vocational qualifications for the mineral products industry.

The institution was visited for a three-day inspection by education watchdog Ofsted, which covered several aspects of its level two mineral processing mobile and static plant apprenticeship, including the apprentice learner experience, course content, mentoring and safeguarding.

Throughout the inspection, the quality of education was reviewed along with behaviour and attitudes, personal development, leadership and management of the apprenticeship, with all rated good in Ofsted’s newly published report.

Inspectors noted apprentices were enthusiastic about their courses, developed positive relationships with their learning mentors and benefitted from a rich curriculum.

The report also said leaders and managers of the independent learning provider use their extensive industry experience to select the course content that is most useful to apprentices.

Neil Peacock, MP Skills general manager, said: “This result is testament to the hard work, specialist knowledge and commitment from our expert delivery learning mentors and assessors, plus our fantastic apprenticeship coordinator and management teams.

“We strive to provide excellent learner development and structured apprenticeship experience to support the needs of the wider industry over multiple employers. I am incredibly proud of what we, as a business, have achieved.

“In the ever-changing arena of competence development, it is important we value the contribution of good quality education and qualifications such as this apprenticeship.“This apprenticeship and the success stories of candidates that have undergone the programme, is down to the blended learning approach we created to ensure we support the sector and manage expectations and complexities of working with multiple employers who forward employees to the programme.”

MP Skills is currently mentoring its eighth cohort since 2019, with 14 apprentices on the programme at present, working with five companies.

To further improve MP Skills was urged to work more closely with employers to ensure what is taught in the workplace aligns with classroom learning, to ensure tasks were clear and precise and to review recall sessions to ensure learners have the opportunity to review topics.To learn more about apprenticeships with MP Skills, visit mp-qc.org