West Notts College principal Andrew Cropley on how he hopes they will be able to make Mansfield and Ashfield prosperous again

After joining West Nottinghamshire College in 2019 he has set about transforming what they offer - from simply being an educator to playing a fundamental part in driving the Mansfield and Ashfield economies, to working with local authorities and businesses.

This, he explains, will provide companies with the skilled workers they need, bring other companies into the area, and create well-paid and sustainable jobs.

For Andrew, it is all about retaining talent in the Mansfield and Ashfield areas, partnering with Nottingham Trent University at their new base next door, so people, depending on their career choices, can move seamlessly from the college to the university campus as almost one continual process.

He tells me: “It’s an exciting time for FE, and the whole Government agenda of FE being a driving factor for prosperity and I think we were ahead of that.

“We want to be a force for raising aspirations, with high-performing staff, encouraging students to stretch their potential, and in partnership with employers, develop the workforce of the future - that’s our vision, that’s what we want to be, and we’re a whole lot closer to that now than we were in 2019.”

He says that, when the partnership with NTU was first announced, other principals were sceptical about the move, with universities having a track record of swallowing-up FE colleges they worked with, but he said that “Nottingham Trent are in it for the long haul”.

He says: “If you’re a bright young student at West Notts College, what’s going to attract you to stay here? Not enough at the moment. So our best students go off to Nottingham or Manchester or Derby or London, and they don’t come back.

“So a lot of it is how do we work with our local businesses to create those well-paid and secure jobs that will encourage our students to stay, and part of our partnership with NTU is about that.

“This time last year, if you were a mum whose kids had gone to school now and you thought, I want to train to be a nurse, that would have meant going to Nottingham or Sheffield or Derby or Lincoln three or four days a week, getting a placement who knows where, and then coming back and hoping you could get a job in your local community.

“Now, you can walk down the road, get your degree here, and get a guaranteed placement at the local hospital.

“They’re delighted because the investment they’re making into training people is bringing people who actually want to work for them, rather than disappearing off.”

We take a stroll around the bustling college, now back to face-to-face after covid, and look in on a health and social care class - they used lifelike specialist dummies in a mocked-up hospital ward to give students a real feel for their sector.

They offer courses up to Level 3 and an Access to Higher Education in Nursing programme - allowing students without the required qualifications to commence their education, before moving next door to NTU to carry on.

We look in on a digital technology class, where students occupy banks of computers, and have access to a professional level television studio.

But it’s not all about the Derby Road Campus, Andrew tells me. There are huge plans for an automation and robotics centre over in Ashfield - close to where West Notts currently offers its construction programmes and will soon branch out further into civil engineering.

He says: “The reality is that 30 per cent of jobs in Mansfield and Ashfield will be lost to automation - you can either treat that as a threat or an opportunity.

“I’m proud to say we took the approach that, if automation is coming, let’s make it something we can grasp. So if companies are going to automate, let’s not have our people just sweeping up and locking the doors, let’s make sure that they’re programming the automation and the robots - that they’re operating it, that they’re diagnosing it and servicing it.

“If Mansfield and Ashfield are going to thrive, it’s not about the public sector, it’s about people coming here to make money, investing money in our communities and creating those high-paid jobs – then they pay their council taxes into the local authority, they spend more money in our high streets and you get into that positive circle. We want to play a part in making that happen.

There are also plans for a new town centre hub for local businesses support, and a new Sixth Form Centre on the college’s Chesterfield Road campus opened this year.

“With our A Level students, we didn’t get enough of them into good universities, so we’ve created a sixth form college at our Chesterfield Road site so we can create this atmosphere of academic excellence,” Andrew says.

“If you're coming to study A Levels, it’s about getting you into the best university we can get you into.”

The walls in Andrew’s office are covered in designs - there are posters for the NHS which have been created by design students, and a campaign for a brewery. These are real designs, pitched and delivered by one of the numerous learning companies that West Notts has set up.

They run as real companies, with board meetings and the like, giving students real experience of working in industry.

He says the design company is perhaps the most visible, but motor vehicle students service cars for the general public, IT students mend their computers, while leisure and tourism students have carried out tours around the town for Historic Mansfield.

Andrew says. “I want the people that live here to see our campuses as the route into great jobs, that pay well, and I want businesses to think that we can help them and that they can learn from us.”

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