As part of the Strategic Development Fund (SDF), we are training our lecturers in net zero skills. We're working with 10 colleges in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Milton Keynes and Northamptonshire to update our curriculum to fit a more green, future-led teaching strategy.
From January, our students will have opportunities to learn how to install solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicle charging points. In which, areas of this teaching will be taught using virtual reality technology, like accessing roods for solar panels.
Amanda Washbrook, Deputy Principal, said:
"It's a big change in terms of focus. At the moment people are looking at really quite old fashioned ways of doing things, but ways of doing things that we've used for decades, which now quite rapidly need to be replaced with new solutions."
Amanda adds that forecasts say there is an "urgent" need to develop new skills.
"Let's say electric vehicle chargers, where you look at the number of electric vehicle chargers that need to be put in, there just aren't the installers qualified at the moment to do that,"
"So if we all start buying electric vehicles there will be a problem with people waiting a long time to get those chargers installed in their houses or waiting a long time for installations of chargers in public places that they'd be able to use."