West Midlands Combined Authority has announced that around £27 million has been allocated to a regional training programme, which will benefit local people.
With the funding coming from central government, the bootcamps are to specialise in training and upskilling people so that they are prepared for employment in fast-growing industries. These include advanced manufacturing, digital, green technology, and the creative sector.
West Midlands Mayor Andy Street announced the programme and said:
“With better qualifications comes higher-quality jobs and ultimately a better quality of life, which is why - using our devolved pot of Adult Education cash - we’ve used all the tools at our disposal to make incredible strides in helping citizens across the West Midlands get better qualified.
“We successfully delivered on our 100,000 jobs plan, and we’ve seen the number of people qualified to level 3 or higher increase by more than 10% in just three years.
“A key part of our success has been these bootcamps, with more than 4,600 adults trained in the last year alone through this method. In fact, we have been so successful in getting people trained through bootcamps that the Government has now awarded us a further £27m to roll out more courses – the highest allocation of any UK region and almost twice what we were awarded last year.
“This is a huge vote of confidence in the West Midlands and shows how we truly are leading the way as Britain’s training hub.”
This funding will be the largest of its kind in the UK, with this being almost double the amount that the combined authority received for the bootcamps programme last year. That funding supported 4,600 unemployed adults who were looking to upskill. This funding also adds to the more than £700m that the combined authority has received since the Adult Education budget was devolved in 2019.
Free of charge for residents of the West Midlands, the bootcamps are carefully designed to make sure that those taking part are given the skills that they need to operate in the rapidly expanding sectors that have a high need for skilled workers.
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