What is this Net Zero thing anyway?
Addressing some of the language around Net Zero is important when it comes to buidling education and training. A Green Edge conversation with City of Portsmouth College.
We’ve heard from a number of trusted sources that Net Zero-flavoured Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) has some of the characteristics of a great product waiting for the market to form around it. That’s nothing new of course, from Leonardo and George Boole all the way down. Perhaps it’s just a case of market overhang, with the penguins crowding the ice floe waiting for first one to make the big jump. Or perhaps Government should stop dithering and over-complicating the whole thing, and make it easier for all the penguins to jump together.
Whatever, we have observed some spirited early movers in the field of NZ-TVET like People Powered Retrofit and we commend their efforts. Looking more towards the mainstream, we await some kind of consolidation among the colleges, of which there are 163 Further Education (FE) and 45 Sixth Form in England alone, hopefully driven by some kind of useful funding structure coming down from Westminster and Whitehall. Time is, we need hardly remind ourselves, of the essence.
Given this context, when we heard a conversational aside during a recent online meeting of the worthy Green Innovation Steering Group run by Hampshire Chamber of Commerce, that the new Net Zero Training Hub at City of Portsmouth College was experiencing a few bleeding-edge difficulties regarding bums on seats, we asked for an interview, which was graciously granted. So, we sat down on a Zoom a couple of weeks back with the College’s Principal, Katy Quinn, its Deputy Principal of Curriculum and Quality, Matt Phelps, and Tim Jackson, a member of the college’s Board of Governors, to learn a little more.
City of Portsmouth College (COPC) is still quite new. It was formed in August 2021 from a merger between a former city FE college and a Sixth Form college. Both Katy and Matt joined after the college’s launch, to bring together the staff body, build the brand and maximise the opportunities created by the merger. All of which are considerable: the college’s strategic plan tells us that it operates across 4 main sites and as many as 40 other community venues across Portsmouth; it offers more than 560 courses and apprenticeships across 40 subject areas; has over 7,700 students including more than 970 apprentices; and has over 460 FTE staff. Katy says, “We're early in our lifetime but have huge ambition. There's so much talent in the college to be realised and despite it being a challenging environment, we're excited about the future”.
The challenges are real: since 2010-11 there’s been a decline in per-student spending of something like 15% for FE’s and 25% for Sixth forms. The projections for the next few years don’t see much of an uptick in either of these:
Annual spending per student, adjusted for inflation, £ in 2022-23 terms. Image: FT from source IFS.
We’ll come back to this later. For now, though, we’d like to hear a little more about the College’s Net Zero Training Hub. How did that come about?
Matt gives us the details. The setup funding came from a combination of Portsmouth City Council’s Community Renewal Fund (CRF) Programme and the Government’s Strategic Development Fund, which we know well from its financing of the soon-to-be published English LSIPs. A bit of entrepreneurial Ali-shuffling secured the CRF portion with a bid put together in 24 hours, while the SDF portion was more measured, with COPC as a partner college in a group bid led by Fareham College, a few miles away on the other side of Portsmouth Harbour. Matt describes the latter as a good collaboration, in which COPC led on the Net Zero strand. He continues, “Of course it comes with a bit of tension because we're all individual colleges with [our own] things to achieve, but we put that largely behind us and sat at the table and agreed how we can take it forward as a regional curriculum. There is duplication in there – for example, Fareham has its clean Energy Hub which has been developed more recently than our Net Zero Training Hub – and if you look at the principles in terms of curriculum, they’re a bit similar. But the demand is big in practice and in theory, so that’s not necessarily a problem”.
The Net Zero Training Hub was officially opened in April 2022 at its home in North Harbour, Portsmouth – also the location of COPC’s Construction Centre of Excellence – with a raft of manufacturing partners who in their own right are important to the Net Zero transition. Companies like Vaillant and others, who have contributed high-end kit to what the Hub calls its ‘showroom’, where students, adult learners and other stakeholders can see and touch the latest gear and emerging tech.
All was looking hunky dory, and the Hub was all set to go live in the new 2022/23 academic year with a shiny new suite of 25 short, sharp programmes, developed with the aid of the SDF monies and informed by local intelligence from the City Council, the local LEP and companies and other bodies around the Solent. Matt again: “We'd had the feedback and it was all in things like hydrocarbon, electric vehicles, and retrofit. For retrofit, we recognised there are three pillars – Heating, Power, and Insulation [Fabric First] – and we had a curriculum at level 2 and above in each of these pillars.”
There were, though – potentially at least – one or two gaps. For one, the courses weren’t accredited, because at the time of development none of the awarding bodies were accrediting courses like these, meaning that the courses were being offered on a commercial basis. For another, there was nothing at the kind of entry levels that would talk to new entrants into the market, like those who are unemployed or looking to redeploy, or people in employment needing to up- and re-skill and needing to understand the new technologies and the green tech coming through.
This wasn’t necessarily an error by the College, badging itself both internally and externally as a foundation academy for whole house retrofit. If the Jobcentre Pluses and employers are embedding into their job opportunities and job descriptions and opportunities the kind of Net Zero terminologies, along with descriptions of the skills and tasks we talk about (incessantly, some might say) here on the Green Edge, then the links can be made between demand and the sort of supply that the College is offering to develop. The problem seems to be, according to our friends at COPC at least, that it isn’t. And we have no reason to doubt this is the case.
Whatever the reason, the first year of the Hub’s operation has not seen the throughput that was anticipated, despite indications from the local employers that they were comfortable with the fees being asked for the courses on offer. One of the hazards of being early to market, of course, but as Matt says, “We've got a really great training suite and a good facility sat there and we've got the ability to service quite a high number of people coming through. But we just don't have the throughput and that's been quite difficult for us. So, what we've had to do is think about our curriculum and refine the offer”.
Refining the offer has meant taking a number of actions, including looking at how to better align with the needs of construction contractors bidding for Local Authority work. There’s not much of a driver right now, it seems; none of the contractual awards being placed by Portsmouth City Council require contractor staff to be up- or re-skilled in green disciplines. Perhaps PCC might like to respond to us on that point?
One problem, according to Matt, might even be the term Net Zero itself. Matt explains, “What does net zero actually mean to somebody out on the street or an individual looking to get into a particular discipline? When we surveyed a lot of the local employers, it didn't mean a lot. What did mean more were terms like retrofitting, carbon neutral, and decarbonisation. So, some of it was language which we quickly addressed”.
Alongside that, though, came the problem often seen in a rapidly-developing market of early movers being caught up with and – if they’re not on the ball – being overtaken. New accreditations, not available at the time of development, appeared on the landscape. And, having spent a lot of time and effort building a curriculum that was then very quickly being superseded by other curricula, the College had to go back to the well, rebuild, and rebadge.
Probably the most significant thing the team did was to embed the Net Zero Training Hub’s programme into the College’s mainstream curriculum. So, as Matt describes, “Rather than have it as a discrete team over here, sat outside our mainstream curriculum, it now feeds straight through to plumbing, electrical, construction, and so on. We’ve established a clear link in our curriculum planning process this year and that's already had a better traction than last year prior with local employers and the employer advisory boards”.
Yes, we can see how that might work better…
Net Zero curriculum based on building capacity and capability to meet the retrofit challenge. Image: COPC Net Zero Training Hub.
As the Hub waits for its student numbers to build, it isn’t standing still in terms of building up its resources. Through one of the capital bids recently won, it built a retrofitting house with the three core principles of insulation, power and heat, to enable students to apply lean principles to retrofitting. This kind of initiative has to be of relevance to any local authority: in Portsmouth’s case, the city has something like 11,000 council homes, alongside of which are 6,000 housing association-owned homes. The remaining of the housing stock is split between 15,300 rental properties and 53,500 owner-occupied homes. Around 50% of the housing stock is pre-1960. Then there’s the households living with fuel poverty – around 10,400 in Portsmouth alone. All on the College’s – and the Council’s, who should be leveraging this resource to the max – doorstep.
Of course, Portsmouth itself may be simply a microcosm for the nation as a whole. But is the Hub a microcosm for other colleges around the country working on similar initiatives, with the same pressures? To a certain extent, we suspect it is, although – as we saw recently in Cumbria with Orsted knocking on local college doors for wind turbine technicians – the needs vary according to the local business landscape and its key actors. For retrofitting in cities with older housing stock and tonnes of social housing, local authorities are up there among the key actors and, particularly via UK100, are showing signs of acting accordingly. Elsewhere, the key actors may be different; Katy mentions Hinckley Point as a key actor for Bridgwater and Taunton College in the South West, for example. But, she adds, “It takes a long time to get these things moving. I think similarly some of the other colleges around the country that have been working with offshore energy wind turbines, it takes quite a long time to get them going. Regarding retrofit, though, I’m not aware of any other colleges that are ahead of the curve. I think we're probably ahead of the market – maybe 12 to 18 months is my guess – but I'm just thinking about how far we've travelled as a college in the last 12 to 18 months. We've travelled a long way and learned a lot”.
So, what will move the Net Zero FE market away from its market overhang and towards the tipping point of growing demand and supply? So far in this post we’ve talked about some of the deficiencies of demand, but on the supply side, as so often, it comes down to that old F-word: Funding. And with so much of that coming through the apprenticeship process these days – at least in England – it’s critical that qualifications around retrofit in particular get on the IfATE map. But while we see, for example, Level 2 awards and certificates in retrofit with CITB grants being available from City & Guilds, and Levels 3 and 4 coming down the pipe, a search for an IfATE retrofit standard comes up blank. In fact, Matt tells us that a retrofit apprenticeship programme has been in discussion with the IfATE Trailblazer Group for around two years and is still not available, with no date to say when it will be. Someone, somewhere needs to be cracking on with this.
In time, IfATE might provide the push, but what about the big pull, through policy, legislation, a change in buyer behaviour among the key actors, or some combination of all the above? Katy Quinn picks up this point: “I hate to use the word ‘forcing’, but talking about the Section 106’s, there needs to be something legislative making it happen. And when you start to see all that working and coming together, that's when you build momentum and pace.”
Tim Jackson adds: “There are the building regulations as well. Fundamentally, when local authorities are securing provision of any type, they've got to have best value for public funds, and if they start to impose higher standards than government regulators – the base standard – then questions will get asked1. And if the standards are raised for building regulations to meet Net Zero, or at least something far closer to it than they are currently, then that will drive demand and in all probability we may well end up with a number of different types of apprenticeship.”
We agree. Demand doesn’t always follow from what organisations say (or think) they need. And our experience is that colleges can be pretty agile and responsive to demand when they want to be – and when there’s proper funding, pumped and primed centrally, they want to be. We wish COPC and its Net Zero Training Hub the very best in its forward path and its nurturing of people for a green world.
Our thanks to Katy Quinn, Matt Phelps and Tim Jackson at City of Portsmouth College for their time in talking to The Green Edge for this post.
Tim’s is not the only voice here: as far back as 2021 the Government’s consultation on the Future Buildings Standard found that ‘[a] common concern was that the proposal was not suitably ambitious’ (see para. 2.3). We still have no Future Buildings Standard.