Nottingham Trent University and Vision West Nottinghamshire College West receive Excellence in Collaboration award

This category aims to recognise and celebrate successful business partnerships, where organisations have collaborated on a project with successful outcomes for those involved.

West Nottinghamshire College serves Mansfield, Ashfield and surrounding areas. Around 3000 16-18 year olds, 1000 apprentices and 5000 adults study on a wide range of courses.

NTU is one of the UK’s most successful universities and recruits more UK based undergraduates than any other university. NTU was awarded The Times and The Sunday Times Modern University of the Year 2023 and ranked second best university in the UK in the Uni Compare Top 100 rankings (2021/2022). NTU is a major provider of business support in the local economy from ‘start-up to scale-up’ and has supported 1,700 local SME’s in the past three years.

As part of this collaboration, VWNC has provided NTU with a base in Mansfield NTU from which it can project the entirety of its offer across local communities.

The collaboration is built upon a shared set of 12 principles and is aimed at bringing the strengths of each partner for student benefit but also to support the businesses and communities of Mansfield and Ashfield.

The two partners are committed to developing a curriculum offer from level 2 to level 7 in Mansfield that will help local employers across a wide range of sectors to address their skills needs. Level 2 to Level 7 cover GCSE and NVQ’s all the way up to Postgraduate study.

NTU received accreditation to create nursing courses on the Mansfield site, and since 2021 almost 200 students have enrolled on nursing programmes.

The partnership has enabled multiple pathways students can take from VWNC into NTU, such as the nursing and teaching. Both parties are working closely with nearby hospital Kings Mill, primary schools, and the wider business community to enable people to study and work locally.

NTU has introduced a wide range of funded courses directed at employers such as leadership, marketing and construction. The NTU Knowledge Exchange team are also bringing the opportunity to engage with academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as other businesses in order to help them embrace new technologies into their operations.

VWNC and NTU are working in partnership with Ashfield District Council to create the Automated Distribution and Manufacturing Centre. This facility will support local and regional businesses to embrace automation and robotics successfully and will also provide opportunities for businesses already using these technologies to explore further investment through testing and prototyping.

NTU have recently launched the Enterprising Ashfield programme which will support start-up and early-stage local businesses, whilst its “Finders Keepers” programme will help local businesses to attract graduates.

A number of ministers have had their attention caught by this collaboration and sessions with the Minister for Higher Education, Minister for Skills and the Chair of the Education Select Committee have all taken place over recent months.

Andrew Cropley, Principal and Chief Executive of West Nottinghamshire College, said: “Winning things like this collaboration award tells people that we are committed to partnership and committed to doing the right thing for our community. It of course also raises our profile, raises our reputation and gives us a chance to talk about all the great things we are doing as a college in partnership with Nottingham Trent University.

“The link with Nottingham Trent University has helped make our campuses have even more vibrancy and its helped us to really make a difference and gives us access to the wider influence that the university has, Mansfield is now a university town.”

Sarah Mayfield, Director of Mansfield Hub and UK College Partnerships at Nottingham Trent University, said: “Working together with West Nottinghamshire College, we are helping more people to gain access to higher skilled employment, required by employers, via a higher education route available in Mansfield”

“The university is also collaborating with West Nottinghamshire College to provide enterprise support to businesses from start up to scale up. It’s fantastic that our efforts have been recognised through Nottinghamshire Business Awards win.