The concept of Hounslow’s YSEG is like our ethos.
At K10, we're also about pathways into employment for young people. We’re proud to enable young people into construction, a very well-paid industry, and you can get qualified in the process.
We’ve had a relationship with Hounslow Council for many years, but a current connection is about levy funding.
If you're a large employer - anyone with a payroll of £3 million and above - you pay into a government pot. It’s like a payroll tax.
Companies with a payroll of more than £3m contribute 0.5% into a levy pot which they have to spend on apprenticeship training. The money then gets allocated to a training provider.
A lot of companies are not spending their levy funding and there is around £3 billion unspent across the private and public sector.
So, there is something called a levy transfer where you can give it to other organisations who are going to put it to good use and that’s where we come in.
With apprenticeships , you need someone to help you get into companies. We work for Heathrow Airport for example, and we're now part of the team there and have been for seven or eight years
Heathrow focus on local people, from the surrounding boroughs, including Hounslow. If you look at big construction jobs in London, a lot of the contractors are from outside the capital. They come in, deliver their work, and go back to Essex, for example. But they bring their personnel from Essex.
Construction is a massive multi-billion-pound industry and there are lots of people making lots of money out of it. People should be given opportunities to learn new skills and become part of that industry.
But people that live in inner London, where all the work and the investment is, are not always getting access to those opportunities.
School leavers are encouraged to go to university and that’s fine, but a skilled trades person can be earning very good money before they're thirty years of age.
So through rules and regulations that organisations like the Council has put in place, and because big organisations like Heathrow want to do the right thing, we can draw from where the work actually is, and enable local work for local people.
Around 60% of our apprentices are from the BAME community. I think some 88% of our apprentices were unemployed at the point that we engaged with them. We are a social impact business, and we do genuinely impact society.
Our average apprentice earns between 35 and 40K on qualifying, and that's just the beginning.
We genuinely do change people's lives.
