Latham launches fund to increase industry students

CITB chairman Sir Michael Latham has launched a drive to bring more graduates into the industry by encouraging firms to pay for students through university.

Latham is aiming to raise £1m to fund construction-related university education, including graduates studying quantity surveying and project management.

Latham has written to around 50 professional practices and construction companies asking for them to provide funding to send a number of graduates through university, which they would later employ.

The CITB has pledged to match whatever is raised. Funds are already flowing in, according to Latham.

He added that university courses must include more on-site experience so that companies would not have to spend time training new recruits in basics, such as health and safety.

Latham also called on the Government generally to find its own new ways to fund vocational education. “Government wants schools, rail and road links, houses for key workers and hospitals to continue to spring up around the country. All that is very good, and the industry is responding. But it needs to support industry and academia.”

Speaking to QS News at the Progress Through Partnership conference organised by the Centre for Education in the Built Environment, Latham added: “Government needs to realise that there is a problem with construction sector education. With technical subjects like quantity surveying, more and more students are part-time and that is bad for university funds, because they are only geared to full time students.”

Government needs to realise that there is a problem with construction sector education

Sir Michael Latham, CITB chairman

Another speaker at Tuesday’s event, John Hobson, chairman of Accelerating Skills in

The Built Environment, added his support to Latham’s campaign. The ACBEE annual report, released this week (see left), called for closer co-operation between the industry and academia and incentives for people to study construction-related subjects.

Martin Davis, champion for integration for the Strategic Forum, said at the conference that partnering between university and construction companies and practices was widespread but ineffective. He said young recruits to the industry must not be “taught the social and confrontational baggage” which prevented a more integrated approach between different teams working on a construction project.

Some delegates greeted the speakers’ remarks with scepticism. Professor Peter Westland of Sheffield Hallam University said: “The government will never give money to the construction industry as long as they have got schools and the NHS to pay for.”

He added that Sheffield was already putting into practice many of the recommendations on closer co-operation with the industry and fostering better relationships between the professions and contractors.