New Back to Work courses to run at Castle View in Oswestry

Walford and North Shropshire College will be running its highly successful Back to Work courses from Shropshire Council’s base at Castle View from this week.

Starting from Monday 28 May, the Back to Work courses which run for 5 weeks, aim to help people who have been out of work for an extended period of time. The course is completely free and provides the support, advice and skills people need to get back into employment.

The courses have been running from the College’s Oswestry campus since 2011, but feedback from students suggested that some people preferred learning somewhere which was more self-contained and easier to travel to in the town centre.

Walford and North Shropshire College Principal , Andrew Tyley approached local Councillor Martin Bennett, member for Eastern Oswestry and Chair of Oswestry Local Joint Committee to see if he knew of a suitable alterative. Councillor Bennett suggested Shropshire Council’s IT training room at its Castle View offices.

Councillor Keith Barrow, Leader of Shropshire Council and local member or Oswestry South said;

“Shropshire Council continues to build strong working relationships with our Partners. Offering one of the council’s locations is a great way of us sharing our resources with partners to get the best outcomes for local residents. It’s a great example of local members using their local knowledge and role as community champions to resolve issues in their local area.”

Councillor Bennett said, “Shropshire Council is committed to ensuring people get the right support and advice to get them back into work. I’m very pleased that we have been able to respond to the needs of local people by offering our IT training room at Castle View to Walford and North Shropshire College. I hope that this will be a great success, and that the students get the most out of the training and the venue.”

Andrew Tyley welcomed this initiative and the commitment given by the Council: “This is a really creative solution to our need for extra accommodation for our growing employability skills programme. Castle View offers an ideal facility and the Council has worked hard to accommodate our requirements. We are running more and more courses concurrently and this extra capacity should mean we are not constrained by room availability at College during peak term time.”

Anybody seeking employment who would like more details about employability skills training can find our more from their Jobcentre Plus adviser. Further courses start every two to three weeks and typically last for five weeks.