West Lothian College students complete training with Sibbald

The new course, supported by HCI Skills Gateway, Edinburgh and South East of Scotland City deal, was introduced this year to give young students from school the opportunity to develop transferable skills and introduce them to the wide range of opportunities in the world of construction.

The onsite element of the programme takes the classroom and workshop learning onto an operational site putting the theory into practice in a realistic working environment.

Starting at 8:30am and finishing at 4pm every day, the experience was as real as possible giving all the 14 students an authentic experience in the world of construction.

The students undertook a 3-day project to develop skills from site planning, steelfixing, creating formwork, pouring concrete, erecting the mast and working at height to place the wind turbine to complete and generating renewable energy.

One student on the course said: “It’s been fun actually; the days have gone really quickly we’ve been having so much fun. Planning and then seeing it all come together has been amazing, everyone’s worked really hard together.”

Dale Lyon, Director of ConStrucEd, said: “We were delighted to host the pupils from local schools hoping to gain a placement at West Lothian College. The intensive study period required the pupils to build a functioning wind turbine. The students found themselves having to overcome a multitude of problems as they learnt new skills and applying them to the tasks presented to them.”