RNN Group Achievements in 2024
2024 has seen a myriad of amazing new achievements and initiatives throughout the year.
New Facilities
Our new Construction Centre and Digital and VR Suite opened to students at Rotherham College which means now that all learners are based within the main Rotherham College site and are now enjoying some state of the art equipment and facilities across these two core areas in the regional skills drive.
Not only that, we opened up brand new T Level facilities at North Notts College this year too across Early Years and Education, Health and Social Care and Digital. Alongside that, a brand new joinery room was opened too for our students to benefit from alongside a state of the art Hair and Beauty Suite with medical aesthetics room and media make up suite for both students and the public to enjoy.
Dearne Valley College has got in early with a brand new Health Suite and Animal Management Centre all ready for new learners to the College to take advantage of.
Offering More Qualifications
The Group started to deliver Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs) in this new suite of rooms to support the driver for developing higher skills in Health throughout the region as well as Construction and Digital HTQs at Rotherham College.
The Group is also working on developing our Higher Education (HE) provision for the future developing our products in skills based courses including Higher and Degree level apprenticeships, HNCs and HNDs alongside HTQs.
As an HTQ provider, we became members of the South Yorkshire Institute of Technology. Backed by over £12 million in funding from the Department for Education, the establishment of SYIoT in South Yorkshire marks a significant milestone for the region, kite-marking the high-quality, higher-level technical education and training provision in the region.
Free Educational Webinars
Our free webinar series brought a full year of different sessions. Monthly webinars have proved popular with sessions both at lunchtime and the early evening.
2025 will be expanded upon with more webinars across a range of topics to suit parents, school leavers, adults, employers, businesses and local civic organisations.
National Fluid Power Centre
The jewel in our crown had two celebrations this year. Firstly, John Savage – managing director of the National Fluid Power Centre – celebrated 50 years within the RNN Group. John has built up a world renowned centre at the NFPC through excellent relationship building and an international advisory board supporting the work of the NFPC.
A new NFPC website was launched this year too, to highlight and showcase the courses and offer at the NFPC.
Celebrating our Employer Partners
We launched monthly employer awards to showcase on a regular basis our amazing employer partners as well as developing and hosting our own business breakfasts at the Business Centre Rotherham with the first one held in March jointly with the Barnsley and Rotherham Chamber of Commerce. We held a further one in June and then during our Careers week in October and ended the year with our first ever ‘Thank you’ Awards and Celebration evening event for our employer partners which was a fantastic success.
We have listened carefully this year to our employers’ needs. Employers keep telling us they want employees with transferable skills. Therefore we launched ‘Skills for Employment’ an initiative to develop these key skills needed in tomorrow’s workforce. This initiative will allow learners to work towards developing these key skills across a range of ten ‘Power’ skills needed in business today!
We launched termly e-newsletters to parents of learners and bi-monthly newsletter to employers and stakeholders to ensure that we keep you up to date with all the RNN Group and College news. Communication and feedback from our stakeholders and members of our local community is very important to us and we want you to be up to date with all things RNN.
Driving Innovation
Our open events continued to welcome record numbers of registered families and visitors throughout the year with a new enrolment process for current and new learners which supported a calm and reassuring start to the year for all our learners both new and returning.
All these new initiatives mean one thing: that our learners are enjoying more offerings within enrichment, greater partnerships with employers, and being given the best tools to achieve and be successful in their lives and this is why the RNN Group continues to drive innovation and skills in our communities and works hard to develop new initiatives and offerings year on year.
A huge thank you to everyone who has made everything possible this year. #OneTeam!