Firm shakes off OFSTED woes to relaunch as commercial trainer

A Chesterfield company has said it is moving away from being an apprenticeship provider to focus on purely commercial training.

The moves comes after NLT had its funding withdrawn from the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) after being labelled as ‘inadequate’ in an OFSTED report which closed the company for a short while and nearly sent it under. ESFA reinstated its funding and the company was taken over by WEBS Training in February.

NLT Training Services, which has been trading for 50 years, will now specialise in training for the manufacturing and engineering-related training, and has developed a range of packages, specifically created to match the training needs of businesses.

Chief executive Sarah Temperton said: “This is a time of transformation for NLT. Although early days we are have a strong team and are building our commercial training offering to reflect the ever-diversifying needs of businesses.

“We also want to give something back to businesses, so we are looking at developing a bursary to help more people enter the industry in order to address the skills problem.”