Jesse Norman, MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire

BAE Systems, Balfour Beatty, Kier Construction ,the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the leading autonomous vehicle company OXA, the global food producer Mondelez…

By any standards these are some of the most well-known and widely respected companies in the UK. And let’s include a shout-out for an equally brilliant local company, Oakwrights.

These companies all have something in common: in the past few weeks every one of them has recruited a freshly minted graduate engineer from our new Herefordshire technical university, NMITE.

Not only that, the average salary for these starting jobs is over £30,000 a year; that is more than the average annual household income in the West Midlands at present.

In other words NMITE, a new university which opened its doors just three years ago this month, has shown its ability to propel young people into great engineering jobs at some of the best employers in the UK.

That is an amazing achievement by everyone involved, including its trustees, administrative staff, academic and technical teams, and most of all its students.

But it also offers an incredible opportunity for young people across the county – and older ones looking for a new challenge.

Think about it from the perspective of the student. If you are living in Herefordshire today, you can do a Bachelors Degree in Engineering at NMITE in two years and two months, and a Masters in three years. That’s a full year faster than in any other UK university.

This makes it far more affordable, especially if you live at home, and it gets the student into the jobs market and hopefully earning that much faster as well.

The result is a massive expansion of affordable opportunities for local people young and old. And beginning next September, NMITE is expanding its degree courses to include Construction Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, alongside its current Integrated Engineering degrees.

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These new courses will be taught in the same practical hands-on way, working with great companies and other organisations as sponsors, but with no loss of focus on academic quality.

There is no faster or more cost-effective way in Britain for a someone to graduate with a great degree, knowing they will be well prepared to work, perhaps in companies like those above.

Indeed, it is starting to become clear that this new accelerated academic-plus-practical-plusprofessional approach has the potential to revolutionise education in this country. And it has been made in Herefordshire.