Work to start in summer on £9.4m Corby Tresham campus as Government levelling-up leader Neil O'Brien MP visits town

A new £9.4m A-level campus for Tresham College could open as soon as September next year, the Northants Telegraph can reveal.

Building is set to start within months to transform the 1950s office block into a modern, zero-carbon building to bring hundreds of students back to Corby town centre.

Tresham closed its dilapidated George Street site in 2011 after it opened a huge new building in Oakley Road.

Then the college dropped its entire A-level syllabus from its Kettering campus in 2016 in favour of a more vocational syllabus.

But now Tresham, which is run by Bedford College, will reintroduce a wide-ranging A-level syllabus to the building which has 360-degree vistas across the town. The work can go ahead thanks to money from the £19m cashpot from the Government's Towns Fund, awarded to Corby after a successful bid last year.

The new sixth form will be constructed inside the existing open-plan concrete Chisholm House which was visited yesterday (Thursday, February 17) by MP Neil O'Brien, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

Mr O'Brien was in town to see how some of the Government's Towns Fund cash will be spent.

He visited the concrete structure which sits above Wilko and Boots in the town centre. The top two floors, which encompass about 4,000 square metres, will be converted by a team led by Bedford College's capital works project manager Mark Eustace with Devonshire Architects and Panda CES.

Mr Eustace said that the scheme will be a complete refurb of the existing building, with internal insulation and heat pump technology helping to ensure it's a carbon net zero project.

"This is a really important project for Corby," he said. "We have already developed a good partnership with our landlords here in the town centre.

"It's 100 per cent funded by the Towns Fund. We're going to be on site in July this year and it will be fully operational by September 2023.

"There will be extensive market research done to ensure the offer is correct but there'll be core A-level subjects with all the sciences and languages. We also hope to offer some apprenticeships. It will be a broad church."

It will be the first time students in Corby have been able to take A-levels outside of a school sixth form setting in a decade.

Town Centre Manager Dan Pickard said: "This is great news for Corby town centre. It was bring a difficult-to-let office building back into use right in the heart of Corby and will increase footfall coming through the town centre every day."

The Rooftop Arts Centre, which has occupied part of the first floor of the building for ten years, will move to another site in the town centre.

Managers say that they are working hand-in-hand with the town centre management to secure a new location.

Their current exhibition, photographs by members of the East Midlands Monochrome Group, is free to enter every day between Wednesdays and Saturdays from 11am until 4pm.

Neil O'Brien is MP for Market Harborough and the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.

We asked him a series of questions about levelling-up in Corby and how the government is going to tackle issues like the lack of skilled work and investment in our town. Here's what he had to say.

Mr O'Brien said he knows our town well, and he and his children regularly visit Corby swimming pool, Gravity trampoline park and East Carlton Country Park, which is not far from his Harborough constituency home.

"There are so many positives to living around here," he said.

"It's really well-positioned town. It's had its challenges since the 1970s but it's had so much regeneration since then."

He said the new college could be a game-changer for education in Corby.

"This is a win-win, bringing a good quality provider for further education into Corby town centre, bringing young people back into the town and bringing a building that's currently mostly disused back into use."

Mr O'Brien said that he recognised that many secondary-aged children from Corby had to be educated in Uppingham and Oundle because there are not enough school places. He said that he hoped the fact Northamptonshire has been made an Education Investment Area would help with the issues.

"It will mean two or three things," he said. "There'll be funding to help schools retain the best teachers."

He said there would be capital investment available to expand well-performing schools and that academy chains that were successful could be brought in to run those that weren't doing so well.

We also asked Mr O'Brien about how more higher-skilled, quality jobs could be created in Corby to offset the proliferation of lower-paid jobs in manufacturing and logistics. He said: "Being so close to London and having the train station is a real selling point for investors. But we don't want people to go away to university then just come back when they're over 40."

He said he hoped the £1.4bn Global Investment Fund could be utilised in Corby to help attract overseas investment to the town.

"Britain's been really rubbish at looking after international investors, " he said, adding that the Government must be prepared to subsidise businesses that provided key, skilled jobs as it had done at Nissan in Sunderland.

He said that the Government had pledged to up its spend on research and development by 40 per cent over the next three years and that the bulk of the money would be spent outside of the South East. He added that the money would be targeted at high-tech businesses that wanted to take the next expansion step and he hoped some of those would be businesses in Corby.

"There are a lot of businesses around here that stand to benefit," he said.

Mr O'Brien also visited Corby railway station to see where some more of the Towns Fund money will be spent on a safe cycle route along Oakley Road and into the town centre.