CIOB chief executive Caroline Gumble joined Chelmsford and Ipswich hubs on a multi-day tour of various site visits throughout Essex.
The first day saw a visit to a distinctive housing development from Rooff in Felsted, a trip to Colchester Institute to learn about its offer to built environment students and how it is responding to feedback from regional employers to ensure the curriculum is meeting needs, and a site visit with Rose Builders to a project delivering 440 homes working with the Building Heroes programme.
The second day of visit started at British Offsite, learning about principles from factory processes being brought into improving built environment processes.
The next visit was to Limebrook Primary School and Nursery in Maldon to talk to some of the Morgan Sindall team about its sustainability initiatives and work on public sector projects. Among the many innovations is an ‘immersive learning programme’ which uses VR to deliver health and safety training.
The final visit took the chief executive and Hub team to the Anglia Ruskin University campus in Chelmsford. This included the retrofit training workshop, run with the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE), and included a presentation by Human Nature outlining its plan for The Phoenix in Lewes, which aims to deliver the “largest timber neighbourhood” with “radical affordability”.
