The housing association offering trade skills to GCSE students
To celebrate National Apprenticeship Week, Katharine Swindells visits housing association Gentoo’s Trades Academy – a new programme for teenagers studying for their GCSEs, where they can learn trade skills two days a week. Photography by Pawel Gajek
I hover slightly awkwardly next to my interview subjects, with my dictaphone and notebook in hand. We are in the basement of Sunderland College, and the 14-year-olds are working on bricklaying. They are all concentrating as they lay the mortar, carve the trench and place each brick. They are so focused on their mini walls that I feel bad for interrupting to ask them about the course they are on.
I should not be surprised at their dedication, as only pupils with strong attendance and work ethic were considered by their school for one of 22 places at housing association Gentoo’s new Trades Academy, a course here at the college. “My mam was buzzing. She put my acceptance letter on the fridge,” says Logan, one of the bricklayers in training.
Tiffany, one of a few girls on the scheme, tells me that she loves being active and finds bricklaying “really soothing”. It has helped her think about her future: “Before this, I literally had no idea what I wanted to do.”
Another one of the teenagers, Israel, says: “I’d rather be here than at school. School’s OK, but it’s a bit boring.” But he is quick to reassure me: “I’m not just here to skip school. I also wanted to learn the skills.”
The class of year 10s from St Wilfrid’s Academy are a few months into their two-year course at the Trades Academy, which launched in March 2024, based out of Sunderland College.
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The academy is the brainchild of Louise Bassett, chief executive of 30,000-home Gentoo. She was inspired by the Nissan Academy which launched with Sunderland College in 2023, and Gentoo replicated that model. The college and academy can access government funding for the course. For Gentoo, the only costs are the students’ uniforms and any hours its staff spends with them.
The teenagers travel to the college’s technical city campus two days a week, where they split their time between theory and practical study, working towards two specialised construction qualifications. They attend school the rest of the week to study for their GCSEs.
Inside Housing visits the academy as part of the Housing Hires campaign, which aims to promote the social housing sector as a place to work.
As the sector grapples with the shortfall in workers required to meet the government’s housebuilding, decent homes and sustainability targets, schemes such as these can help train young people to fill this need.
However, Gentoo is not only focused on its own future workforce. The training academy is part of a wider strategic mission to bring customers and staff closer together. As we speak, I notice that almost every time in our conversation that Ms Bassett says “customers”, she also adds “and colleagues”.
Perhaps this is unsurprising, given her career background. Before Ms Bassett joined Gentoo, she held the HR director role at a number of multinational corporations, including manufacturing firm Merck and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Then she spent nearly seven years as HR director at Gentoo, before becoming executive director of corporate services in 2018, and then taking on the top job in 2023.
“I believe very strongly that if we invest in our colleagues, they will provide better service to our customers,” she states.
James Haste, director of property maintenance at Gentoo, believes that reinforcing the relationship between residents and the 430 staff working across repairs, maintenance and estates is crucial to improving its repairs operation.
Bringing a customer focus to repairs and complaints
In spring 2024, Gentoo was inspected by the regulator. In August 2024, it received a C1 rating under the consumer standards and had its G1/V2 grades sustained. Like most landlords, repairs is one of the key areas of focus.
“We didn’t expect the C1, but we have put a huge amount of effort into focusing on our customers, so we are absolutely delighted,” chief executive Louise Bassett says. But she is quick to add that she is not complacent. “Our tenant satisfaction measure [scores] are slightly above average, but they’re not amazing. My target is to get 90% customer satisfaction, but we are currently around 78%.”
The pressure was on for Ms Bassett to oversee a successful assessment, as the memories of a difficult period are still fresh: in 2017, the landlord was downgraded to G3 for governance in relation to severance payouts. The regulatory judgement also highlighted Gentoo’s “substantial number of properties” that failed to meet the Decent Homes Standard. It took until 2020 for the association to regain its G1 rating.
“We have put a huge amount of effort into just making sure that we were doing all the right things. We’ve been a well-governed organisation for some time now, and the regulator said that we wouldn’t have got C1 had we not been so well governed,” Ms Bassett says.
The regulator met with Gentoo’s customer committee that had been established just a few months before, and “they really showed their teeth”, Ms Bassett laughs.
Then the landlord faced “a real challenge” when, amid the inspection process, the BBC published an article detailing accounts of multiple Gentoo tenants suffering with damp and black mould. But, Ms Bassett says, the regulator was impressed with Gentoo’s handling of the case and it did not impact the landlord’s rating.
“What the regulator told us was that they accept that organisations are not going to be perfect. You’ll get things wrong, but it’s how you deal with things that’s important.”
This incident was an example of an aspect of complaints that has been a real learning curve for Gentoo. In the case of one of the tenants quoted by the BBC, Gentoo could not find a record of a complaint being filed. But when it dug further, it found voicemails that had not been followed up and Facebook messages that had not been logged.
“We’re not perfect. It’s a big organisation with old properties and a lot of moving parts, but that’s no excuse,” Ms Bassett says. “It’s not about somebody putting the formal complaint in, it’s about when the issue is first raised. Every interaction with a customer, you need to treat it as an opportunity to solve a problem.”
She says repairs and housing management staff are “the heart of the organisation”. “I am in awe of the work our housing teams do. They have the toughest jobs in this organisation, and they are just getting even tougher,” she adds. “We should be respecting them, valuing them and investing in them, which is what we’ve been trying to do, and empathising with them, and not having that kind of blame culture that might have existed previously.”
In spring last year, Gentoo invited Richard Blakeway and the Housing Ombudsman team to host a ‘meet the customers’ event. “We had customers turn up who we had never met before, who had never raised complaints… One customer said, ‘I think it’s pointless raising things with Gentoo because it doesn’t get fixed,’” Ms Bassett says.
Rather than recoil from the criticism, Gentoo invited some of the customers to speak to the board about why they do not raise complaints or feel listened to. “And while it was painful to hear some of this, it also made us think that, ‘Actually, there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t speaking to us. How can we reach them?’” Ms Bassett says.
The fact that the tradespeople are overwhelmingly Sunderland residents, many born and bred, means there is a loyalty to the local community that Mr Haste is sure improves the service provided. “You get to know your repair guy by name and the local councillors know them, too,” he says. “So there’s accountability there.”
Gentoo is keen to strengthen that connection further, so any resident who applies for an apprenticeship will be guaranteed an interview. In the past two years, a third of the new apprentices have been Gentoo customers.
Strengthening that relationship between local residents and staff is what Gentoo is trying to do with the Trades Academy – training skilled workers with a loyalty to Sunderland and to the landlord’s social purpose. Students are guaranteed an apprenticeship interview once they have finished their GCSEs.
Future careers
Back at the bricklaying class at the Trades Academy, Logan says he wants to do a gas engineer apprenticeship, so is doing this construction qualification to gain more skills and boost his application. Another student, Joe, wants to be an electrician.
22
Number of places on the course at the Trades Academy
14-15
Age of the year 10 students from St Wilfrid’s Academy
2024
Year the programme launched at Sunderland College
Most of the students tell me they had never heard of Gentoo, even though it provides almost all of the social housing across Sunderland. Ms Bassett is keen to get face time with them herself, cutting a striking figure as she steps over spilled mounds of mortar in her monochrome purple suit and heels.
She has the students’ full attention. She asks what they like about the programme and what they would change. A few mention that lunches at Sunderland College’s canteen are a bit more expensive than their usual school lunches. A few minutes later, I overhear Ms Bassett arranging with the college for Gentoo to subsidise the cost difference for these students.
“A huge part of the work we do in schools is promoting the wider work of the sector, and just how rewarding it is to work in housing,” says Alex Hammond, head of learning and development at the housing association.
“When you ask the pupils about what they want to do, some of them will say construction, but not necessarily then make the link between a construction career and a career in social housing.”
Of course, not all of these young people will decide they want a role with Gentoo or in social housing at all. The academy provides two GCSE-equivalent qualifications, but does not replace any core subjects, so the students are still able to go on to sixth form or university if they wish.
Student Amber has hopes of studying architecture at university, or maybe civil engineering. Harry enjoys construction but also enjoys film studies, which given the recent announcement of a new film studio in Sunderland, could also be a promising career path.
Ultimately, though, while Gentoo is keen to build a connection with these students and their community, there is a wider mission.
“We are Sunderland. We have a passion for this city,” Ms Bassett says. “Seeing investment in this city, that’s something that makes our colleagues really proud.”
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