WaterSafe is urging plumbing and heating students in the Midlands to sign up to showcase their skills in next year’s HIP Learner of the Year competition. For the fifth time, the WaterSafe national register of approved plumbers is sponsoring the competition and will also be on the judging panel of the live regional heats and Grand Final in 2022.

Birmingham City Council will be ensuring families eligible for free school meals over the upcoming October half-term break will get the help they need.

Using £1.2m of its Household Support Fund allocation, the city council is buying 76,000 supermarket vouchers for school-age children, a further 3,000 for early years children and the equivalent of 3,000 for young people post-16 and attending college.

On October 14, school children, parents and business professionals from across Birmingham came together at Highbury Hall for the first final of the Birmingham Civic Society’s Next Generation Awards since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now in its 17th year, the Next Generation Awards bring young people together from Birmingham Secondary Schools across the city in teams to devise a plan to improve one aspect of life for people living in Birmingham and never has this been more relevant and important to our communities.

A record number of more than 7,000 Coventry University students worked on projects with students in 52 countries around the world in the last year, as the university adapted to the impact of Covid on overseas travel.

Coventry University’s Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) programme saw 7,129 Coventry University students participate in 170 different projects led by 141 Coventry University staff with 134 institutions across the globe during the 2020-21 academic year.

The University of Birmingham is leading a new study to identify the impact COVID-19 has had on domestic violence and abuse survivors and the best support packages that can be remotely accessed by survivors or those at risk.

Funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the research is being carried out in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University and two charities working to end domestic abuse - Women’s Aid and WE:ARE Women’s Empowerment And Recovery Educators.

City of Wolverhampton Council is set to start the process of appointing a contractor to construct a new £8.1million technical centre as part of its City Learning Quarter vision. The Advanced Engineering and Electric Vehicle Centre of Excellence will secure hundreds of jobs in the local economy and create learning opportunities for thousands of students – specialising in the mechanics and engineering of electric vehicles (EV).

Planning permission is already in place for it to be built at City of Wolverhampton College’s Wellington Road site in Bilston, with the hope construction can get underway in summer 2022.