Brick Baron Ltd are a specialist masonry contractors based in Hull with a geographical operating area throughout Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Teesside, currently employing around 140 bricklayers, management and technical staff.
The skills crisis in the UK construction industry has created major challenges for Brick Baron Ltd over the past few years. Growth of the company has been much slower than intended simply due to the lack of available quality resources, and Brick Baron has reached capacity in Hull, with all experienced, quality bricklayers already employed by the company.
The quality, cost and reputational issues risked when using the remaining, less experienced and poor quality bricklayers are exacerbated by the tendency of large regional and national contractors working in the city to sub-contract the masonry element of their schemes to brickwork contractors from other cities, therefore taking business out of the city.
Having experienced issues with using agencies and experimented with foreign labour, Brick Baron determined that neither option was a long-term sustainable solution due to issues in quality, consistency, fluctuating cost and variance of build practices. The quality of apprentices under the existing schemes was also deemed to be an issue.
Therefore the Brick Baron Academy was formed in 2014 and currently has over 20 apprentices. Brick Baron are keen to expand further but have struggled to access apprenticeship funding or experienced gangs of bricklayers able to take on apprentices.
The Brick Baron Academy sets out to be different from other training providers, offering top quality training whilst earning on site and a guaranteed job afterwards. The Academy works in partnership with Leeds College of Building, who developed the training standards, now also in use in a further partnership with Hull College. Targeted support is given to less academic apprentices who struggle with functional skills (Maths and English) to get them up to the required standard as well as other funded training. Another partnership was formed with Hull Training, Hull City Council's own training division.