The first EuroSkills competition will be held in the Netherlands this year and will challenge European students and graduates in vocational education to showcase their skills through team competitions. The goals of EuroSkills are to:

• To use skills competitions to help the EU and its member states to raise skills standards and to promote excellence in vocational skills throughout the EU.
• Increase awareness of the importance of skills and vocational education/training for the EU economies and societies.
• Develop a range of European vocational skills competitions for EU member states.
• Ensure that vocational skills competitions organised by EuroSkills, reflect the varied and changing skills requirements of the EU's member states and of the EU as a whole.
• Encourage each EU member country to participate in EuroSkills and so expand and develop the range and structure of its own vocational skills competitions.

Initial work has been undertaken to develop an outline for a new environmental science competition, as set out in the enclosed flyer. The UK Skills team at the recent WorldSkills 2007 competition in Japan used the flyer to promote this initiative, and received positive support for it - especially from other European nations. The Skills Minister David Lammy has also been alerted to it, and has offered support through his contacts with European Ministers.

To take this work forward, we need next to develop a domestic competition to be held in 2009 and, to this end, would like to invite you - or a representative of your organisation - to attend a half-day regional consultation events to:

• Present and discuss with you the work undertaken to date;
• Hear your ideas about developing a domestic competition;
• Consider and agree next steps.

Regional events will be held as follows:

• East of England - 13 June, Hethel Engineering Centre, near Norwich
• South West - 9 July, Lackham College, Wiltshire
• North West - 26 June, North West Development Agency, Warrington.

We will also be holding a consultation event in Scotland later in the summer.

In addition to other employers from across the energy and environment sectors, we will be inviting education providers and other interested stakeholders and we would be delighted if you were able to bring one or more potential competitors along with you. Competitors for EuroSkills competitions need to be 25 or under, and could therefore include apprentices, sponsored FE/HE students, and A level and equivalent school students.

Space at these events is limited but if there is heavy demand for places we will run a second workshop during the same day. Therefore when requesting a place you should at this stage reserve the whole day. We will let you know as soon as we can the time of the workshop to which you have been allocated. We will also send out travel directions and joining instructions when we confirm your place.

If you wish to attend please contact:

Jackie Moonan at Prospect, 8 Leake Street, London SE1 7NN or by e-mail to [email protected].