For partners & commissioners

A specialist construction delivery partner for your contracts.

Cornerstone is a 25-year construction trade training provider based in Birkenhead, serving the Liverpool City Region, Cheshire, and North Wales. We deliver six construction trades to unemployed adults and employed tradespeople, working as a tier-2 subcontractor to programme primes, CICs, and FE colleges.

Twenty-five years delivering construction trade training in the North West.

Cornerstone has delivered construction training continuously from our Birkenhead base since 2001. Our current and recent delivery includes:

Subcontracted delivery of Plastering and Solar PV Installation for Roofers
Subcontracted delivery for a long-standing CIC partner across LCR and Wirral
Direct employer upskilling for regional construction firms
Delivering to schools across Merseyside, Cheshire and North Wales since 2002
16–18 construction training delivered with providers since 2007

We’re developing our adult, route-to-work training in a separate workshop, alongside the outcomes our commissioners need — while continuing to deliver to schools five days a week, with students attending one to three days each.

What we can deliver.

Two concurrent cohorts of 10 per workshop — 20–25 learners on each site, up to around 50 across both
48 weeks per year delivery capacity
Two workshops at our Birkenhead base on Price Street, each divided into trade-specific sections, with dedicated space for each of the six trades
A dedicated adult workshop, kept separate from our school and 16–18 learners
Experienced delivery team operating year-round, with capacity planned to scale into 2027

Our workshop is configured for hands-on trade delivery — most of each course is practical, on tools and real materials, in conditions that mirror the sites learners will work on. Each course also includes the classroom elements that the trade and its safe practice require: health and safety, regulations, theory, and (for self-employed-route trades) the business setup pack.

Where our learners come from.

We’re based in Birkenhead. We accept learners from anywhere within roughly a 45-minute travel radius, which covers:

Liverpool City Region (Wirral, Liverpool, Sefton, Knowsley, St Helens, Halton)
Cheshire West, Warrington, and Cheshire East
Flintshire, Wrexham, Denbighshire and the wider North Wales coast

Our workshop catchment spans both sides of the England–Wales border.

Six trades, two outcome routes.

Roofing · Solar PV Installation · Kitchen Fitting · Joinery · Plastering · Tiling

We’re also developing an External Wall Insulation (EWI) installation pathway for delivery from early 2027, in response to demand from the Warm Homes Plan and Liverpool City Region retrofit funding.

How we get people into work.

Our outcome route is built into the trade. Learners follow one of two paths:

Train and start trading

For Kitchen Fitting, Plastering, Joinery, and Tiling, the credible route to income is self-employment or small-firm sole-trading. Every learner in these trades leaves with the qualification AND a business setup pack: HMRC self-assessment registration, public liability guidance, CIS scheme registration, pricing and quotation workshop, and profiles set up on Checkatrade and MyBuilder. They finish the course ready to take their first paid job.

Train and get hired

For Roofing and Solar PV, the credible route to income is employment with an established firm. We work directly with a panel of regional employers — for Solar PV, that’s MCS-accredited installer firms looking for roofers who can install panels safely. (Our Solar PV course covers the roofing-side install — fixing, mounting, weatherproofing, cable routing to the loft. The electrical connection from the loft onwards is a separate, electrician-only job.) We introduce graduating cohorts to hiring employers as standard. No recruitment fees, no agency layer.

We track every learner at 13 weeks post-course to record their employment or self-employment status. Our first comprehensive outcomes dataset will be available from spring 2027 onwards, covering cohorts from autumn 2026.