Trinity House Hotel is real training, in a real hotel, by qualified, experienced staff, such as Executive Chef Duncan Collinge (himself trained by the Roux brothers); Helen Waring, now Trinity Manager, who spent 11 years at The Lakeside Hotel, the last four as manager; and Sarah Kendall, Lakeside Hotel’s Training Manager, who looks after all the training both at Lakeside and Trinity.

The Training Academy is about developing practical and people skills, instilling self-confidence and self-respect and teaching the trainees more about themselves and their capabilities then they ever imagined possible. When the training is finished, Trinity House offers excellent rates of pay, nationally recognised qualifications and, ultimately, a job at The Lakeside, recognised and accepted as the best four-star hotel in the Lake District.

Q: How old are the chef apprentices and how closely supervised are they?

A: S ince Trinity House was opened in September 2001, the average age has probably been around the 20 to 21 mark, but we have had 16-year-olds and at least one approaching 30. What they all have in common is that from day one they are under the wing of experts. They are constantly coached – tutored, trained, call it what you will – on the job by very experienced and highly-motivated staff. Everybody involved in that hands-on coaching has a four-star hotel background. These apprentices get the very best.

Q : You are taking young men and women from many different backgrounds – and often from long-term unemployment – into a service industry to look after paying guests from all aspects of society. Just how big a challenge is it?

A: Massive, but very rewarding. Before we can teach them the service skills we have to teach them people skills, social skills – how to communicate not just with the staff in the hotel but also with the guests. We are constantly trying to pass on to every trainee our years of experience and, of course, some respond better and more quickly than others. And yes, the majority of our trainees do have a history of unemployment, very much so in the case of our would-be chefs, but that’s inevitable because we do not recruit from other hotels. We want to train our own and, for the most part, we are giving them their first jobs – they are simply not used to being supervised in a working environment. So yes the challenge for us is huge, but it’s terrific to see people develop both personally and professionally and to see the pleasure they get from knowing they have a real future.

Q: Is this a normal hotel or just a Training Centre?

A: Trinity House is a six-bedroom hotel offering four-star service at two-star prices. At the same time it operates as a Training Academy for the Lakeside Hotel and gives people of many different age groups and backgrounds an opportunity to come and have a go at housekeeping, food and beverage work, bar and restaurant. Trinity also has a groundbreaking scheme for apprentice chefs who are paid – and paid well – for learning both in the practical sense and at Lancaster and Morecambe College, where they gain vocational related qualifications in the first three months. After those early weeks they split their time between Lakeside and Trinity working, as always, under the supervision of qualified staff, and they also attend Kendal College one day a week for a year. Overall, it’s a two-year commitment for the apprentices, but they do get £60 a week for the first few months, £370 a month when they’ve got their first VRQ and, at the end of their first year they will be earning around £600 a month.















Q: The Academy is still in its infancy really, but how confident are you about the future? And how has it developed from day one?

A: The apprenticeship scheme grew out of a need for us to produce our own staff because over the years recruiting staff into the hotel, catering and leisure industries has been a very hit and miss business. When we set up the Academy we had a three-year commitment at Trinity House with an option for a further three years, which we are into now. We are very conscious that we have to make Trinity a commercially viable hotel if we are to stop the financial burden borne from the start by the Lakeside Hotel. But we took it on knowing that we were very much pathfinders in terms of training our own people to work at Lakeside and we have produced some real talent in every department – kitchen, reception, housekeeping, bar, restaurant – you name it we’ve taken good people from Trinity and seen them blossom into fine employees at Lakeside. We’ve changed things, of course – now the chef apprentices do three days a week at college only for the first three months and then they’re much more hands-on with their practical work and it seems to work much better. It’s a constant learning curve for us as well as for them, but overall we can look back on those first three years and know that not only have we made a lot of difference to a lot of young people, but we have also laid a solid foundation for our Training Academy to become invaluable in the future.

Q: It’s self-evident that it can’t have been total success all the way, so what about the disappointments? What lessons have you learned about the people you take in for training?

A: Of course we have had our setbacks and we’ve also learned some harsh lessons. Over the years we’ve perhaps been a touch too tolerant and forgiving with our apprentices and we’ve now introduced a Soccer-style yellow card scheme which they – and their parents - are told about when we tell them they have been accepted. Two yellows, for things like coming in late, not turning in at all and not letting us know, and also missing a college day without good reason, means it’s a red card next time and a red means it’s goodbye. But you can’t be too harsh and unforgiving or you would quickly find that you were losing too many. There are always some who drop out of their own volition and it’s sad when that happens, especially when you lose someone you really thought had a great chance of completing the apprenticeship. We were maybe a bit naive initially, believing that because we were giving them so much they would be more than a bit keen to repay our faith in them. It tends not to happen that way and we are certainly more aware of the pitfalls. Again, using a football analogy, our Training Academy is a bit like running a youth team at a big club – you invest time, money and expertise hoping that at least some of the squad will go on to make the first team. And you are also hoping that you might just unearth a real diamond, a Wayne Rooney. We found our Rooney in our very first intake of chef apprentices – Darren Anderson stepped from a background of long-term unemployment to become a fine member of our team of chefs at The Lakeside. From every intake we have had successes and failures, but that’s the nature of the beast – you win some, you lose some. But the Lake District Training Academy is undoubtedly flourishing. Long may it reign…

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