TDR Training turns 25 this year, and that number is worth pausing on. Twenty five years of apprentices trained, employers supported and, less visibly, a charity quietly funded on the back of it all. Here is where it started, and why the way we were set up still shapes how we work today.
Where TDR actually comes from
TDR Training was formed in 2001 as part of the TDR Trust, a charity created to get young people in the North East interested in science, engineering and industry. That is not a marketing line, it is the legal and financial structure the organisation still runs on. TDR Training Ltd is the trading arm: it delivers apprenticeships and staff training commercially, and its profits are gift aided straight back into the Trust’s charitable work, including STEM programmes for local schools.
Our motto, “By Science, Industry and Honour”, has sat on TDR’s coat of arms since 1884, long before the current organisation existed in its present form, and it is a fair description of what the Trust was always trying to do: connect science and industry, and do it properly.
Twenty five years of practical training
Over that time TDR has delivered engineering, science and business administration apprenticeships to hundreds of employers across the North East, alongside dozens of staff training courses for businesses upskilling their existing teams. The trades and standards have changed as industry has changed, machining, welding, electrical and mechanical maintenance sit alongside newer science and laboratory standards nobody else in the region offers as a specialist, but the basic model has not: real workshops, real trainers, and a training centre built for apprenticeships rather than squeezed in around something else.
We are Ofsted rated Good and Matrix accredited, and we are still based in Newcastle upon Tyne, now from our own centre at Q1 Quorum Business Park in Benton.
What the charity structure means in practice
Most training providers are either purely commercial or purely charitable. TDR sits deliberately in between. Every apprenticeship we deliver and every staff training course we run helps fund the TDR Trust’s separate work getting younger children, well below apprenticeship age, interested in science and engineering in the first place. It is a long game: today’s school STEM session is, with luck, a future apprentice ten years from now.
Thank you, twenty five years in
None of this happens without the employers who have taken on apprentices, trusted us with staff training, and stuck with TDR through 25 years of a changing region and a changing economy. It also does not happen without the apprentices themselves, many of whom are now the engineers, technicians and managers training the next intake.
If you trained with TDR, employed a TDR apprentice, or simply remember us from somewhere along the way, we would genuinely like to hear from you as part of this anniversary year. If you are an employer who has not worked with us before, 25 years is as good a reason as any to find out what we do. Get in touch, or take a look at our current apprenticeships and staff training courses.
