Wirral Met's £4m Birkenhead Build Opens in September

A new Maths and English Centre at Wirral Met College’s Twelve Quays campus in Birkenhead has been handed over by its builder and will take students from the start of term in September. It is the first half of a £4m programme on the Shore Road site. (Wirral Met College, 18 August 2026)

The second half is the NEXUS Engineering Hub, which the college expects to finish in October. Both buildings have gone up while the campus stayed open and teaching continued.

What has actually been built

The contractor is Krol Corlett, a Liverpool firm. Its own site updates through the year describe the job as two separate structures:

• a two-storey teaching block, which the construction team called the CEM Block
• a single-storey motor vehicle workshop

Work began with groundworks and steel frames over the winter. By May the teaching block had reached the facade and internal finishes stage, and was expected to be ready for the return from the summer break. The workshop was further behind, with its steel frame up and its concrete slab being poured. (Krol Corlett construction updates)

That timetable held. The teaching block is the building now handed over as the Maths and English Centre.

Twelve Quays is the college’s waterfront campus at Shore Road, CH41 1AG. It already teaches engineering, automotive, computing and digital, health and social care, animal management, childcare, and art, music and creative media, alongside English and maths. (Wirral Met, Twelve Quays campus)

The wider project team is 10 Architect, MDA Wirral on structures, Futureserv on building services and SDA Consulting as cost consultants.

The college’s construction students worked on it

The detail the college leads on is that its own construction students and apprentices were on the site while it was being built.

Gill Banks is Principal and Chief Executive of Wirral Met College. She said students would benefit from “a dedicated, modern environment designed to help them develop the essential Maths and English skills that underpin success in education, employment and life”. She added that the college was “particularly pleased that our Construction apprentices have had the opportunity to gain valuable hands-on experience throughout the project”.

Dan Tebay, Managing Director of Krol Corlett, took his joinery qualifications at Wirral Met himself. He said:

Aside from delivering on time and to budget, one of the most pleasing aspects of this project is how many of the College’s Construction students we’ve been able to involve. The classroom is vital, but there’s nothing like being on site experiencing how a complex project is delivered, the discipline needed to ensure everything runs smoothly and the camaraderie between the different trades.

Why maths and English specifically

The subject choice is not incidental. Under the government’s condition of funding, 16 to 19 year olds who do not hold GCSE maths and English at grade 4 or above must keep studying them alongside their main course. From this year, students holding a grade 3 must work towards the GCSE itself, while those at grade 2 or below can take either a GCSE or a Functional Skills level 2. (Department for Education guidance)

That makes maths and English one of the largest teaching loads any further education college carries, and a dedicated building for them a bigger commitment than it sounds.

It also lands in the part of Wirral under most pressure. The Twelve Quays campus sits in Birkenhead and Tranmere, the ward with the borough’s highest claimant rate at 8.6 per cent. Wirral’s overall claimant count fell over the past year, but the number of claimants aged 18 to 24 rose by 150 to 1,780, and this ward alone accounts for 260 of them. We set out those figures ward by ward in our Wirral claimant count report.

What it means for you

If you are enrolling this September, the Maths and English Centre is open from the start of the academic year at Twelve Quays. The NEXUS Engineering Hub is not, so engineering students should expect to be in the existing workshops until at least October. The college has not published a firmer date than the month.

If you are considering a construction course, the college’s own account of this project is the useful part: students were placed on a live commercial site alongside the trades, not just shown one. It is worth asking directly what site experience a course includes before you sign up.

Getting there. Twelve Quays is on Shore Road, a short walk from Hamilton Square station, which is on the same Merseyrail lines covered on our Wirral trains to Liverpool page. Check our Wirral roadworks and travel page before driving in during the first week of term.

One thing we could not confirm. Neither the college nor the contractor names the funding source for the £4m. We have not seen it published, so we are not going to guess at it.