About
Opportunity Oxford
Connecting Oxford residents with local employment, training and skills opportunities
Local Impact
Real Local Benefits
When new developments come to a borough, they bring real opportunities for local people - jobs, apprenticeships, training and community engagement.
Oxford has one of the fastest-growing science and innovation pipelines in the UK. Opportunity Oxford connects local residents with the construction-phase work and permanent operational roles those developments are creating.
Local residents get first sight of jobs, apprenticeships and training placements created on the scheme, with on-the-ground support to apply.
Purpose
Our Mission
We believe local development should mean local jobs. Opportunity Platform exists because when major new development reshapes Oxford, the jobs, apprenticeships and training it creates should land first with the people whose streets are changing, not travel to outsiders with better networks.
We work borough by borough, pairing every listing with resident-facing support from local partners so Oxford residents are first in line where they live.
How It Works
The Delivery Model
A replicable partnership model connecting developers, councils, and communities
Strategy
Storey Consulting designs the local employment and skills strategy for each development
Platform
Opportunity Platform lists local opportunities and connects them with the right candidates
Delivery
Local delivery partners provide resident-facing support: pre-employment training, mentoring, and welfare advice
Outcomes
Real impact for residents - jobs started, apprenticeships placed, training completed
Why local people come first
What Section 106 actually means
When a council grants planning permission for a big development, it can attach conditions to it. That agreement is called a Section 106, after the part of the planning law it comes from. Some of those conditions are about buildings: affordable homes, a new park, money towards a school. Some are about people.
The ones about people are the reason this site exists. They commit the developer and its contractors to hiring locally, creating a set number of apprenticeships, offering work experience, and going into local schools. Those are promises made on your behalf, in public, before a single brick was laid.
Promises like that have historically been easy to make and hard to check. Our job is to make them real: every job, apprenticeship and training place published where local people can actually find it, and every outcome recorded so the council, the developer and you can see whether the commitment was kept.
How Oxford North is doing
The commitment was that 15 in every 100 people working on site would come from the local Oxfordshire labour market. As of December 2025, 2,123 people had worked on the site and 28 in every 100 of them were local, well ahead of what was promised. Apprenticeships, work experience, school engagement, site tours and volunteering are all running ahead of their commitments too.
The next stage is the finished buildings. As the labs, workspace and neighbourhood centre open, the same principle applies to the jobs inside them, and those are the ones listed on this site now.
Figures as reported for the Oxford North construction phase to December 2025.
Our Community
The labs and workspaces
The work happening on the doorstep. Two lab buildings, the workspaces around them, and the people already in them.
Wolvercote
The sensory garden
Volunteers spent a fortnight building a sensory garden at Wolvercote Youth Club, a place where children, and particularly children with special needs, can explore scent, sound and texture. Work the club could not have funded on its own was done in a matter of days.
“It is just starting to feel like somebody loves this place now.”
Get Involved
Whether you are a resident, an employer or a training provider - we would love to connect with you.