NISSAN'S North-East plant has been chosen by its Japanese parent company as one of only two global training centres for manufacturing excellence.

Production supervisors from Nissan factories across Europe, India, the Middle East and South Africa will visit the region to learn how to become master trainers in car production.

Nissan will invest £500,000 to convert part of the Sunderland plant to house the centre, and a further £3.5m will be spent on staffing over the next five years.

The global training centre will have a replica production line dedicated to each area of manufacturing, along with a suite of training rooms.

It will be staffed by Sunderland's training department, together with a number of manufacturing supervisors, who recently spent seven weeks in Japan preparing for their new role.

Kevin Fitzpatrick, the plant's deputy managing director, said: "It's a significant honour for our plant to have been chosen to train staff from other Nissan facilities spanning four continents. It shows a huge amount of confidence in our ability, which I feel has been well-earned over the past 20 years." The centre will complement Nissan's only other global training facility in Oppama, Japan, which trains supervisors from Asia, Oceania and the Americas.