Education theme
I grew up in the North of England in an era when engineering was a mass employer – companies like Leyland Motors, Royal Ordnance, BAC (now BAE Systems), Philips and many others were major players in the area. Consequently, children grew up knowing what engineering was and many aspired to a career in engineering.
Today the world is different with many children growing up with no conception of what engineering is or why they would ever consider it as a career.
It was against this background that I had a ‘road to Damascus’ moment one evening whilst attending the Alastair Graham Bryce lecture at the Institution. The lecture was given by Bob Shanks and concerned the Imagineering Foundation and the work they do to promote science and engineering in schools.
On returning to work the following day I decided that my company – Xaar – would form an Imagineering group with a local school. It sounded pretty straightforward to me – call the school, set up the group, job done. How wrong could I be!
When I called the local primary school – Stukeley Meadows in Huntingdon – I was met with a reaction from the Head that I should have anticipated: “Who are you?”, “what is Imagineering?”, “why would we want to do it?”, “will it cost anything?”.
After much discussion, they agreed to send the science teacher to visit our plant and assess if we were for real in wanting to run a group. His reaction was priceless: “My God, it’s like a set from a James Bond film”, and underlined my view that in the modern world very few people understand what science and engineering actually are. Part of the problem rests with the media which, whenever reporting on an engineering story either seem to show film of someone welding or a man in greasy overalls in a cluttered workshop operating a pillar drill.
However, once we were over the initial and understandable reluctance of the school we commenced setting up the group. This involved recruiting tutors from inside Xaar (we have three engineers from the Huntingdon manufacturing site – Ian Harper, Helen Kirby and Sarah Anderson), training the tutors, buying the kits from the Imagineering Foundation, completing the tutors’ DBS checks, attracting Year 6 pupils to take the plunge and join an after school group and finally going live and starting the sessions.
That was four years ago and in the current academic year we are working with fourteen Year 6 pupils, and the head teacher James Singleterry feels that Imagineering is an important contribution to the school’s range of activities.
Building on this success, a new club started in 2016 at Grove Primary School in Cambridge. Four members of Xaar’s Research and Development staff in Cambridge (Maelle Douaire, Kirsty Green, Mike Hook and Mark Crankshaw) support the club which has 11 children, nine in Year 6 and two in Year 5. They are enthusiastically joined by teacher Ms Esther Claydon. Headmistress Ms Karen Martin is very keen on the club, particularly because the recent Ofsted visit highlighted how having the Imagineering Club reflected well on the school.
So why did Xaar do all of this? Our view is that if we can capture the imagination of a few children at primary school and fire up their interest in science and engineering whilst educating parents and teachers about industry then maybe, just maybe, we can help to reverse the trend away from STEM subjects. What we are hoping is that more companies and engineers will follow our lead in Cambridgeshire.
For more information about Imagineering click here
For more information on the Institution’s Manufacturing Industries Division click here
For more information about Xaar click here