Alderman Peel High School

As STEM lead in my secondary school (11 to 16), I want to provide our students with engaging and inspiring STEM workshops and learning experiences to raise their educational and career aspirations.

A high percentage of our students are from disadvantaged backgrounds and many lack aspirations to engage with further education.

COVID-19 has only made this situation worse so it is more important than ever that we open their eyes to more varied and exciting career opportunities.

Since restrictions eased I have been desperately trying to organise face-to-face interactions for our students before the end of term. They haven’t had anything like it all year and it's a huge shame. As a school, we feel that our students have really missed out on the chance to develop key skills, like team building, problem solving, collaboration and creativity.

I first stumbled across Neon when I was looking to book STEM Ambassadors to come to our school and speak to our students. As a newcomer to the website, I was really impressed. It’s well designed, easy to use and has lots of great content.

I found out about the bursaries as soon as I landed on the homepage, immediately applied, and heard back with the positive news very quickly. In our school we don’t have a STEM budget and any activity I put on for students comes out of my department budget, so any financial help is hugely appreciated. The application process was quick and easy - just brilliant for a busy teacher!

We received £700 to spend on activities featured on Neon, so I trawled the site for ideas, contacted a few local providers and decided on a couple of activities by Hartlepool College of Further Education. The facilitator Dave was receptive to our needs and very accommodating. We agreed on 2 back-to-back team building days in July, one full day for my year 7s and the next for my year 8s. That’s 120 students in each year group.

Both mornings will be spent on Logistics Factory and the afternoons on The Pipe Bridge Challenge, involving lots of teamwork and Knex resource!

I tried to maximise the impact for our students by catering for whole year groups, including students with special educational needs.

It was important for me that the workshops are inclusive, and to be able to offer it to all our students for free is amazing.

My hope is to really try and encourage those important skills that students have missed out on because of the pandemic because they are key skills for the jobs market. And they’re going to have lots of fun doing it. I can’t wait, and neither can the students!

How did it go?

It was a really successful day! I’d really love to do it again in future.

The experience was great - everyone got involved and it’s had a positive impact on the students. It was fantastic to have external contact, especially after the pandemic. The experience allowed students to simulate real life work as an engineer – they had to plan their time, inventory and cost while they worked on their projects.

At the end of the session we asked students how they found the experience. Before we started, most students said they thought of engineering as mechanics. Feedback showed that the session allowed students to broaden their understanding of what engineering was, and what they thought an engineer does day to day. Several students also said that after the day, they would now consider an career in STEM!