Engineering the school curriculum
More young people with engineering STEM skills are critical for net zero. Primary Engineer makes sure they're being built from the earliest age. A Green Edge conversation with Dr Susan Scurlock MBE.
One of the biggest challenges to society is how to enable young people to become active citizens. Schools need to equip children to make choices about their own careers and to seek opportunities to change the lives of others. The Green Edge believes that the hardest challenge of the present day is to show pupils – and their teachers – how they can meaningfully partake in the green economy.
To explore this a little further we were delighted the other day to have a conversation with Dr Susan Scurlock MBE, founder and CEO of Primary Engineer.
The stealthy way to STEM
Susan founded Primary Engineer in 2005 and pioneered an approach to education that she calls STEM by Stealth®. She explains the term: “Some people don't like it. Some people do. I love it because it came from a kid, you know, and it was literally ‘Miss, you’re teaching us maths and science without telling us’. And I thought, that's exactly what we're doing, because the minute you put it into a pigeonhole, you become frightened of it”.
She goes on: “As an educator in secondary schools many of my Year 7 students had given up by the time they walked in the door. And, quite often, you were aware that those children – predominantly at the back of the class – were the most interesting and potentially had a lot to offer that the system couldn’t provide for, and no matter how I adapted by curriculum, I couldn’t really break that habit that they’d already go into.
“I discovered that there was a thing at the time [in 2005] called pre-NEET [not in education, employment or training] which was children that were identified in primary school (yes, primary school!) as likely to be NEET at a later date. Personally, I found that absolutely criminal, that you could identify children that were going to not only cost society but cost themselves so much and labelled at that age. So, I had an opportunity to apply for funding to the DTI and I set about it because for me I felt that engineering was a topic that if you used to build creativity and skills then you would get more children engaged with education from an earlier age.”
Based in Burnley and Glasgow, Primary Engineer has created an engineering curriculum that spans Early Years, Primary, Secondary and Further Education institutions. It seeks to use engineering as a vehicle to boost inventiveness, curiosity, creativity, problem solving, self-esteem, and a host of skills that transfer into other key subjects like maths, science and geography. Now, over 100,000 children and young people are engaged in Primary Engineer each year across all its programmes – even more when the teachers that run its projects in subsequent years with new classes of children are included. Primary Engineer is also supported by a huge number of engineers, both from across the UK and local to the schools involved. “Quite often you've got these white wall buildings that amazing things go on in. It's making teachers aware that these offers and opportunities that are on their doorsteps as well, so they've got to use local engineers as much as online engineers”, says Susan.
The value of a certificate
Susan tells us that teacher training is key: “The biggest barrier to children’s understanding of engineering careers is the teachers’ unawareness of what engineering actually is.”
To meet the needs of teachers to drive curriculum development and to engage children in creative problem-solving, Primary Engineer developed a Post Graduate Certificate which is accredited alongside the University of Strathclyde and the General Teaching Council of Scotland. Susan tells us that building on the success of this qualification Primary Engineer is developing a short course funded by Education Scotland to link as wide an audience as possible across the 70,000 educational practitioners in Scotland with engineering and local engineers.
Primary Engineer has also built many academic collaborations over the last 17 years. Susan describes some key collaborations, including University of Strathclyde with the PGCert, University of Central Lancashire with support to research into engineering across the curriculum, and the Primary Engineer MacRobert Medal, a celebration of innovation in universities built on the solutions to problems that young people have dreamed.
But while Primary Engineer is predominantly a provider of teacher training and curriculum focused resources, it also creates and runs competitions and facilitates projects around major themes such as rail and electric cars. All of its projects, whether they’re competition-based or project-based in the classroom, involve elements of engineering. So, through engagement with engineers or teachers, children build an understanding of what an engineer is, over a period of time and across multiple projects. Susan says: “That way they get to see a diverse range of engineers, different pathways and routes.”
The impact is huge, but sometimes hidden. Susan tells us about a young female engineering apprentice, a past participant in the Primary Engineer programme. When Susan asked how she got into engineering, she said “…‘you sent me a certificate. You were the only person who believed in me’. And I thought, I didn't know you personally, but I sent you a certificate and that changed it. A good certificate can't be overstated”.
STATWARS® - dealing with the devil in the data
We move on to talk about some of Primary Engineer’s projects. “One of the core skills that we recognised was really not being addressed and was really quite hard to cover off was data and data skills”, says Susan.
We listen closely: while data engineering at higher education levels and data-related bootcamps seem to be pretty well represented, is this not necessarily flowing down to earlier levels of education?
She continues, “…there’s tonnes of stuff on coding, you can throw a stick and it’s something to do with coding, but not to do with data. So we designed a project called STATWARS, the idea being that you use data creatively. In the first project the challenge was to design a film or TV series based on data analysis, which is a nice way in for people not thinking about how they’re really using data. And this anecdotal, but I heard kids were saying ‘I can use this in geography. I can use these data visualisations. I can use these infographics’”.
The next STATWARS challenge was climate change, which was to look at data in order to identify three things that you can personally change. “I wanted to get children to feel empowered by the things they could do and the sphere of influence that they could have. I wanted to get away from the complaining that other people should do it.
“So if I identify me personally, what can I change? I can delete the photographs on my phone that I don't use, I can do this and I can do that. I can't reduce the carbon footprints of the industrial estate down the road, unless I did something else. But for me personally, this is what I can change. And that's a really nice project because it fulfils the climate awareness and it also fills a lot of the responsibilities that industry is having in terms of what we do in a school setting that actually informs in a kind of STEM way.
The SMA jacket and the flat pack wind turbine
Susan goes on to highlight Primary Engineer’s key themes: creativity, curiosity, engagement, recognition and engagement between students, teachers and engineers. In one competition, The Leaders Award ‘If you were an engineer what would you do?’, engineers grade every entry. She says, “every pupil gets a certificate with their name on and a grade given by an engineer. The impacts of that can’t be overstated, that’s huge for a child to get.
She again mentions the ‘Primary Engineer MacRobert Medal’, launched at COP26 in association with the MacRobert Trust in Aberdeenshire, WEIR Group and the RAFCT. “I wanted something that recognised the university proto teams and their innovation, their outreach, potentially their links to industry and the child that the idea came from. So we've got this beautiful loop of ‘Engineers Inspiring Children Inspiring Engineers®’, and it's potentially the only place you'll ever find a palindrome in an engineering setting”.
We talk about how this has worked in ‘If you were an engineer what would you do?’. She tells us about two entries, both described in the podcast series for the project. The first, a Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) jacket designed by Krystina Marshall of the Sir John Thursby Community College in Burnley was inspired by her small cousin who was diagnosed with the condition, went to human trials this year and will change the course of the way SMA is treated around the world. The second, a flat pack wind turbine for refugee camps designed by Douglas McCartney at the Royal High School in Edinburgh, was prototyped by the Glasgow Caledonian University ProtoTeam and field tested of the first models are being planned.
Susan comments: “A lot of the drive is from the innate curiosity of children and young people and also the overpowering ‘why can't you?’ attitude of pupils which is making engineers think about the process of what they've designed and why they should approach it slightly left field maybe. I would also say that 99% [of the entries in ‘If you were an engineer what would you do?’] are altruistic, it's always about helping somebody else to deliver better life. To make the planet a better place.
“The project also runs in a lot of special schools. And in fact, hearing back from teachers , it’s the only project they run which is on a level playing field with pupils in mainstream school settings and that's magical. Their ideas are as valid as anybody else’s, because it's not judged on the quality of the drawing or the description or their spelling. It’s about how good is that idea/solution for that problem?”
Stemming the outflow
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) skills will underpin jobs that are key to taking forward the green recovery and delivering net zero1.
While the Green Jobs Task Force report of July 2021 highlighted the importance of STEM skills for net zero, the concern is that children’s love for STEM is on the decline. But in Green Edge’s opinion, Primary Engineer is showing that an approach like STEM by Stealth® is a powerful way to build transferable STEM skills alongside the so-called ‘soft’ skills like resilience, problem solving and team working. Above all, programmes like the ones developed by Primary Engineer build mindsets in children and young people that look for (often multiple) solutions to problems and can deal with the detail, whilst also seeing the big picture. These are the mindsets we need to tackle the complex problems of net zero.
But Green Edge’s opinion is this: mindsets like the ones Primary Engineer nurtures are not necessarily the mindsets that the current schools’ curriculum encourages. In a previous post we talked about the reductionist approach in the classroom and an increasing fixation on terminal exams, at the expense of things like modelling and systems thinking. Fear of exams – particularly STEM-related exams which, as everyone knows (or is told), are ‘hard’ – are a deterrent, pushing too many young people towards ‘easier’ subjects. This is made worse when more and more of the sub-topics hold less and less relevance to the real world. As Susan points out, many engineering degree apprentice students are not completing because they are exhausted by the pointless things they're being asked to learn. She comments: “…all I do is to inspire kids towards something and then the system conspires against me at every step to try and stop them from getting there. The system should be more connected, the pathways easier and more logical to navigate”.
Engineering is like a rugby team: there’s a place for everyone. Certainly, there are the cerebral parts, the bits for the rocket scientists. But at some point in every engineered product’s lifecycle, there comes a point when it has to ‘come off the drawing board’ (or at least out of the CAD screen) and become a practical reality. And that’s where the development and test engineers, the civil, manufacturing, production and process engineers, the service, operations and maintenance engineers and the whole raft of technicians of all disciplines kick in. But they never teach you that in school. We know – we are engineers too, Susan.
On the plus side, we think Primary Engineer has much to offer across education. Susan and her team have shown how to incorporate key principles into an already crowded curriculum and this fits very strongly with the recent Department for Education draft strategy2.
We leave the last word to Susan: “Our approach has at its heart that all pupils are more likely to engage with education through a curriculum that revolves around engineering, is contextualised by engineers and is driven by teachers.”
Our thanks to Dr Susan Scurlock MBE for her time in talking to us for this Green Edge article. Opinions given on skills are entirely The Green Edge’s and may not coincide with Susan’s own opinions.
See the Primary Engineer website at www.primaryengineer.com
Images for this post courtesy Primary Engineer.
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