STEM Accord is founded on the concept of partnership and cooperation.
We believe that a coordinated approach is critical to inspiring future engineers and address the £1.5bn skills shortage in the UK STEM sector.
We work closely with Engineering UK’s national programme, and exist to coordinate the work of our partners to deliver tailored STEM intervention in primary and secondary schools taking part in our regional pilot programme.
This philosophy is driven by the “Perkins Review revisited” which rallied the engineering and education community to “recognise the value of supporting a collaborative approach” so we could “work together around a common goal – a coherent vision for inspiring a broad diversity of future engineers“.
The existing activity of our network of partners allows us considerable access to schools across the UK . Through our partners we already reach:
Our aim is to provide locally coordinated STEM programmes to primary and secondary schools. Our programme is built around Gatsby Career Benchmarks, but considers the educational and industrial context of the regions we work within.
Our strength lies in the established expertise our partners. This allow us to offer participating schools a tailor-made series of workshops, assemblies, STEM activities, talks and classes designed to bridge the gaps their existing careers programmes.
By focusing our STEM intervention around good career guidance alongside a understanding of regional context we know we can inspire students towards further study and allow them to make informed decisions whenever choices are open to them.
We work in alignment with the overarching national programme framework being developed by Engineering UK.
We took a tailored approach in our Bristol Pilot; and this is being used as a basis for the next set of regional initiatives in the UK.
Our wider vision is to encourage more school pupils to long term careers in STEM related sectors across the UK.
To do this we will test and develop our model of local coordination. Developing a new sustainable framework which can be adopted and used nationally.
We will use our first three pilot programmes develop and refine our STEM programme. Working with Engineering UK we will use the data and feedback from the regional pilot studies to determine which interventions are most useful in different regional, industrial and educational contexts.
Over the next year we will be extending our partnership networks to work with Industry, Councils, Local Enterprise Partnerships, Universities, and Further Education Colleges.
If you are interested in working with STEM Accord, either as a partner organisation or as a school connect with us.
Sign up here if you would like to know more about how your organisation can be part of STEMAccord