Skills for Industry launches with Severn Trent

Published 5th April 2017

On Tuesday 28th March 2017, nine apprentices from Severn Trent Water, together with The Design and Technology Association, launched a Skills for Industry programme, supporting five local secondary schools in the Coventry area. Over one hundred, year 8 pupils, at The Westwood Academy, Sidney Stringer Academy, Cardinal Wiseman School, Finham Park School and Ernesford Grange Community Academy will take part in a Skills for Industry Programme designed to bring employment skills into their classrooms.

Through the Skills for Industry programme, teachers and pupils get a real opportunity to meet with industry professionals, learn how the business operates and how they approach different projects and tasks in the real world. They will learn to apply new skills, to solve challenging problems over a period of 6-8 weeks. The overall aim is to inspire pupils to include design and technology as an option subject which will hopefully lead them into careers within designing, manufacturing and engineering industries. Teachers are provided with links and contacts with local industries to develop robust future working relationships.

The five schools will develop their problem-solving skills, a key element of the design & technology curriculum and an invaluable skill when it comes to employability. We are delighted that one our members schools Pete Maguire of Finham Park school are involved in this exciting opportunity. Pete said “Finham Park school are looking forward to engaging with Severn Trent Water, working with graduates on real life industrial problems through a process of iterative problem solving. We are hoping that Seven Trent will provide in industrial insight to our students to widen their understanding of problems beyond the classroom.”

In this current economic climate, increasing pupil’s skills, is important if we are to continue to provide companies like Severn Trent Water with their next generation of apprentices.

Severn Trent Water is the UK’s second biggest water company.  It serves more than 4.2m homes and business customers in England and Wales.  The company delivers almost two billion litres of water every day through 46,000km of pipes. A further 91,000km of sewer pipes take waste water away to more than 1,000 sewage treatment works.  Severn Trent’s Asset Creation teams are responsible for delivering our Asset Management Plans, and the most recent, running from 2015-2020, will be our largest ever, with £3.5billion invested in new water and waste schemes to improve our services.  This includes one of our most significant projects to secure the supply of water to Birmingham for generations to come, through our £300million Birmingham Resilience project and a £60million waste and water improvement project in Newark.

Callum Sproull from the company’s Asset Creation apprentice team said: “We wanted to get involved with this programme as we see it as an opportunity to help young people in our community outside of our every day job and training.  Working with Skills for Industry allows us to help to improve the Design and Technology classes in the local community which will hopefully help students to decide whether they want to take up STEM subjects in further education.  We think this is really important as it was STEM subjects which allowed our team to become apprentice engineers at Severn Trent Water.”

The Design and Technology Association supports design and technology teachers in delivering excellence in D&T. Our goal is to increase the uptake of D&T at GCSE to provide the UK with its future designers and engineers.

The Skills for Industry programme has been funded by The Ernest Cook Trust, The Higgs Charity and The Michael Marsh Charitable Trust.