BCAS 2018

Primary & Secondary Engineers 46 www.bcas.org.uk Inspiring a new generation Aaron Blutstein spoke to Susan Scurlock, CEO of Primary Engineer, about the organisation she created to encourage young people to consider careers in STEM related professions. M eeting Susan was an inspiring experience. Her story is one we can all perhaps identify with – that of trying to help inspire the next generation. Most involved in UK manufacturing and engineering are only too readily aware of this need. As a child, Susan wanted to become an engineer, but she explains she couldn’t because of stereotypical gender pressures from her father. Eventually she became a secondary school teacher (the other option being a nurse), and also worked as a graphic designer for a long period. Nothing out of the ordinary at the moment, but her story becomes inspiring because despite not pursuing her childhood dream of becoming an engineer, the dream never left her, and it’s what comes next that gets interesting. The brainchild of Susan began in 2005, when Primary Engineers was established. It came about when she had the opportunity for DTI funding for people who had ideas about how to encourage more engineers. Susan explained: “I made an application, it was successful and we received three years worth of funding. Which meant I had to actually bite my lip, put my money where my mouth was and stop teaching, give up my career and start Primary Engineer (PE).” Her eventual creation of what is now Primary Engineer and Secondary Engineer was born out of a belief that if children knew the structures and support mechanisms from organisations such as the IMechE, BCAS, BFPA, and EEF were in place when they left school, they would surely want to be part of it. She believes these organisations really do want to help and support, adding that once you’re on the radar, it’s quite straight forward. Therefore she came up with the idea of the Institution of Primary Engineers, and the Institution of Secondary Engineers. She created two professional engineering institutions for children so that they could look at the skills they were accumulating from all these different sources, recognise them and build on them in the same way you would do if you were going for Chartership or going to be an Eng Tech or an Incorporated Engineer. She built two structures in a similar way. Ultimately the PE and SE are designed to encourage both girls and boys to aspire to become designers and makers from a very early age. The engineers of the future. The very career that Susan would have loved to have had the opportunity to pursue. PE’s main supporter for the last five years has been the IMechE – which Susan says “has been extraordinarily supportive and generous with us. They’ve given us a foundation to be able to do all we do”. In the beginning… The task of creating PE, has been a long and difficult one, explains Susan. She believes that many engineers have a tendency to look at things and think there’s something wrong so we can mend it. They don’t necessarily look at the options that are out there. She explains: “There are a lot of people and organisations that exist that think they have the solution, so you have to have one that is unique to survive within this type of field.” When PE started, the idea was looking at teachers not children. Because, as Susan explains, if you actually look at the biggest influencer – it’s the teacher: “If they don’t teach maths or science, if they don’t talk about engineering, if they don’t have that conversation with the child then that child will never get to know that that opportunity exists.” So right from the beginning PE took a different approach and concentrated on the teachers rather than the children, knowing that’s where it would end up - with the children. The original plan was always to train teachers to deliver practical maths and science to technology. Susan explains that PE design the projects, the resource, the teacher training, and then delivers it out to schools: “We normally have around about 15- 20 schools on anyone course and we try and link each of the schools up with an engineer so the engineer comes on the course with the teachers and does the same activities and then we’ll go back into the schools at some later date and work alongside the kids but not as the teacher – but as the expert in the room. She adds: “We also recognise that engineers have a limited amount of time so the idea of engineers designing something to take into a school that they don’t know is going to work or be relevant or being pitched right is potentially a bigger waste of their time than actually fronting up to a programme that is established within the curriculum that they know they can support, so the time is given to the kids rather that thinking about what you could do with them.” Susan also emphasises that PE doesn’t have a problem with socio-economic backgrounds. She explains: “I think if I’m honest, the PE programme is a leveller. Because schools where there are issues with pupils, be it behavioural or attainment, quite often those children will engage infinitely more with practical based activities, and because it suits, because there are the engineer contexts, because there are all these different elements to it we are seeing a major impact in these types of schools and they share their knowledge. We are not an activity that works with the usual suspects. It’s wholly inclusive of everybody in the school, and whichever school wants to be involved is