We support a few key national initiatives which aim to increase coordination and collaboration between the wide range of organisations and projects promoting STEM education, and improve communication between government and STEM communities on policy issues.
This country suffers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to enrichment schemes, prizes and other initiatives designed to support and promote STEM education. All these initiatives are well intentioned, but they are often fragmented and only a minority secure the level of sustainable impact they are capable of. We believe there is benefit - to schools and colleges, resource and scheme providers, and often the public purse - in increasing coordination between the various initiatives.
Our work in this area is limited to a small number of partnerships. These include the Big Bang Fair - which brings together under a single umbrella the numerous science and engineering competitions aimed at young people - and the ACME and SCORE initiatives, which aim to improve communication on education policy issues between government and the mathematics and science communities.
Our largest grant in this area has been to establish the National STEM Centre in York. Over time, the Centre, which is co-located with the National Science Learning Centre, will grow into a one-stop-shop for busy teachers looking for quality-assured STEM curriculum resource material, whether it be produced by learned societies, charities, public bodies or commercial publishers. A significant digitisation programme is underway, which will allow teachers online access to resources which have previously only been available in hard copy. The Centre will also allow teachers of mathematics and engineering to access the facilities of the National Science Learning Centre to a much greater degree than has hitherto been the case. A key role of the Centre is to facilitate and promote greater collaboration between the many organisations working in STEM education by running national and regional stakeholder events and offering on-site facilities (including meeting rooms, event support, and hot-desking space) to STEM partners.
From the early 1990s until 2010 we also funded a number of projects which sought to stimulate and strengthen partnerships between universities and industry. Today there is a broad national commitment to such Knowledge and Technology Transfer (KTT) activity, with public funding frameworks in place to actively encourage it. However, this was not the case 20 years ago when we first began to explore what could be done. Our pilot, proof-of-principle initiatives at six universities were often innovative and sometimes even pioneering in their nature. Our most significant support in the KTT field has been to Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing.
Not all our ventures were unqualified successes, but the lessons learned from each - whether positive or negative - shaped both the ongoing development of our investment in this area and, we believe, the expansion of KTT activity across the UK university system. In 2010, as our involvement in the area of KTT drew to a close, we published a review of our work in the field which can be downloaded from this page.
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The National STEM Centre promotes collaboration across STEM education and houses the UK’s largest collection of STEM teaching & learning resources, allowing teachers online access to material previously only available in hard copy.
We have supported The Big Bang Fair since its outset. The Fair is the UK’s biggest single celebration of science and engineering for young people and brings together a number of science and engineering competitions.
We support the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, which acts as a single voice for the mathematics education community to government, influencing policies with a view to improving the outcomes of mathematics teaching and learning.
We support SCORE, which brings together organisations dedicated to tackling long-term issues in science education to maximise the impact of their efforts to support the development and implementation of effective education policy.
See all projects encouraging partnerships