Primary Schools STEM Careers & Skills Engagement Project – Call for support from industry!
03/01/2025
UKSTEM Ltd is a Yorkshire-based STEM educational consultancy and resources development business
UKSTEM Ltd is a Yorkshire-based STEM educational consultancy and resources development business with 10 years’ experience in supporting schools, colleges and universities in teacher training as well as developing resources and delivering STEM activities to children and young people. We are currently working to build a local STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) business with education network with the aim of connecting primary schools in the East Riding of Yorkshire to local industry. If children can see and hear about real-life opportunities, learn about the variety of STEM businesses and have their minds opened to future careers, directly from in our region we can look to re-address the imbalances of gender stereotyping and inspire the next generation of the local work force.
It is vital that careers related learning and development starts at primary age. By the time children are 8 years old, many will already have formed their own perceptions on gender stereotypes – they will see jobs as belonging to one sex more than the other and rule out jobs that are the wrong status and level of difficulty for them and which do not fit their sense of where they belong. Learning in school also is a lot more fun and can make sense to young people if they can recognise the relevance to real-life and how what they learn in school relates to the world of work.
We are looking for local STEM businesses to support primary schools in a variety of ways which could include:
• Short 30 minute assemblies/talks in school to talk about your STEM business – including careers and skills that are required in your company.
• Supporting schools in connecting your business to a school curriculum topic. For example construction links with a ‘structures’ Design Technology project or topic; pharmaceuticals links to a science topic, graphic design links to ICT etc – the possibilities are endless!
• A class visit to your business site – workplace tour with talks from employees (giving children the opportunity to find out about career pathways)
• Supporting an in-school ‘Awareness Day/Event’ – many primary schools will run ‘Careers Week’ awareness events or ‘STEM Focus’ days. Could you offer a workshop or a talk as part of these types of events?
In addition to this we would be looking to organise and deliver occasional in-person network meetings, which although will be entirely optional to attend, these will provide valuable opportunities for teachers and businesses to ‘connect’ and form partnerships.
To enable us to gauge interest from local business and organisations in supporting primary schools, we have created a very short online form to capture your responses to this proposal – the form can be completed via the link below and we would be extremely grateful to hear from you. https://forms.office.com/e/us3YZTdE94
If you would like to contact us directly about our work and the primary schools STEM project, please email sally@ukstem.uk
