Part II: Class of Your Own’s Alison Watson discusses impact of skills shortage

In the second of a four-part series, UK Construction Online’s Matt Brown speaks to Alison Watson, Managing Director and founder of Class Of Your Own Limited – creators of the Design Engineer Construct! (DEC!) programme.

Design Engineer Construct! is an accredited learning programme for secondary-school age students developed to create and inspire the next generation of Built Environment professionals. Through a project-based approach, DEC! applies pure academic subjects to the latest construction industry practices. The result is young people with real-world practical experience and employability skills.

In part II, Alison discusses the experience of engaging with students and what impact the skills shortage has had on the DEC! programme.

Engaging with students through live projects sounds like it would naturally inspire them.  This must be a rewarding experience for all involved?

It’s brilliant. There are now well over 3,000 kids studying ‘Design, Engineer, Construct!’ and I feel like a mum to all of them! We’ve just had the Ugandan School Parabongo Challenge – the four girls who won were just amazing. You can see what it does for them and they just take in their stride. I am in awe of what they can produce.

I used to say land surveying is the best job in the world but it’s not actually! My new job of encouraging children to be the land surveyors (and architects and engineers!) of the future is a truly rewarding experience. I’m 100% fulfilled, high on happiness, all the time.

Has the well-publicised construction industry skill shortage led to an increase of schools looking to offer the DEC! Programme?

Not at all really. Ridiculous, isn’t it? There’s a bigger push in Scotland and Wales to a certain extent because Construction is generally seen as a good industry to aspire to, although I suspect it is still considered trade and craft opportunity. I think the main reason there is an issue in England is because schools are driven by core academic subjects. Children have to study Maths and English – that’s a given and that’s fine. They also have to study humanities, science and language subjects to meet English Baccalaureate targets.

Vocational, or as the government now refers to them, ‘technical and professional’ qualifications, are still seen as non academic in many schools, and as such, subjects such as DEC! can easily be ignored. Essentially, kids can be left with just one option choice from DEC!, Art, Drama, Music, PE, Sport, Design Technology, and a host of other creative and technical subjects.

Although’ Design, Engineer, Construct’! has academic parity, it’s not part of the EBacc. Most schools don’t see the construction industry as a destination for high attainers, and so you lose young people traditional Law, Medicine, Science and Research careers. The construction industry just doesn’t appear on their radar.

I can give you a good example: at my local school, top-achieving children didn’t have a clue that they could be engineers. Their careers advice was limited to a pile of Russell Group University prospectuses. It’s terrible, but unfortunately, the construction industry is at fault as much as the education system, because we never champion what we do.

It frustrates me; I still believe there’s so much more we could do.

The delays in government announcements surrounding the apprenticeship levy are only making things worse. We are saying “Join our industry; be an apprentice; apprenticeships are fantastic for everybody”, and I thoroughly believe they are, yet the fear of the unknown blocks organisations from stepping up to the challenge. Every time you thing you are making progress, you end up taking a step backwards.

Does this mean that the skills shortage will hit infrastructure and housing projects with a lack of people to build them?

Yes, I’m sure it will, especially when schools see bricklaying, plastering and joinery as a job for those who ‘If you can’t do anything else, do that’. We need to champion the fact that bricklayers, plasterers and joiners need maths. Schools admit to sending kids to construction college because they believe they can’t do anything else. I’m quite sure many of these kids are highly capable, they just learn in a different, more practical, way.

Colleges can turn out some wonderful bricklayers who bypassed the school system because they didn’t achieve the grades they wanted. They need ‘functional maths’ – applied maths – but sadly, the general consensus is that applied maths is for people who can’t do pure maths and statistics. It’s bonkers. Absolute bonkers.

Clacton Coastal Academy is in one of the most deprived areas of the country and depravation is also linked to low attainment. Yet CCA is turning out DEC! students who are being offered great jobs with major contractors and consultants. These kids are fantastic and have been given a chance to prove themselves. The school genuinely believes that the construction industry can offer these amazing life chances.

The same is true at St Ambrose Barlow RC High School in Salford. Those students, even the ones who attained lower grades in DEC!, chose to come into built environment; going to college to study bricklaying and so on, because they want to become bricklayers. They see the worth, they know they’ll need special skills, especially in numeracy and literacy.

We need to put the message out there that whatever you do in construction, you can have a brilliant career. You can carve out a niche for yourself no matter what your academic ability.

Our government is constantly sending out the message that our country needs to up its game when it comes to raising attainment in numeracy and literacy. Instead of spending so much money on deploying teachers from Singapore I’d love to get Maths teachers into construction for a week to spend time with architects, surveyors, engineers and trade and crash specialists – because the maths they use is just like that taught in British classrooms they teach. I have worked with maths teachers and showed them some of the applications we use on site – most memorably Pythagoras for setting out, and most would love to take the kids out into the fresh air and show them. However, there is not enough time – teachers have to crash through an ever expanding GCSE syllabus and hope they hit their target grades.

I’m not criticising maths teachers; I’m basically saying that when pupils question the use of maths in everyday life, saying ‘I don’t like Maths, it’s boring, I’ll never use it’ etc it would be great to show them applications that bring the subject to life. There’s no better industry than construction for doing that. Think of a school building, a classroom, as a fantastic tool – so many opportunities to use trigonometry and quadratic functions, area, volume….

To read part I of this interview, click here.

Part III will appear soon.

If you would like to read more articles like this then please click here

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