Budding Heathrow employees test their construction skills
This year, 52 schools in the five surrounding boroughs to Heathrow – Ealing, Hounslow, Hillingdon, Slough and Spelthorne - and more than 3,250 students are expected to participate in the challenge, along with their teachers and parents.
During the course of The Challenge, students will receive a presentation about Heathrow’s new Terminal 2 – The Queen’s Terminal – and will have the opportunity to draw up their own inspired designs for a terminal large enough to fit six of their colleagues. Students will then use a STIXX machine, an environmentally innovative system that turns newspapers into building rods, and work in groups to translate their designs into reality.
Sundeep Sangha, Heathrow’s Economic Development Manager, said: ‘Heathrow is committed to reducing skills gaps in fields like engineering, doing our part to help our local economy, and at the same time raising academic achievements and aspirations of young people.’
As well as fitting in with curriculum Key Stage 2 structures, the Heathrow Primary School Challenge is based on the Department for Education’s guidelines for Enterprise Education. Enterprise challenge events exercise participants’ decision making, both individually and as a team, develop creativity and encourage confidence in students.
By highlighting the successful engineering story of Heathrow’s Terminal 2, the Primary School Challenge aims to encourage a new generation to explore careers in engineering and address a growing national skills gap in this field. Engineering UK estimates that Britain needs to double the number of recruits into engineering to meet demand. They, along with key members of the engineering community, have called for the doubling of the numbers of students taking GCSE physics, a key subject and route into engineering.
