Student enthusiasm for STEM subjects is infectious at engineering and cyber campus

The enthusiasm of the young students at Gloucestershire’s Berkeley Green engineering and cyber campus is infectious.

Here we have young people voting to leave their secondary school and embark on training which I believe will stand them in great stead for future employment opportunities.

I have to say that these young people now at Berkeley are, in my view, the standard bearers for a new era of economic prosperity for the county of Gloucestershire.

Remember that this is the county where the jet engine was born. This is the county that houses GCHQ and where the government has sanctioned a new Cyber Park in Cheltenham.

But we need those digitally minded young people who will carry forward what has always been a beacon for precision engineering in our county.

Up until now, digitally savvy young people have found it difficult to achieve their ambitions in this growing business sector.

Berkeley, run by South Gloucestershire and Stroud College, on the site of the decommissioned nuclear power station, is now becoming the ideal breeding ground for the young engineers of the future.

The students, and there are around 300 of them currently, are travelling up to an hour and half to get to Berkeley every morning but they love it.

They love what I thought was the infectious atmosphere of learning in the cyber, digital and engineering area.

They all say that this is unlike normal school. They study the main subjects, of course, but spend most of their time with hands-on learning in engineering, cyber and digital.

This is an avenue of learning that their secondary schools could not provide, and that is why these students have voted to leave and go to Berkeley.

A brave decision and talking to some of these students, I was so impressed by their determination to achieve their dream of good jobs and a future.

I just wish that some schools were more enthusiastic in encouraging students keen on engineering and digital to go to Berkeley.

It is to some schools, of course, not in their interest both in terms of revenue and their league tables.

But what is more important: a student’s ambition or the school’s ambition?

Certainly, Kevin Hamblin, the chief executive of South Gloucestershire and Stroud College, wants more of our schools which do not provide these engineering and digital courses to realise they must do the right thing.

“The statutory duty of the local authorities is to ensure every child has a place - I am not interested in that here.

“I am interested in ensuring we have engineers and cyber professionals going into the future”, he told me.

“If I ask students at Berkeley what their parents did, they would probably be in engineering or IT.

“So, parents get what we are trying to do here but at the moment, there is no endorsement to say that Berkeley is a specialist centre.”

Kevin is pressing for more funding – “My argument is that you cannot get more specialised than what we are doing at Berkeley for your young people.

“We are spending up to £200,000 a year bussing students to Berkeley which means we cannot use that money to give them the specialist education they need for the benefit of the employers.

“Our young adults should have access to the very best we can provide for them. But there is a switch that needs to go off in some people’s heads which says it doesn’t come at a cost.

“It is an investment and the best investment you can ever make for the county. If they train here and are employed here they are contributing to the economy of Gloucestershire.

“This is our engineering and cyber academy at 14."