Education
Saying yes to geospatial education
“WE train students very early on that in order to get along in professional careers in engineering or construction, they have to say yes to every career development opportunity and meet as many people as they can.” It’s sage advice from Jo Hall, head of professional engineering and digital built environment at Cronton College near Widnes in northwest England. It’s also advice that she takes herself.
Having said yes to the Design Engineer Construct! (DEC) levels 1-3 learning programme early on in her teaching career, she brought it to Cronton with her four years ago, turning Cronton into a DEC Centre of Excellence, alongside its Outstanding Ofsted rating.
She then said yes to running the first-ever DEC Survey School – a joint venture with Class of Your Own and the Survey School, supported by the Survey Association (TSA), Topcon and CICES. The week-long ‘bootcamp’ gave 12 students a crash course in survey basics with expert tuition provided by the Survey School and hands-on experience of total stations, GNSS receivers and laser scanners provided by Topcon. It is a model that is now being rolled out at other DEC schools across the UK.
The latest ‘yes’ is to run the level 3 geospatial survey technician apprenticeship, the first provider in the northwest. The apprenticeship provision was announced in the spring and was at full capacity for its September 2021 start. Geospatial Engineering spoke to Jo Hall about how she ended up saying yes to teaching the built environment and yes to geospatial.
How did you become a teacher?
I studied mechanical engineering at uni and I’ve spent the rest of my life wondering why! I wanted a career that was people-centric and after some time as a business consultant, I realised that I liked performing in front of people and retrained as a design technology teacher. I was introduced to Alison Watson [Class of Your Own chief executive] and Design Engineer Construct! around 11 years ago and I realised that I actually love the built environment!
I used to specialise in supporting disengaged learners with low aspirations and career ambitions. I’m not the nurturing type, but I do have an ‘everyone can do it’ attitude. It is about making educational progress accessible to all. I taught one 16-year-old who had the reading age of a five-year-old, but he was fantastically verbose. He could present high-level technical information but just couldn’t read or write it. Seeing students like that realise they ‘get it’ – it’s like the lightbulb moment, and whomp, off they go.
What is it about DEC that works?
Students love it. They really love it. Everyone has opinions about buildings; we’ve used buildings from the day we’re born and students feel confident talking about the subject content at a really early stage.
Everything students learn in DEC is for the sake of applying it to their own personal project. They can see very clearly how what they’re doing applies to a building and how it applies to industry – and the industry links are just insane! That’s one of the big pulling points for students. They feel like they’re achieving something with a career at the end of it, they’re more motivated and they achieve higher grades.
What are the popular career choices for DEC students?
A lot of students start the course wanting to be an architect. What they really mean is that they want to work in construction but not as a bricklayer. An architect is just the profession that students and parents recognise and can talk about.
Once they start DEC, they very quickly become a land surveyor surveying sites, then an architectural technologist planning materials and specifications, then a structural engineer working out the structural loading in their building, all the way through to a facilities manager. DEC breaks down some of the career misconceptions for students and parents.
Cronton was the first college to pilot the DEC Survey School, how did you get involved in that?
I say yes to Alison [Watson] a lot! I know that when she asks for something, there’s probably a good reason why; it could be an industry reason, an educational reason or, on most occasions, both. With the DEC Survey School I knew that it meant a lot to Alison personally as a former land surveyor. Deep down in her heart, she’s still out in the fields! And it was a no-brainer. Getting students hands-on with experts in the field is exactly the work experience they should be doing. Particularly in a year like this year, where a week of face-to-face work experience has not happened for any single student across the entire country.
The Survey School is an absolute centre of excellence and to have an organisation with that calibre working with our students wasn’t something we’d say no to. We’re flexible enough in our curriculum that we could move things around to accommodate it. Our tutors were enthusiastic enough to get stuck in. And the students were phenomenal. We train them very early on that in order to get along in professional careers in engineering or construction, they have to say yes to everything and meet as many people as they can, because that’s how they will get jobs.
What difference does industry engagement make to students?
It makes a complete difference. Whether students are on a BTEC, DEC or a different qualification, whether level 3, 4 or 5, all of our qualifications, assignments, briefs and learning are based within an industry context.
The way maths can be taught in secondary schools is not necessarily helpful. Students can follow processes that they are taught, but may not be able to apply that learning to different problems or real life scenarios.
I don’t know why anyone would teach anything like engineering or digital built environment not entirely contextualised with industry links. I sit on the built environment board for the Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership and being able to link that strategic insight from industry to education is really important.
On a more micro scale, some of our BTEC units are contextualised with Jaguar Land Rover, as it has a large automotive engineering plant near us at Cronton. Students visit the plant and their assignments are written as if they are either an apprentice of Jaguar Land Rover or an apprentice of a company working for or supplying Jaguar Land Rover. With DEC, because they’re playing different job roles, their engagements with industry are planned against the RIBA plan of work.
We also do a lot of soft skills education with employers. Having someone come in to college who the students haven’t seen before for a mock interview is a more realistic experience for students and the feedback they get is much more genuine.
How much do you focus on softer skills alongside technical?
We have VESPA weeks. V is vision, E is effort, S is systems, P is practice, A is attitude.
Our demographic is white working class, predominantly male, and we have some ‘passive choosers’ – boys who didn’t really know what they wanted to do and they chose engineering or digital built environment without an active plan for progression at the end of the course.
This is very much about their vision and aspirations, but it also impacts on their motivation. There are some students, who do not enjoy maths, for example, who do not realise the high mathematical content in engineering and some professional construction careers.
How much of an issue is maths?
Maths is our biggest curriculum learning barrier. Students who have got a grade 4 – equivalent to an old C pass – in maths may not be mathematically capable enough and might struggle on our engineering and construction courses. Our entry requirement is a grade 5, for this reason.
The way maths can be taught in secondary schools is not necessarily helpful. Students can follow processes that they are taught, but may not be able to apply that learning to different problems or real life scenarios. We run booster sessions alongside teaching engineering and construction maths. We also teach maths visually and kinaesthetically – so students can ‘see’ the maths at work. For example, students can set off a block sliding down a plane and calculate the friction, which is actually a complicated maths concept made easier when you see it. Or they look at loaded beams, which is an abstract mathematical concept, but when they see it and touch it, they get it.
What other barriers do students face?
There are some significant barriers facing a lot of our students. The college is within Halton, the 13th most deprived borough in the country. Over half the students are WP [widening participation], which means they live in a postcode where they’re not likely to make progress equal to their peers.
Learners hit their peaks at different points in time – some courses give them the opportunity to do that and some don’t. Some courses expect 100% from the beginning like A-Levels and some students find their stride later.
Not all of the students come with additional support needs, but often they come from a background where aspirations aren’t necessarily high and they don’t have that vision of becoming, say, a structural engineer. In our VESPA weeks, we do a lot of work on vision with those students, about being aspirational.
Many students say they don’t want to go to university, not because they’re not bright enough, but because they lack the support behind the scenes. There’s a lot of concern over finance and funding, and we talk to them about looking at university debt as an investment that pays for itself time and time again. We have students who will take a much lower level apprenticeship than they could go for, because the pay they’ll get is important to everyone at home.
We’re now running HNCs and HNDs, as the level of funding required for these is much lower than the first year of university and we are hoping they will make higher education more accessible. Students are carrying on with the same tutors, the same team, in the same building, they can live at home and they know the bus route – a lot of those barriers are taken down.
We face the same issues with gender disparity as industry. We have around 10% females on our engineering courses, and 15% on the built environment. We know that when girls hit the age of seven, they don’t see themselves as STEM learners, so we do a lot of engagement with primary schools for that age group. We also work with companies to pilot and host STEM activities for secondary school girls.
Why run the level 3 geospatial apprenticeship and why now?
We already run construction and engineering apprenticeships, and we felt we were well placed to offer this one. Geospatial is such a specialist topic, I think some colleges have struggled to work out how to run it, but we’ve got that expertise in place, we’re rated outstanding for our apprenticeship provision, and we’re really looking forward to delivering it.
We already deliver elements and insights into land surveying and other students will benefit from having the geospatial apprentices and their kit on site. Having them here will open up geospatial careers as further potential positive destinations for our students.
The market for the apprenticeship is certainly there. As a college, we couldn’t do it unless it was financially viable. Having spoken to lots of different companies, from one-man-bands to SMEs, to some of the big guys, it is very clear that a lot of companies have been waiting for this to happen.
There’s a lot of fear about taking on apprentices and the paperwork, the finance, the mentoring – it’s a big unknown for a lot of companies. And that’s something we can help with. We deal with levies, with non-levy paying, with digital accounts, with training plans, with contracts every day. We can support employers through a process a lot of them are daunted by.
We have had interest in a joint twintrack with geospatial and our digital engineering level 3 apprenticeship – which I didn’t expect. A lot of surveying companies have said they’re looking for skills in information and data management and BIM, with a couple of companies sending one apprentice for geospatial and one for digital engineering – matching each other skill for skill.
Do you see the future of education as being in apprenticeships or university?
A mix of both. Learners hit their peaks at different points in time – some courses give them the opportunity to do that and some don’t. Some courses expect 100% from the beginning like A-Levels and some students find their stride later.
We have students who have been on that trajectory of getting great GCSEs, really great A-Levels and they start a degree and think this isn’t right for them, and they jump to a level 3 apprenticeship. Apprentices tend to be older students who haven’t found their niche. Graduates bring an awful lot to companies, but an apprentice is going to be a really capable pair of hands quite quickly.
T-Levels will be very interesting to watch. We’ll be running the built environment ones and including DEC as part of that. T-Levels will provide a good opportunity for sectors like surveying to look at learners and offer industry placements to them.
It’s been interesting to look at the uptake for apprenticeships, degree apprenticeships and degrees. Many of our students see degree apprenticeships as the ultimate goal but they don’t connect them with going to university until we ask them where they think they’ll be doing their level 4, 5 and 6 learning. These higher apprenticeships have really seen growth, indicating that the university graduate route is not necessarily seen as the only route to a professional career anymore. Different learning styles suit different types of learners, and post-COVID, we’re going to need this mix of options available.
Jo Hall, Head of Professional Engineering and Digital Built Environment, Cronton College, was talking to Abigail Tomkins
jo.hall@cronton.ac.uk
Win a GEO Squad comic!
CICES has five copies of the GEO Squad comic to give away to those who can Crack the Code. Can you work out what number the Last Surveyor represents with clues from Maddison, Kwame, Miles and Setsuko?
Send your answers to ces@cices.org with ‘GEO Squad competition’ in the subject line. The winners will be drawn at random on 1 November 2021.
The first GEO Squad comic was published earlier this year, bringing together the popular comic strips into one 44-page book, complete with puzzles.
It can be purchased from £6.99 at www.getkidsintosurvey.com