UK: ‘Champions for Wind’ Highlights Offshore Wind Job Opportunities

Champions for Wind is a careers education programme launched by Forewind, development partner for the Dogger Bank offshore wind farm zone, working together with the Humberside Engineering Training Association (HETA).

The students have all been at secondary schools with teacher “champions” who were awarded bursaries through Champions for Wind to develop their own curriculum-based resources. The aim has been to highlight the range and types of potential job opportunities in the growing offshore wind industry.

Nine teachers have developed innovative curriculum materials tailored to their own students and covering a broad range of subjects including humanities, geography, business, science and design and technology.

Utilising their own resources, local networks and relevant specialists, the teachers’ interpretation of the brief has yielded a wide range of creative results. These include: student-produced videos of classmates acting in roles of people in the industry; a series of booklets aimed at lower end learners to highlight service needs; a documentary style film; school lessons on ethics linked to environment and culture, and a wind turbine for camping.

The outcome of their work to date will be shared amongst the involved teachers this week (Friday, July 13) as the “champions” come together to present their projects and give feedback on their experiences at a workshop on at the National STEM Centre in York.

Forewind Stakeholder Manager, Nikki Smith said that while this has only been the first phase, the feedback from both students and teachers has been very positive.

“Each programme was devised to be transferable to a second group of schools, which means a large body of useful materials has been developed,” Miss Smith said. “We look forward to even more students being involved as the initiative enters its second phase.”

Director of Educational Programmes at HETA, Mike Cargill, said the teachers have produced high quality resources that will be rolled out to other schools in the Yorkshire catchment area.

“A series of evaluation tasks have been carried out to measure the impact on teaching and learning and early results show it has been a very well received initiative that has led to a very real improvement in pupil’s understanding of the industry.” 

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Offshore WIND staff, July 11, 2012; Image: Forewind