Diary Entry - September

In spite of an even more hectic start to the year than usual, the Rolls-Royce Science Prize team at Ashton have made impressive progress.

I have ordered two camcorders to be used by students during their (hopefully) many trips to scientific workplaces this year. We plan to get them to edit these so that they can feature on the website. I have also been in touch with many scientific organisations with a view to getting information that the website needs. Primarily, I have been liaising with the Industrial trust to establish local contacts. I have arranged to a visit to Springfields Fuels Limited for our Additional Applied Science GCSE group in early October, and Steve is currently tailoring a program for them to meet their needs. I have also been in touch with Warburton’s in Bolton to arrange a trip to cover the Food Science part of the course, and the University of Central Lancashire have kindly offered to lay on a couple of days to show our students how to extract and visualise their own DNA - a fantastic offer that we’re all looking forward to! I am also trying to gather the support of our local newspaper, the Lancashire Evening Post, who are keen to highlight our success and promote our project.

I am also drafting a questionnaire to go home to parents and carers with Stuart in order to find out how many of them use Science in their jobs. Hopefully, this will help the students to see just how relevant science is to the real world, and get us some useful information for the website in the process! Stuart is also working hard to get an engineering project up and running. The plan is to get a group of lower school students to build a racing car that will be used compete with other schools. It is still in its fledgling stages though, and space is the big stumbling block at present.

Steph has been hounding local scientific businesses in order to establish links that will bring about the ‘Apprenticeships Fair’ that we intend to hold in school to coincide with National Apprenticeships Week. We have already made contact with other schools to gauge opinion, and we anticipate a great deal of interest within the Preston area. Steph has managed to find out that the National Advanced Apprentice of the Year 2008 lives in the vicinity, and not just that but she is a former Ashton student! Rachael Hoyle is an absolute gem and is keen to come on board and help with the project as much as she can.

Ian has arranged for the hosting of our website, and we are currently in negotiations with a number of website designers, including some from within the school itself. His next job is to try to get the website endorsed by our exam board. Gemma’s role as Head of Key Stage 3 Science has prompted her to scrap the current schemes of work and re-write them from scratch. An ambitious project that allows us to fully utilise the website lower down the school by looking at the vocational applications of science knowledge and skills. She has already identified a few opportunities, but is keen to do much more, including trips to Total Bitumen and BAE Systems.

A good start that we are keen to build on in October!

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