We are grateful to Leonardo, long-standing partners of The Smallpeice Trust and passionate advocates for inspiring the next generation of engineers. Since 2012, Leonardo has worked alongside The Smallpeice Trust to expand STEM opportunities for young people, helping to deliver engaging engineering experiences to students across schools, regions and age groups. Reflecting on more than a decade of partnership, Kris Harrison, Head of Systems Engineering at Leonardo, shares how working together has strengthened STEM outreach, improved young people’s understanding of engineering, and demonstrated the power of creativity, innovation and resilience in STEM education. Here’s his story.
What inspired your organisation to support The Smallpeice Trust and STEM education?
Back in 2012, when I first started running our STEM programme here in Luton, I was looking for ways to scale up our STEM activities, as at the time they were very dependent on individuals. When I heard about The Smallpeice Trust’s STEM Activity Days, I knew that partnering with them was going to be the ideal solution. Not only could they offer activities that would be repeatable across schools, across regions and year to year, but they could also be tailored to different age groups, for example primary students, allowing us to work with a wider range of young people.
How does this partnership align with your company’s goals or values?
The partnership supports our goal of engaging more young people with STEM and engineering. The Smallpeice Trust provides activities that are scalable, repeatable and adaptable for different age groups, helping us reach more students and broaden access to STEM learning. Their creativity, forward thinking and passion for STEM education strongly align with our own commitment to inspiring the next generation of engineers.
What impact have you seen from your involvement, on young people, employees or the wider community?
The work that we do with The Smallpeice Trust has really impacted young people both collectively and individually. If you look at the metrics that we collect from the STEM Days, they show how much of a really big improvement it has on students’ understanding of engineering.
During the pandemic, when school set-ups were disrupted and companies such as ourselves had to reduce or stop outreach programmes, students found it much harder to engage with STEM. The Trust was determined to continue reaching young people. They created STEM-at-home resources, turned to live streaming, and worked with us to create and deliver engineering activity kits to local schools. These required minimal teacher instruction and enabled students to continue engaging with STEM independently. The schools absolutely loved them.
We are so grateful to Leonardo for their ongoing support and look forward to working with them in future years to build a better, brighter future for our young STEM enthusiasts.Â
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