I am standing here, in Coventry Motor Museum, watching a bunch of kids pushing plastic rods and wheels and clips together to make little cars. A sort of 21st century update of the Meccano I used to so love bending and abusing. Only now they have no nuts and bolts. Possibly some safety freak somewhere said nuts and bolts is dangerous ‘cos some kid somewhere might swallow them. I have a certain difficulty imagining even the dumbest kid making himself a nut-and-bolt sandwich, and my instinctive answer would be that if you don’t know how to do up a nut and bolt then that could be far more dangerous in later life. But then, what do I know…

Some of these kids today are five, some are maybe 11. But most are 30, 40, 50, anything up to and beyond 70.

It is called education.

Looking back on it over nearly half a century, I suppose I had an education. Can’t in all honesty say it shows a lot these days.

The Grammar School I dragged myself into every morning was a hotch-potch of self-satisfied if slightly crumbling old buildings overshadowed by huge cubular ‘fifties blocks added to increase pupil capacity and already oozing rust-stains as if slowly vomiting on the seat of learning. Plus portable huts for hastily-added classrooms which froze or boiled according to season, they being not entirely fit for purpose.

The teaching staff to some extent matched the buildings. Some were World War One veterans with now-greying hair. Some – most, I suppose – were a decade on from World War Two, and somewhat given to the steely eye which had formerly commanded an army platoon or an RAF squadron and was most certainly not going to take no hassle from the likes of us. And a few were newly graduated and therefore pointedly ignored by the rest of the staff and most of the pupils. Except for some of the sixth-form girls, but that was a matter for them.

All of the qualified teachers wore gowns at all times, which made them slightly resemble ravens, and all of these ravens signally failed to inspire the young and malleable Lecomber with any enthusiasm about anything whatsoever except perhaps playing truant sometimes. All taught their captives by rote with very little – some, but very little – reference to a hapless pupil’s aptitude or otherwise for any particular line of endeavour. I recall being constantly harried by the music teacher – the music teacher, fer Chrissake – for what he called my wilful ineptitude. The detail that I was partially tone deaf and simply couldn’t understand the wailings and howlings weighed as nothing.

And it worked the other way round, too. The fact that at the age of 15 this malleable Lecomber ran the school aeromodelling club and also built a hybrid motorbike in his bedroom (a Vincent-Norton, for those with long memories) meant to my Maths and Physics teachers – exactly nothing. Nobody thought; “Aha, this is an engineer in the making!”  I was still just one of the faceless 35 in the class.

Fast-forward to the present.

And well, well, of course that wouldn’t happen now. No, not now in our modern education system.  A kid’s talent not noticed in the classroom and not nurtured and inspired?  No, no, that can’t happen in these enlightened days…

Like hell it can’t.

These are the facts.

Those primary school teachers who do a three-year degree course to become qualified, actually in most cases spend between two and four months in University and the rest of the time in ‘teacher training’ – in theory learning their trade in the classroom, but also being used as cheap teachers along the way.

In those short months in university they get taught class control, ideally without the teaching aid of an AK47, and they get taught that the Government’s primary objective is that the kids get crammed into their frequently reluctant skulls the rudiments of literacy and numeracy – the old three R’s: Reading’, Ritin’, and ‘Rithmatic. Only the words change.

During their university time these teachers are also taught to teach technology. This takes up time in the course. Just how much time varies from place to place. It might be as much as five days, more usually less than three days, and sometimes as little as one half of one day.

I’ll say that again. In case you didn’t believe it. This is the fact.

A primary school teacher on a three-year course normally gets one to five days devoted to technology.

Then we have our Government looking all astonished about how came it that we seem to be running out of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians. Surprise, surprise…

Okay, things get somewhat better as you move into secondary education. It is open to any teacher to concentrate and qualify in a particular field, usually by knuckling down to a post-graduate course. Thus you get teachers specifically trained in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects. Now this is improving, yes…?

Well – ye-e-sss…

But with a downside…

Because out there in the real world what actually happens is that teachers who train to become what they call subject-specific don’t tend to go into first school teaching – they head straight off to secondary schools or higher. They don’t go into primary schools.

Result? There are very few STEM-trained teachers in primary education.

Please be very clear that this is NOT a dig at primary school teachers. Very, very far from it. Ninety-nine per cent of the primary school teachers I have ever met have been highly conscientious, deeply caring of the children in their charge, and possessed of the patience of Job with several saints grated on top. If I was put in charge of a bunch of five-to-ten year olds I’d probably resort to drowning some of the more obnoxious specimens within a week, which I admit could lead to the odd critical remark. But these gals and guys just smile placidly, hide occasionally gritted teeth, and sail smoothly on.

But they cain’t teach what they don’t know. And ain’t been taught to teach. The teachers haven’t let the kids down – the system has let the teachers down. 

That, sadly, is the fact.

Progressives like Lord Drayson are aware of this, and changes emphasising technology are happening. But in the juggernaut of the education system changes like this do not happen overnight. Government paperwork changes happen quickly enough all right, much to everybody’s distraction and frustration – but that is just worthless bureaucratic crap, and universally recognised as such. Real attitude changes sort of seep down over a period of years.

The result being that kids today in their formative years – their primary school years – mostly haven’t been exposed to the wonders of science and technology, or at least not much. And yes, I mean the wonders. I make no excuse for the word. The wonders. And for years our kids have not been shown them in their early education. Which is exactly when most kids – consciously or sub-consciously – start shaping the course of their lives.

Enter BLOODHOUND.

STEM by stealth

The idea, quite simply, is that BLOODHOUND sparks up science. What it means is if you’ve got an iconic project going on like a Land Speed Record attempt and teacher starts talking about it in class – well, if that don’t grab the little darlings’ attention, the teacher probably has drowned them all, but just not told anybody. As the BLOODHOUND Education Team (BET) are fond of saying, it introduces STEM by stealth.

Later in the education chain it has the further advantage that students can tackle real live problems in real live time on one of the most difficult projects on the planet, since BLOODHOUND intends to be totally open about design and performance data whereas aircraft designers, racing car designers etc have to be secretive to the point of paranoia. Who knows – some dedicated student somewhere might even come up with an angle on something the BLOODHOUND Design Team hasn’t thought of, in which case the team will either have to hire him or kidnap him.

So BLOODHOUND is a tremendous educational vehicle and will increasingly become more so as the project progresses. “Mum, you know that car we saw on telly last night – well, I know how to measure the speed and work out the axle loads! That’s really cool!”

Cool, yes – and that’s the idea. Engineering is cool…

Easy? No.

Nobody ever said this adventure was going to be easy. No part of it. Not the car design. Not the car build. Not the desert search. And equally, not the education side. Very, very highly worthwhile, yes. But not easy. Especially at this stage of the project, when the car is more or less non-existent except in cyber-space, CAD designs, and endless miles of calculus. There is a very real Eurofighter jet engine plus the biggest hybrid rocket ever made in England – which by the time you read this may have stunned the desert around its remote California testing ground with the unearthly thunder of its first full firing. But there is no actual car.

Which leaves the – at the moment, tiny – BLOODHOUND Education Team, led by one Dave Rowley, with something of a sales job on their hands.

The obstacle, particularly in primary and early secondary schools is, to be brutally frank, the not-invented-here syndrome. Schools have been bimbling along for years with what technology syllabi they have – and that’s what they’re used to. It produces results they’re used to – and they don’t, by and large, expect much better.

Which of course is why we’re running out of scientists and engineers. Stick to an outdated system in a new world order and you must not be astonished if the new world order pees on your left foot.

But grass-root change is never easy.

Go along to a hard-working teacher who has a whole pile of books to be marked preferably sometime yesterday and then a raft of government forms waiting to be filled in by the day before. And you tell him/her that you’ve got this wonderful new delivery system for STEM subjects which will fire up interest and produce a whole new standard of results. All it will take is a bit of time to get your head round it and then organise some extra-curricular activities. Or, in the case of primary schools, you can take a bit longer getting your head round it and then actually persuade your school to revise your present syllabus to incorporate it…

Tell them this. True as it all is…

And what you may encounter, not entirely surprisingly, is a certain smidgin of sales resistance. Particularly from comfortable Mrs Ada Alwaysthere who, bless her, has been teaching classes 2 to 4 for 35 years and wouldn’t recognise a Land Speed Record car if it stood on her foot.

So you, the BLOODHOUND Education Team, have a marketing task.

So let’s think in marketing-think…

Objective? Leaving Universities apart in this instance, to reach the energetic, go-getting teachers and heads in primary and secondary schools.

Simple enough objective.

Methodology? 

Aah – a bit more difficult…

Most of the BLOODHOUND educational material is available via the website. But quite clearly you cannot rely on teachers and schools simply bumping into the website by chance. So how do you tell ‘em all it’s there?

Go visit each school and give’em a pep-talk?

Well, yes, that will – and definitely does – produce results. Except for the minor issue that the present BET is about five strong at the core – and there is a target audience of about 20,000 schools in the UK. So this could obviously take a moment – in fact enough moments for BLOODHOUND to have done the record and been sitting in a museum for a decade before you’ve got round the lot.

So okay – send in BLOODHOUND Ambassadors from the 1K Club to the schools?

Well, again, this will work. But BLOODHOUND Ambassadors are not selected lightly, and there is never going to be a marching army of them. Well … maybe there might be sometime – but not yet.

And there are still more than 20,000 schools in the UK.

So … still a marketing problem.

And clearly at least part of the answer is that you have to expand exponentially – get more and more teachers on-side and more and more kids on-side so as to set up a sort of self-sustaining expansion.

Possible. Not easy, but possible. In fact the only way.

Forgive me if I digress a moment. I come from an era when I vaguely imagined school textbooks kinda just happened. A teacher would say: “Get out your Genghis Khan on Maths and turn to page 63” – and I would dutifully do so. Well, most of the time, anyway. If I’d thought about it at all – which I didn’t – I’d probably have assumed that God wrote the textbooks, and that was that.

Seems it doesn’t work like that. Probably didn’t then, and certainly doesn’t now.

Seems there’s huge competition in the education supply business, and BLOODHOUND has to vie for attention like everyone else. Seems that no vendor of anything can get around 20,000 schools in a year, so they all go to education institutions, centres, and suppliers as well as the end-users. To seminars, exhibitions, conferences, dinners, expositions, competitions – any organisation or event where teachers and/or pupils are involved or will gather. And BLOODHOUND has to compete – indeed, to overwhelm – to keep up the impetus.

Alphabet soup

And here we run straight into alphabet soup.

The BLOODHOUND Education Team have to get the message out to and via organisations such as BEEA, MOSI, DCFS, PTC, DATA, NPE, EPSRC, HEA, DTA, SSAT, TDA, CREST, BSA, RAE, SMS, NEBPN, SEAs, EDT, IET – and on and on.

Whoever the heck they all are.

The world’s military organisations undoubtedly hold the record for the haughty use of acronyms – but the British educational system definitely runs them a close second. Give me any outfit’s initials and I will remember exactly who they are for perhaps ten minutes. Give me 50 of them and I just curl up in the foetal position. There should be a First Class Hons Degree available for just figuring out who all the institutions are, what they do, how they interlock, and indeed how they may at times engage in internecine warfare.

And this is where the tiny BLOODHOUND team excels. The likes of Dave Rowley, Dawn Fitt, Kate Bellingham, and Ian Galloway know their way through this maze of complication the way a London cabbie knows his way around Soho. They know how to cherry-pick the system to reach as many teachers and kids as possible.

Nonetheless…

How can such a small team hope to make more than the slightest dent in this turgidly complicated educational establishment?

Well… they have

Well, the answer is… they have. And not a small dent, either. A big dent.

In less than a year the BET have signed-up 2,000 schools – roughly 50/50 primary and secondary.

Which means 10 per cent of all the schools in the UK.

Plus about 100 further education emporiums – colleges and universities.

No small achievement. In fact, huge, amazing achievement.

Okay, there are a-ways still to go. You don’t pep-up a nation’s STEM-awareness overnight, however sexy your educational vehicle. For example, “signed-up” via the website (click the ‘Education’ button) means a school can download lesson material. What is lacking (and apparently this is always the case in education) is feedback from the schools as to just what they are using.

So as BLOODHOUND moves on, so the BET team must evolve – and must, inevitably, grow larger. And how can it do that when BLOODHOUND needs every red cent for expanding the design team and building the car…?

Well, well – taps side of nose in confidential manner – there is more than one way of skinning a cat. And there are a couple deals about to be signed – crosses fingers there are no slips ‘twixt cup and lip – which will provide the BET with a considerable boost in fire-power both in the UK and abroad. Watch this space.

All of which brings me back – by, admittedly, a rather roundabout route – to the Coventry Motor Museum where we started.

For what these kids – these kids of all ages – are doing is trying their hand at the problem which was set to under-11’s in 800 UK schools in the final of the 2009 K’Nex Challenge.

K’Nex is the American company who produce all these rods, clips and wheels, and sell them in construction kits. They sponsor this vast junior engineering competition as a contribution to education. And this year in the UK they themed on BLOODHOUND along with the BET, first asking kids to produce a car which would go furthest and straightest off a particular launch platform, and in the finals challenging them to devise a system which would turn the car round between record runs. On this 1K Club day at Coventry parties of adults and kids are being fed into the system for 40 minutes a time so that maybe 300 people young and old have a brief go at the problems.

Ha! Piece of cake!  I’ll show them!  I’ve got an engineering degree from the University of Life!  I’ll produce a car which surprises them all…!

Well… it does that. It hurtles off the launcher and instantly surprises everybody – especially me – by slowing right down and then turning right and hitting the wall.

The need for scientific education? It’s there. It’s real.