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Fifteen students stand in the middle of a workshop, surrounded by hazards. Loose wires trail along the floor, dangerous tools are lying around discarded and the fire exit is obstructed by wobbling towers of stacked boxes.

If a health and safety inspector so much as glanced inside, they would be astounded by the number of violations and issue a prohibition notice on the spot.

Yet the students, who are fully immersed in their learning and gaining valuable real- life experience of the future environments they will be working in, are completely safe because they are using our virtual reality (VR) environment. Here, they can make mistakes and learn from them before going out to start their careers in the real world.

VR usually gets written off as a gimmick or too expensive to be useful, but in further education it could be a vital tool. Since we installed our two VR suites - known as igloos - at Stoke on Trent College, they have become an integral part of college life for hundreds of students in different subjects, from creative industries and IT to manufacturing and construction.

Why might colleges need a VR igloo? The initiative to install these VR spaces was launched after the college carried out a full review of its curriculum to ensure that it aligns to local enterprise partnership (LEP) employment and skills priorities, particularly in the areas of digital technologies. VR was identified as one of the ways in which we can meet these priorities and deliver an enhanced level of education and training.

We have an igloo at each of our two campuses. They are essentially 5.5m wide and 2.4m high cylinders with a fully immersive 360-degree projection screen and a surround-sound system inside. They can fit up to 15 students, giving them each a 360-degree view of the programmed setting.

What might students see on a typical day? In many professions, health and safety is the first thing students learn. Whether you are planning to enter a motor vehicle workshop, catering kitchen or nursery setting, you need to know how to keep yourself and others safe. Unfortunately, working through health and safety protocols can be pretty dry and recreating hazards in real life can be risky. So, do students always recognise the risks and the seriousness of those risks?

When our students enter the igloo, they can look for and learn about these hazards - the hot cup of coffee left on a table within reach of children in a nursery, or the loose cables in a workshop - and then discuss what they can do to minimise this risk. In a real environment, this would be a massive breach of health and safety regulations, but in the igloo we can simulate a hazardous environment without a single student entering it.

Another group that has benefited massively from the VR installation is our games design students, as it enables them to create 360-degree 2D games. This is the direction the world of gaming is moving in and it means our students are work-ready, making them more employable.

What else? Our media students have been photographing and recording 360-degree images and video to be displayed and interacted with in the igloos, teaching them valuable photo- and video-editing skills, and our graphic design students are planning to use the igloos for their end-of-year exhibition to showcase their work.

We have only scratched the surface of what we can do with this resource.

Does it work? It’s inspiring to see how immersed our students are when they use the igloos. They are enhancing their learning with living experiences that they are far more likely to remember than if they had just read about a scenario in a textbook. They have been really intrigued and impressed and want to get in there as much as possible.

We provide quarterly monitoring returns to the LEP, which show the impact that the equipment is having; for example, the increase in the number of students and employers engaged, and how we have embedded it into our curriculum.

Is it expensive? Honestly, yes. But it is worth it, and we were fortunate that we were able to raise funding of £200,000 from Stoke on Trent and Staffordshire LEP.

Obviously, with that outlay in mind, we have plans to use the igloos even more.

We are now working cross-departmentally to develop tools and experiences for other curriculum areas, such as an interactive anatomy and physiology lecture, where students will be able to delve into and explore the different layers and systems of the human body. This will benefit learners across a range of courses.

We also want to engage with employers so we can recreate more environments for our students to learn in. For example, we plan to create a programme where students can “pull apart” the engine of a car that they wouldn’t usually have access to, such as a Ferrari. Or they can get inside an engine to see all of the parts working while the car is in motion.

Other plans include enabling students to practise welding, or painting and decorating different environments virtually. And we are aiming to set up mock major incidents, such as floods or explosions, for the public service students as part of their table-top scenarios. Students can then respond virtually to the incident based on their role in the scenario.

Ultimately, our aim is for the igloos to be a break from the mundane, to create learning experiences that are engaging and memorable and can be recalled and reused by learners for future assessment and employment.

The potential is huge.

Charlotte Bennett is CPD lead at Stoke on Trent College

This article originally appeared in the 29 May 2020 issue under the headline “Is the power of VR in the palm of FE’s hands?”