2020 ENTHUSE Celebration Awards: the winners

The 2020 ENTHUSE Celebration Awards, hosted by STEM Learning, were announced today, celebrating the schools, colleges, teachers and technicians doing fantastic things to deliver top-notch Stem education to their students.

Stem Learning supports schools and colleges to develop their students’ science capital and understanding of the scientific environment that surrounds them, both inside and outside of the classroom.

The aim is to nurture an appreciation of science subjects, as well as an understanding of why Stem links to so many aspects of their life and the broad range of careers and opportunities that a good grounding in Stem can offer.

Boundless enthusiasm for Stem

The first award handed out at this year’s digital ceremony was the Primary Science Teaching Trust Award for Excellence in Stem Teaching (sponsored by the Primary Science Teaching Trust).

The winner was Kate Penarski, from St Bede Primary Academy in Bolton, who took the prize in recognition of her efforts to create a strong culture of Stem engagement throughout the primary schools she works with in her multi-academy trust.

Kate’s boundless enthusiasm for science has seen her build links with museums, Stem ambassadors and even NASA, getting an astronaut to launch a project on space - to some incredulous students.

“It was really bringing that context to the children,” she says. “It was this huge wow factor - it was amazing.”

The judges commented that it was “a pleasure to hear about the great work Kate is doing to promote Stem, though we don’t know where she finds the time to do all of this.”

Real-world experiences

Next up was the ENTHUSE Award for Excellence in Stem Teaching in Secondary, which was given to Jayne Hamilton, from Bannockburn High School in Stirling.

Jayne is a “biology teacher by trade”, but is also helping fellow staff to develop, working on new courses in subjects such as rural skills and lab skills. She has run school-wide events and forged links with local industry, bringing real-world experiences into the classroom to champion Stem careers.

“We’ve had lots of different organisations come into the school, with a Stem focus but also an employability focus as well,” she explains.

Commitment to data

Following this, the ENTHUSE Award for Excellence in Stem Teaching at Post-16 went to Stephen Mariadas, from Exeter College in Devon, for his commitment to data and inspiring a love of it in his students.

Seeing the careers challenges faced by young people in the South West, Stephen began developing a comprehensive set of resources and support for those wanting to pursue a career in data analysis or computing.

To achieve this, he worked in collaboration with all phases of education and with local employers, too, setting his students up for bright, data-based futures.

“In my view, data is science - biology, physics, chemistry, they all revolve around data,” he says. “Being able to manipulate and work with data, that’s where the key skills are.”

Tireless work

Support staff were honoured, too, with the ENTHUSE Award for Excellence in Stem - School and College Technicians and Support Staff.

This year’s winner, technician Angie Ridout, of Dagenham Park Church of England School in East London, had been nominated twice before, finally taking the gong for her tireless work on Stem clubs for both primary and secondary students.

Angie has developed schemes of work that have now been used by 80 other UK schools, and she has more material in development.

She has become an ambassador for Stem clubs, presenting to other technicians all over the country, as well as abroad in Ghana. And she says that seeing the children become inspired makes it all worthwhile. 

“The children get to experience a lot of different experiments than they would [do] in science lessons,” she says. “It gets them so enthused about science, before they go on to their senior schools.”

The Stem umbrella

Next, the ENTHUSE Award for School and College Leadership in Stem was awarded to Mick McCarthy, from King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls in the West Midlands.

Mick is the head of D&T at the school and in two years has led the department from having no students taking the subject at GCSE to having 31 do so. Some of those have gone on to study it at A level, too.

“What I tried to do was determine what the problems were in-house, and then what we could do in terms of training or funding to get more equipment to develop it,” he says.

“I wanted to get them to understand where D&T sits under the Stem umbrella and not see it as a standalone department, but where it sits with those other subjects.”

Raising science capital

The next award touched on a big concern that arose during the Covid-19 lockdown: that pupils who were already struggling to engage with Stem subjects may find it even harder to do so while away from school.

This meant that efforts to raise the science capital of young people became more important than ever, and the bp Award for Outstanding Contribution to Developing Science Capital and Social Mobility recognised this, going to Sarah Eames, from Sandfield Close Primary School in Leicester.

Sarah and the team worked across the curriculum to engage pupils and get them thinking scientifically, using initiatives like Science Week and Stem Ambassadors to create a buzz in the school and to get parents involved, too.

This has continued throughout 2020 with video lessons and Stem activities set for home learning. Sarah explains: “I was quite lucky that I could set science and technology projects that they could do as a family - we abandoned the curriculum a little bit, but I think it benefited everybody in the households.

“It really brought home how cross-curricular science and technology and the maths that goes into it is. It became important because it was something they could all work on together.”

Looking to the future

The final award was for the ENTHUSE Partnership of the Year, honouring those taking part in the programme to get schools to collaborate and support each other in their Stem teaching. Project ENTHUSE itself is a charitable trust which provides the tools and funding for teachers from across the UK to participate in career development and CPD.

This year’s winner, the MK D&T ENTHUSE Partnership (based in Milton Keynes), is a perfect example of how schools working together can help a subject thrive, especially one which is often undervalued, like D&T.

The union has boosted the confidence and skills of its teachers through a variety of methods, from “coffee and cake” networking events to a yearly D&T conference. Laura Lazenby, one of the partnership teachers explains: “D&T departments are normally quite small, so working in a partnership has allowed us to network with other teachers and share good practice and our enthusiasm as well. We’ve been learning lots of new things that we’ve been able to bring back into our lessons.

“We’re quite competitive between the schools, so we like to show off what we’ve done and look towards the future and learn new things.”

For more information on the support offered to teachers by Stem Learning, including CPD and resources, visit its website.