With all the free resources that I’ve been creating for schools and home educators over the past few months I haven’t had time to post recently. As usual they had a thread running through them of developing cultural capital in terms of what is going on in the local business community, new developments, awareness of companies and so on. The feedback I’ve had from teachers and parents has been fantastic and has made me more determined than ever to continue my work in this way.

One of the big projects that I am currently working on links back to an event I have been involved with since before it had even been invented! Bring It On North East is an amazing event held every year in Sunderland, which is the nearest we could get to the centre of the NE!

Click on the image to visit the films.

Over two days there are over 2000 pupils visiting around 60 engineering companies to meet the engineers, find out what they do and get to ‘interact’ with some pretty cool kit. The event is always free and up to 15 pupils per school can attend. With the current situation the event has been cancelled this year but I’ve been commissioned to create some ‘meet the engineer’ short films.

They are free to access and several schools, Primary and Secondary, have already been sending them out to pupils as part of their home learning links.The key focus of the films is to generate a sense of relatability. For far too long we have tried to engage children in ‘career’ videos by talking about paths and what a job entails, skills and so on. Those things ARE important but not as a starting point. Far more effective is allow pupils to identify with employees. Do you buy an iPhone because it has all the best features? Probably not. More likely it is because you like the culture around it, you want to ‘be that person who has an iPhone’. Well that is very much the approach all my work takes.

It isn’t: What do you want to be?

It is: Who do you want to be like?

At this moment where people are losing jobs, self employed people can’t get out to work in the way that they did before and imagery on the news seems to reflect a growing national discontentment let loose through some key issues, we need the positivity and stability in pupil’s minds that the world has great opportunities for them, working for brilliant local companies with brilliant people.