Newcastle-under-Lyme College (NULC) hosted its annual
construction project on Tuesday 30 June and Wednesday 1 of
July with 20 pupils attending from a variety of different schools across Staffordshire.
There were four schools that participated in the project,
sending five of their most skilled and practical students to compete to become
Construction Champions 2015. Pupils from St Peters Academy, Biddulph High
School, The Co-operative Academy of Stoke on-Trent and Thistley Hough Academy all attended
the event.
The project was to design and produce a bespoke piece of
garden furniture to be displayed in their own school grounds. Prior to the
‘build days’ the pupils were invited in to college to do all the necessary
calculations and design work. An important skill of any job in the trades is to
have a level ability in both Maths and English, when pricing jobs up or
ordering materials, these are vital skills.
Once the pupils had designed their piece of furniture,
worked out lengths of materials required and calculated real costings for the
‘job’ our lecturers discussed what this would be like in the workplace and how
they would use these skills to a real brief.
The pupils worked in the college’s state of the art
professional workshops and were required to wear industry standard steel toe
capped boots and overalls to comply with health and safety regulations, so
important in today’s industry.
They learned bricklaying techniques with the block paving
element to the garden piece by the bricklaying lecturers and NULC students
helping out. They were able to work with our carpentry and joinery lecturers to
mould the wood into the shape they wanted.
The design of the garden piece was decorated using paint
techniques which our painting and decorating lecturers assisted the pupils
with. Some schools decided to add some plaster castings to their work and this
was also done in our workshops.
A difficult section of the build was the lighting, the
pupils had to wire two lights to each piece and were shown by our electrical
installation lecturers how this is done. The students did all the important cutting
of the wire before our lecturers connected the circuits.
Each piece was of outstanding quality and the schools were
immensely proud of their achievements but an overall winner had to be decided,
after serious discussions amongst the lecturers it was decided that The Co-operative
Academy of Stoke on-Trent were to be crowned Construction Champions 2015!
Project organiser and Joinery lecturer Chris Johnstone was
thrilled with the quality of this year’s pupils commenting ‘The enthusiasm of
this year’s pupils was fantastic, their quality of work was college standard
even though these pupils are only in Year 10, they should be very proud of
themselves’.
If you are interested in finding out more about the Construction project, contact Gareth or Tara on 01782 254347 or e-mail schools@nulc.ac.uk
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