We are delighted to share our CREST Awards partnership project report. This outlines some of the amazing work that the funding from Mewburn towards the British Science Association’s (BSA) CREST Awards programme has achieved over the past two years.
As our main firmwide charity, we have made donations of £88,000 to BSA to help young people, no matter what their background, get into science. The BSA’s mission is to transform the diversity and inclusivity of science; to reach under-served audiences; and to increase the number of people who are actively engaged and involved in science. Last year our focus was on helping kids complete the CREST awards. This year we have focussed on enabling schools to run them.
Covered fully in the report, the work achieved as a result of our funding includes:
1) Supporting schools and teachers
Webinars
A series of three webinars were held in March 2022 for over 90 teachers. The purpose of these were to introduce primary teachers to CREST to provide guidance on running the scheme during lessons or after school, and to demonstrate a number of activities. These were also videoed and were accessed a further 70 times.
Special collection of resources
While funding is not the only barrier to the uptake of CREST Awards in school, it is still an issue as school budgets are ever stretched. However, there are lots of CREST activities that require relatively little complicated kit or equipment, and can be delivered using the type of resources typically found in classrooms.
We created two special resource packs – one for Key Stage 1 (CREST Star) and one for Key Stage 2 (CREST SuperStar) – which featured only low-resource activities. Published in June 2022 they were uploaded to the CREST resources library, and publicised via the BSA and CREST digital and social channels. To date, the resources have received over 5000 downloads.
2) Employee engagement
Two Discovery Days were designed and delivered at Mewburn Ellis’ London and Manchester offices, in partnership with CREST Regional Support Coordinators.
CREST Discovery (typically for students aged 10-to-14) is a great first introduction to project work and helps students develop teamwork and hands-on investigative skills; they work in small groups to solve a STEM challenge. Students complete a Discovery ‘passport’ as they make their way through the day, to reflect on their experience, and present their work at the end of the day to receive their certificates.
You can read our full CREST Awards partnership project report here.
