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TAKING STEM BEYONDTHE CLASSROOM • When pitching STEM competitions to colleagues or senior leadership, focus on a few areas to start with and then expand the project once you can demonstrate the benefits and impacts for the school community. • Collaborating with like- minded people should help sell the idea to the school’s leadership team. Consider inviting STEM ambassadors and professionals from the STEM industry into your school; utilising your connections with other schools if you are part of a MATwill also strengthen your pitch to SLT, parents and pupils. • Try to then encourage buy- in from senior leadership. Obtaining the support of SLT, governors and PTAs will create a sense of solidarity amongst the school administration and likely result in greater buy-in at a whole school level. • Utilise social media platforms such as Twitter to introduce STEMyouth clubs and generate excitement amongst students. 75 S T E M activities we’ve participated in have made our students more engaged and significantly improved their report writing and experimentation skills – both fundamental in STEM. For their part, my students have credited these experiences with improving their mental maths, since they’re tasked with tackling concepts more challenging than those they encounter during normal lessons. We’ve also seen the parent- student dynamic change significantly, with our students becoming much more articulate and confident when talking to their parents and other adults about STEM at home and during parents’ evenings. Not only that, but our parents have themselves become more engaged with the school’s STEM departments, enabling us to take bigger strides towards increasing the provision of these subjects. As teachers, it’s been really satisfying for us to see these changes take place. teachwire.net/secondary TEACH SECONDARY SPECIAL STEM ABOUT THE AUTHOR Thandiwe Banda is the rating standards lead for science at the Beacon School – a mixed 11-18 academy school in Banstead, Surrey that has entered students into the Youth Industrial Strategy Competition to improve engagement and learning opportunities in STEM