The first business breakfast of the new school year focused on how our offering – particularly ENTHUSE Partnerships – definitively helps businesses enhance their social value…and it proved to be another lively and informative session!
After a welcome from our bid development officer and chair Liz Whitworth, our head of monitoring and evaluation, Ben Dunn, held a presentation on measuring the impact of our social value work.
He discussed why we carry out evaluation, our approach to it, our impact and how we measure the social value of our STEM interventions. He explained that we constantly review what we do to ensure what we’re delivering is relevant, high quality and useful.
He said: “People are really interested in impact – so we ask ourselves the question, are we achieving our aims? We need to understand the long term impact of our work.
“For example, we’ve supported many secondary schools in offering triple science GCSE, so we need to understand the population level impact. If we’ve now brought this to every secondary school, we need to update and adjust the programme.
“We access highly sensitive pupil and teacher data which allows us to track the students and teachers we engage with, which helps us understand student attainment and teacher engagement over time. We are genuinely trying to find out whether what we’re doing is making a difference. External evaluators help us to ensure we’re doing this – we’re transparent, which helps.”
He outlined the team’s key findings from recent evaluations:
- CPD improves student attainment and progression
- ENTHUSE Partnerships increase attainment and aspirations
- Nuffield Research Placements positively impact young people
- STEM Ambassadors increase aspirations
He was followed by Michelle Levi, social value lead at Jacobs – a partner of Simetrica-Jacobs. She explained to the attendees that government legislation now requires bidders to apply a minimum weighting of 10% to social value when bidding for a contract, and this means that they need to clearly demonstrate the social value of every single project they work on. She added that they aim to work to five key themes within social value - Covid 19 recovery, tackling economic equality, fighting climate change, equal opportunity and wellbeing. They’re also preparing to launch a bespoke social value bank tool.
Next up was Helen Clements, social value manager at Morgan Sindall Construction. Helen, who’s also a STEM Ambassador, talked about the human stories behind data collection and evaluation.
She said: “We do it for a number of reasons. We’re in a sector which isn’t diverse, so without STEM outreach work, we can’t change our sector. This work changes who joins our business and this is really important as we need to reflect the diversity of our clients.
“I’ve been working with a Year 13 student at one of our partner schools since she was in Year 8. This has been life-changing for her, and she now wants to enter our industry – and there are lots of these type of stories.”
The final speaker was Marianne Shelton, STEM Inspiration lead at UKRI, who help to fund our STEM Ambassador programme. She outlined the many benefits for employers who give their employees the opportunity to volunteer. She also reminded Ambassadors of the value of recording their time spent volunteering as this provides a measure of contribution to feedback into the programme, future developments and their own employer social value evaluation.
She added: “We know that STEM is not a level playing field for everyone and the attainment gap is widening. We also know that many young people don’t see a STEM career as something for them – they don’t see STEM relevance in their own lives. So this is where the STEM Ambassador programme comes in – research shows giving young people access to role models to highlight aspirations and showcase career opportunities is vital. They bring home real life contexts for students.”
Thank you to everyone who joined – nearly 100 people from across various industries - and please sign up to our next session – ‘Engaging with SEND pupils to enrich your STEM talent pipeline’ taking place on 17 November.
If you were unable to attend today’s session and would like a copy of the recording and materials from it please contact employers@stem.org.uk clearly stating which business breakfast you are interested in. Or, if you want to speak to us about how you might support us with any of our programmes, please contact Liz Whitworth l.whitworth@stem.org.uk for an initial conversation
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