Engineering at NHEHS

Engineering Opportunities

There are opportunities to get involved in Engineering from Year 7 right up to Year 13.

• Engineering Club

  The Engineering Club is new from 2023-24 where the Year 12 Representatives have set up a lunch-time club to explore engineering ideas and projects with students from Year 7-9.

• F1 in Schools

  We run F1 in Schools from September to March for Year 10-13. Students will deploy CAD/CAM software to collaborate, design, analyse, manufacture, test, and then race miniature compressed air powered cars made from F1 model block. The challenge inspires students to use IT to learn about physics, aerodynamics, design, manufacture, branding, graphics, sponsorship, marketing, leadership/teamwork, media skills and financial strategy, and apply them in a practical, imaginative, competitive and exciting way.

• Smallpeice Gilder Project

  Another project is the SmallPeice Trust Glider Project for Year 7-9. Work starts in September and will continue through until March. Students are challenged to design and build a Powered Glider. This student-led project purposely has limited guidance, ensuring that teams of students are each challenged to design, build and respond to testing their electrically powered glider before refining and improving it to eventually travel the furthest over two flights made within 10 minutes of each other.

• The Industrial Cadets Programme

  Industrial Cadets Programme: Gold award students in Year 12, are assigned a real-life engineering brief by industry mentors. We have been partnered with Arcadis, a multinational civil engineering firm and have been set projects designing bridges for HS2, Hammersmith Bridge, Salford Quays and a new motorway junction on the M5. The Year 12 students are in a team of six and work together with the support of their industry mentors to complete a project, researching, designing, building a model and producing a professional standard reports and presentation. The projects are then judged regionally against other teams. NHEHS students have won the Best Overall Project in 2019, 2022 and 2024.

  Bronze award students from Year 9 compete in a similar project, more suited to their age. Last year the team designed and built a model of an environmentally sustainable theme park in the UK. They won the People’s Choice award at the regional competition in 2024.

• The UK Space Design Competition

  The UK Space Design Competition  is a multidisciplinary space-themed competition designed to be a simulation of life in industry. Students from multiple schools are combined to form an engineering company and take on the task of designing a crewed space settlement within our solar system. Set between 40 and 80 years in the future, students are able to lose themselves in the elaborate and expansive SDC universe and they form one of our fictional engineering companies. In 2024 the NHEHS team were part of the winning group at the London regional competition. They go on to compete in the National finals in 2025.

• The Faraday Challenge

  NHEHS enters two teams of six students from Year 8 in the Faraday Challenge with local schools – a competition we have hosted in recent years.  The Faraday Challenge Days give students the opportunity to research, design and make solutions to genuinely tough engineering problems and are run by a team of STEM professionals. Each IET Faraday Challenge Day involves six school teams, each made up of six Year 8 students who are interested in either Science, Design & Technology, Mathematics or Engineering. The Challenge is all about letting the students be creative and use their own problem solving skills to explore their capabilities as engineers, building a working model and pitching their ideas on the day, and can lead to a CREST Award.

• The First Lego League

  We regularly send a Year 7-9 team to take part in the First Lego League, sponsored by Bechtel. Girls work in teams of 10 with weekly sessions run by Year 11 mentors. Students engage in research, problem-solving, coding, and engineering to build and program a LEGO robot that navigates the missions of a robot game. The teams compete in the first local round of the league before going onto the regional and finally national rounds if successful.

• Empowered Females in Stem Mentorship Programme

  In recent years two of our Year 12s were accepted on the Empowered Females in Stem Mentorship Programme and got to work with their newly assigned mentors at Amazon. The six month programme aims to educate, enable and empower young women and non-binary people to pursue a fulfilling STEM career. It is a National event sponsored by global STEM companies, including Pfizer; Facebook; Google; BP; Dyson; Salesforce; L’Oréal; Citrix; Colt; GE and UCB. They receive mentoring from leading women in STEM; attend masterclasses to boost employability skills; network online and in person with members of the STEM community; learn about the diverse career paths into STEM and become valued members and leaders of the STEM community. They carried out a Dyson Project Based Learning challenge, providing them with an opportunity to solve a real-world STEM problem.

• The Arkwright Scholarship

   The Arkwright Scholarship – a programme which helps students pursue their dreams and change the world as future leaders in engineering. Students enter an application detailing their interest in engineering as a career and any STEM projects they have worked on to show their technical skills. They then take an exam and then successful candidates are invited to interview. Successful candidates are then awarded the prestigious Arkwright Scholarship, where they receive mentorship, networking opportunities and funding to help pursue their engineering ambitions.

  Several students have been awarded the scholarship since 2020.