Principal of UTC Portsmouth James Doherty outlines what they are doing to match what they are teaching students with the needs of employers…

The uniqueness of the UTC offer

I feel privileged to have worked at UTC Portsmouth since before it opened. What attracted me to what was then a muddy field and a set of architect’s blueprints, was clearly the ‘UTC approach’ – education that meets the needs of employers rather than education for the sake of education. Upon starting at the college, a new question became apparent: How can we best achieve that?

Employer Advisory Group

As a school, we are here to progress young people into employers and universities. As such, one of our primary mechanisms for liaising with employers has been our Employer Advisory Group (EAG). This group, which meets once a term, is led by Alex Blandford, who leads on UTC Portsmouth’s co-curriculum, and is made up of as many employer partner representatives as possible.

The EAG sits differently to our Board of Trustees, and has a more casual membership with representatives from large employers, such as the Royal Navy, Airbus, and Lockheed Martin, as well as more locally-based employers, including Knights Brown, Portsmouth Aviation, and Rolls Royce Motor Cars. In these meetings, we can update employer partners directly on what the college is doing, but also seek their thoughts on future developments and initiatives that we are proposing.

A key example for us of the EAG in action has been the deployment of T Levels. UTC Portsmouth took the idea of T Levels to the EAG and we were intrigued to learn just how positive employers were about the new qualification once we had explained it.

The EAG helped shape the course structure of our first T Level, in engineering maintenance, including what they felt was a useful format for the employer experience element of the course. With the backing of the EAG, we were able to fill all employer placement requirements and have since adopted the same format for our digital T Level and will likely do so for our planned health science T Level. This is in stark contrast to local FE colleges which launched T Levels without consultation, to quite a poor employer reception.

Informing the curriculum and co-curriculum

Our EAG also allows the employer partners to tell us what skills challenges they see in the medium to long term. This includes AI, automation and robotics, as well as a current shortage of skilled programmers. The challenge for the school, then, is to consider how it will play a role in bridging that gap.

This can often be a challenge as many of the areas of need are simply not on any curriculum – they are too cutting edge.

Nevertheless, whilst we can endeavour to insert some of these developments into our curriculum, including by deploying AI algorithms into computing and automation into our engineering courses, our training programmes are the most flexible tool we have for delivering on these needs.

In our experience, we tend to see that employers are keen to support the development of these skill areas, as they will stand to benefit from it. An example of this is our Royal Navy DNA Enrichment. Over the course of a half term, students work with the Royal Navy’s software house with the support of experts to prepare for a whole day ‘hackathon’. Students will present the results of this hack to Royal Navy, civil service, and software contractors.

Flexible employer arrangements

A final key piece for ensuring that we keep at the leading edge of developments is the commitment to flexible employer partner interactions such as UTC Portsmouth’s “Project Pipeline”. This initiative, now in its fifth year involves a dozen employer partners, such as QinetiQ, BAE Systems and the NHS, running real-life projects with students. We encourage employers to send across alumni as a further way of strengthening links.