STEM Workshops in Nuneaton & Bedworth

Nuneaton and Bedworth were built on things dug, woven and fired. Coal was mined here from at least the fourteenth century, and by 1911 roughly a third of Nuneaton's men worked underground; the last local pits closed within living memory. Alongside the collieries, silk-ribbon weaving grew with the help of French Huguenot settlers, worked in distinctive 'top-shops' with wide upper windows, while Bedworth added hatting. Local clay fed brickyards across Stockingford, and the Roman road of Watling Street carried it all away. This is a borough where engineering, materials and hard graft have always sat close to the surface, long before the science lab.

The borough's science story is older than most realise. Henry Beighton, born at Chilvers Coton near Nuneaton around 1687, was an engineer and surveyor who produced the earliest known drawing of a working Newcomen steam engine and a trigonometrically surveyed map of Warwickshire; the Royal Society made him a Fellow. John Barber, who managed collieries in the Nuneaton coalfield, patented the world's first gas turbine in 1791, a design whose compressor, combustion chamber and turbine anticipate every modern jet engine. And George Eliot, the novelist born just outside Nuneaton who served as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, engaged so seriously with Victorian physiology and geology that Middlemarch reads like science; the town's hospital carries her name.

Today the borough sits at the sharp end of British engineering. Just off Watling Street, HORIBA MIRA runs a proving ground on the former RAF Lindley airfield that has tested vehicles since 1949, and its ASSURED CAV facility is now one of Europe's most comprehensive sites for developing connected and self-driving cars, complete with private 4G and 5G networks and recreated town streets. Nearby, Triton Showers has manufactured in Nuneaton for more than fifty years, employing over 250 people and winning a King's Award for Enterprise. Automotive, electronics, testing and manufacturing jobs sit on your pupils' doorstep, not in some distant city.

The routes from a Nuneaton classroom into this work are unusually clear. North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College teaches T Levels, apprenticeships and engineering courses across its Nuneaton and Hinckley campuses, and it co-founded the MIRA Technology Institute, where teenagers train alongside professional engineers for careers in automotive and autonomous vehicles. Triton runs its own Learn and Earn apprenticeship scheme. A pupil who catches the engineering bug in Year 5 can follow it through GCSEs, a T Level and a degree apprenticeship without ever leaving the area. Our workshops are designed to light that first spark, early enough to shape choices.