STEM Workshops in Rugby

Rugby gave the world a game, but its engineering story runs deeper. On 12 April 1937, at the British Thomson-Houston works in the town, Sir Frank Whittle ran the Power Jets WU, the first turbojet engine ever built and run, a test that opened the jet age. A decade earlier, Rugby Radio Station had opened in 1926 on the town's eastern edge; by the 1950s it was the largest radio transmitting station in the world, and its 250-metre masts stood as local landmarks until demolition between 2004 and 2007. Cement has been made in Rugby since the nineteenth century, another strand of industry that still shapes the town.

Sir Frank Whittle is Rugby's engineering giant. A Coventry-born RAF officer, he patented the turbojet in 1930 and, working with the British Thomson-Houston company, brought it to that first shrieking test run in Rugby in 1937, the breakthrough behind Britain's first jet aircraft. Lewis Carroll, then plain Charles Dodgson, was a pupil at Rugby School from 1846 to 1849; his mathematics master said he had not taught a more promising boy of his age, and Dodgson went on to first-class honours in mathematics at Oxford and a mathematical lectureship at Christ Church he held for 26 years, writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland along the way.

Engineering never left the town. GE Vernova's Power Conversion business operates from the former British Thomson-Houston site where Whittle ran his engine, designing and building large rotating electrical machines and power systems for naval, offshore and industrial customers. On Lawford Road, Cemex's Rugby cement plant runs the largest cement kiln in the UK, with capacity of around 1.8 million tonnes a year. To the east, the former radio station site has become Houlton, a new district planned for more than 6,000 homes, where Houlton School teaches 1,100 pupils inside the restored Grade II listed transmitter building. STEM employers here are visible from the school gate.

For pupils in Rugby, the route from classroom to career is unusually visible. GE Vernova employs engineers and technicians at its Rugby site, and has supported the STEM Returners programme to bring experienced people back into engineering. Cemex is investing in its Rugby plant to cut carbon from cement making, work that calls for process engineers, chemists, data analysts and environmental specialists. The growing Houlton district is generating construction and infrastructure roles on the town's doorstep. Add the wider West Midlands manufacturing economy within commuting distance, and a Rugby child who leaves school confident with robotics, code and data has genuine local options.