New Engineering Foundation (NEF)

Since 2005, NEF has contributed over £5M to the Further Education sector of which £3M has been given in direct cash to support continuous professional development (CPD), innovation and knowledge exchange activities. This support has benefited 2400 lecturers from 250 Further Education colleges and engaging 500 companies, positively impacting over 480,000 learners.

2012 was a year of transformation and change for NEF. Alongside its steadfast commitment to driving and providing unique and exciting professional development opportunities for Further Education in science, engineering and technology companies, NEF extended its capability and reach to provide research and programmes to stimulate and support SciTech innovation in education, industry and government.

In 2012, NEF’s CPD programme comprising of the Industrial Fellowship Scheme and Masterclasses has engaged 301 lecturers from 40 FE colleges and 71 companies and host organisations during 2012, thereby benefiting an estimated 30,100 post-16 students1 studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

The Further Education landscape is more than ever facing challenges at local, regional and national levels. These challenges are partly due to the cuts in state funding of colleges (teaching and capital investment) and social deprivation in many of the regions colleges serve, coupled with the limiting economic conditions that demand colleges to present different solutions. The national trends validated at regional level by NEF’s economic strategists demonstrate that Science, engineering and technology based industries remain to be relatively healthy and manufacturing continues to achieve limited but a positive growth in the economy. These challenges are compounded by a limited scientific and technical capability of the lecturers, and a curriculum that is, in the main, dated and structurally rigid, governed by externally controlled factors dictated by qualification awarding bodies and target-driven inspection regimes.

Against this backdrop, there are a number of determined colleges with strong leadership who are turning these challenges into opportunities for their colleges and communities. NEF’s focus has been on those determined colleges to support the development of their scientific and technical capability. In doing so, NEF’s Intelligent College model has been used to guide the NEF-College engagement process, where the focus has been on:

• Linking professional development in STEM (through NEF’s Industrial Fellowship Schemes and Masterclasses) to new strategic direction and college offer in STEM related disciplines;
• Embracing innovation as a college’s centrepiece to invigorate teaching and learning and provide effective solutions to employers beyond qualifications;
• Using STEM strategies as a platform for regional alignment of capabilities to drive economic development and inward investment (e.g. colleges operating in and supporting SciTech based Enterprise Zones);
• Equipping the new generation of technicians and technologists with entrepreneurship and employability skills to drive local wealth creation (e.g. Leicester, Hull, Reading, Sheffield, Oxford and Cherwell Valley regions);
• Unleashing colleges’ potential in addressing wider socio-economic issues at a community level as part of a civic leadership role (e.g. raising the work-readiness of school leavers and those acquiring tertiary qualifications; remedying skills deficiencies, particularly in maths in the current workforce;
• Stimulating SciTech innovation using such vehicles as NEF’s Innovation Hubs and horizon scanning (STEM Foresight) activities to inform and shape future STEM training by FE colleges;
• Supporting cohesion in academic and training provision in regions where a number of different types of institutions exist (UTCs, colleges, various types of schools / academies and universities);
• Enabling FE colleges to diversify their reliance on income from public sources using NEF’s Diamond and Advancing Income Generation programmes and industrial networks.