Farmer, PE teacher, engineer…
November 15th, 2007 by MindyAt the age of 5 Jeff Roche wanted to be a farmer and a train driver, at 10 a computer programmer and at 16 a PE teacher. But his lifelong love of Lego Technic some inspirational Design & Technology teachers and chance has led him to Loughborough University to study Innovative Manufacturing and Technology.
Jeff told his story to a host of business people and policy makers at the annual Owers lecture organised by Core Education and hosted by Oracle at their London offices last week. As well as highlighting the things and people that had inspired him, Jeff was very frank about the things that had not – teaching from the book, almost non-existent careers advice, too few opportunities to relate theory to practice.
This laid the foundations for some really lively discussion with everyone agreeing that while government has got real responsibilities for teaching quality and careers advice, industry itself had to work much harder and smarter at engaging actively with schools to provide those practical experiences and show the innovation, creativity and enterprise within them. And getting Design & Technology properly back on the curriculum. (www.core-ed.org.uk)
November 15th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
I had the privilege of chairing this event and would like to add that we also had the benefit of an interesting and insightful response to Jeff’s honest opener from Raj Rajogopal, fellow and Trustee of the IET, Fellow of the IMechE and member of the Chartered Institute of Management.
Raj had many useful things to say (read my colleague Malcolm Moss’ blog at ideasfarm.net) but I found the most interesting his observation that research and development will follow the place of design and manufacture in the global context. An interesting warning that it’s not just low-cost manufacturing that China and India will be famous for soon.