Villiers Park Educational Trust
Tyneside STEM Scholars Programme
It’s been a busy couple of months for some of our Tyneside STEM Scholars as they have been taking part in their Stepping Stones to Excellence residential courses.
Scholars in Year 12 visited our Cambridge centre in January for the first time and spent two days looking in depth at media bias and fake news, developing presentation skills by presenting to the whole group about a recent piece of news. They also had the opportunity to visit Trinity College, Cambridge where they had a tour of grounds and buildings including the Wren Library and the Great Court where the famous Great Court Run takes place.
At the end of January our Year 11 Scholars joined us for their second Stepping Stones to Excellence course which was held at Dukeshouse Wood in Hexham. The title of this course was ‘Why is communication important?’ and Scholars were challenged to create their own codes and decipher other codes. The importance of security in modern day communication was highlighted as the teachers ‘cheated’ their way to winning the by gaining access to codes that were left unsecure.
The Year 11 Scholars were quickly followed by the Year 13 for their final Stepping Stones to Excellence course of the Scholars programme. The title of this course was ‘University: Surviving and Thriving’ and considered what Scholars need to do to survive and thrive at university and beyond. The course was very much led by Scholar interest and it quickly emerged that finance was an important topic with questions about mortgages, loans and pensions coming up.
For more information about Villiers Park Educational Trust visit www.villierspark.org.uk
Villiers Park Feb 2017    |