Looking to Inspire your Pupils? Look no further than your Parent Body

When Katie Brown, our Science Lead, knew this year’s theme for Science Week 2021 was ‘Innovation’, she knew she needed speakers that would inspire. Dropping a line in our weekly bulletin, she invited any parents with knowledge or experience in scientific innovation to come forward...and come forward they did.

As teachers, we can spend hours trawling the internet, researching organisations to try and find speakers to inspire our pupils, yet often, the parent body is overlooked. Yet here is the richest bank of experience in such a multitude of fields. Who would have thought that we would have a grandfather who attended astronaut training and whose job it was to innovate a system that could calculate the trajectory of a rocket’s journey back to earth! Or a dad talking about the future of Artificial Intelligence or a medical mum who talked about the innovation of the vaccine for Covid and a dad who adapted his company and began reinventing mask design to support the pandemic. Not forgetting the dad who braved the topic of ‘poo’ with Year 1, discussing the scientific inventions around stopping said ‘poo’ from getting back into the Thames.

And finally, thanks to a problem solving mum who shared the innovation of ‘Lightning Decision Jam’ which companies use to solve problems. In this talk, pupils from Upper School used Lightning Decision Jam to solve Miss Katie’s science problems and begin work on their new inventions.

With months of research, Miss Katie would never have been able to recruit such a task force of eclectic and innovative speakers. So here’s to the parents and the wealth of experience that they bring to our school...long may our doors be open and their experience embraced!