April 2010

The work of Phil Eves, BAMs Education Co-ordinator for the Midlands

‘The thing about concrete is, it’s like chocolate. Too many air bubbles in it and you get Aero, and it breaks down. What you need is Dairy Milk.’

It’s not an advert for Cadbury’s, this is Phil Eves explaining construction to young students in the Midlands. And over the past five years, as BAM’s Learning and Resource Co-ordinator for the region, he’s seen a lot of them. Hundreds in fact.

‘It started when I was finding placements in industry for teachers’, he explains. ‘I’d produce interactive videos so pupils could see their teachers doing tasks in dairies, in the kitchens at Nando’s, or in water treatment plant at Severn Trent. I even took teachers into the air ambulance service and hydrotherapy environments – not always a pretty sight! I learned a lot about teachers but funding was always a struggle.’

When Worcestershire County Council appointed BAM to build its five Bromsgrove Schools, it wanted somebody to work alongside the schools. Phil’s experience made him ideal.

‘BAM’s Mantra is to use construction as a learning opportunity. I work by that. Teachers need encouraging away from their desks so they can take back real life experience into their classrooms and we can provide that, not just for them but for their students too. They love construction sites.’

But do construction sites love students? ‘It has changed the way BAM operates as a business’, Phil says. ‘Some of our construction teams felt like running a mile at the thought of students on site. Now project managers enthusiastically call me in at the start of their projects and we work out how we can really get schools involved. I’d say we go further than anybody – we won’t simply stand in front of them and talk, we’ll set them practical things to learn from – like mixing concrete, painting, carpentry and laying brickwork.’

At Q3 Academy in Sandwell, Phil and the team invited engineers to show the pupils and staff how they use maths in an applied way during the construction process. And Phil’s desire to show, not just tell, led to the now widespread use of webcams on site. He says: ‘These are a great innovation; they engage people with what’s happening and the progress and activity on site.’ But he’s gone much, much further.

‘I have asked several of our schools to write and perform a play themed around health and safety on construction sites. I show them a DVD by the Health and Safety Executive and ask them if they can do better. Six performances were staged every day during National Construction Week. It counted towards their BTec performing arts qualification.’

Several schools have written plays – Coventry’s Grace Academy students, North Bromsgrove High and Q3 – using contemporary themes such as bullying to provide a context for how accidents can happen.

The biggest professional challenge for Phil however was when North Bromsgrove High School asked BAM if it could step in and run a BTEC construction qualification from scratch.

‘We realised nobody could teach it’, he says. ‘There’s so many aspects - science, maths, carpentry, bricklaying, health and safety, careers… so I put it together with others and then we hired a workshop. Now the kids turn up every week and work from 8am to 6pm and they absolutely love it.’ The course is the equivalent of four GCSEs.

One early project was an air raid shelter for the community history museum. But the next challenge shows how the work Phil does has planted seeds, literally and metaphorically, at BAM.

‘We’re set to build nine ‘gardens of the future’ for the Malvern Spring Gardening Show. Since I started BAM saw how well received this work has been and decided to repeat the success with other regions so we now have three more education co-ordinators. Now, we are all working with our schools to build sustainable gardens. It’s a positive form of competition. One will be a floating garden a bit like they do in Bangladesh, another will have a greenhouse made from pop bottles. The Royal Horticultural Society will decide a winner.’

Students get to learn about a construction project from start to finish. They design it and construct it, with help from BAM apprentices. Phil has just completed the risk assessment with Bromsgrove pupils and in late April they will have two weeks to assemble their garden.

‘We don’t believe in throwing things away’, Phil says. ‘The idea of these gardens is that they can be assembled, taken down, and re-assembled for use in their communities and schools afterwards.’

Whichever school wins, it is mission accomplished for Phil and BAM. ‘We finished building here at Bromsgrove years ago. This is more than just leaving something behind. It is a true continuing partnership.’