Work Related Learning

Community and Business Links

We value our partnership with local companies, supported by our membership of Epsom and Ewell Education Business Partnership (EBP), and all the opportunities that these provide. In addition to providing interview practice, work experience for Year 10 and work shadowing placements for Sixth Form students, local companies support us in many practical ways. For example, assisting with student project work, enterprise activities and our activity days, such as Year 10 work related days and Y11 ‘businessdynamics’ seminars, and contributing to our School Mentoring Scheme and Science week events.

Groups of students also have the opportunity to work with business representatives and students from other schools through our involvement with, for example, the Royal Naval Challenge and Surrey SATRO (Science and Technology Regional Organisation) Challenge and to gain accreditation through an Understanding Enterprise programme. Please see below for a taster of the different activities.

Year 12 Royal Navy Challenge (Autumn Term)

The Royal Navy engineers and the East Surrey Collage joined up once again for the Royal Navy Challenge. Our six team members specialised in product design or physics. After being introduced to the career opportunities in engineering in the Royal Navy, we were briefed on our task for the day. In four hours we had to design and make a model for a new aircraft platform that fitted in a model ship. This platform had to stay horizontal even if the ship pitched or rolled. The main component to this platform was called a gimbal. Other tasks were to build a simple ‘plane that was to be launched by a catapult system with a remote control mechanism. Our team found the tasks very challenging; however we learnt quickly and with team effort we managed to project our plane into 4th place out of 11 teams. Unfortunately after breaking our remote mechanism in the last seconds, our manual mechanism, marked us down.