Academy: STEM academy
Leader: Abdul M Hussain
Email abdul.hussain@bbec.bdat-academies.org
Your profile To provide a challenging learning environment in the STEM subjects Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, which maximises individual potential and ensures students are well-equipped to meet the challenges in the world around them. Being from a science background I understand the importance of the STEM subjects in order to increase aspirations of our students in BBEC.

At BBEC we believe that citizens of the 21st century must have a solid background in science, technology, engineering and math. With knowledge in these areas, students will be able to keep up with the rapid growth of the technological innovations happening daily. By providing our students with innovative engineering design challenges, they will learn to naturally question and solve problems. BBEC STEM Academy students will have gained different experiences in the STEM subjects so they research and investigate questions they will face in school and in their locality.

We want our academy students to be ambitious by providing opportunities for development of Leadership skills and achieving Gold Awards. We also want to Raise the profile of STEM careers, especially for girls (WISE).

Another aim of the STEM academy is to help improve the Health & Wellbeing of our students by creating a confident group of students, through challenge, resilience and engagement with STEM activities. We also want to deliver some activities that engage with other students, parents and the wider community.
Weekly provisions Currently all year 9 and 10 academy students are taking part in an agronomy challenge prepared by the University of Bradford. The students will be carrying out various experiments using a particular type of plant called “Arabidopsis thaliana”. The students will be placing these plants under different conditions to study the effects of these on their growth.  This project will last for 8 weeks. All students will be achieving a silver crest award and four individuals will be winning vouchers as part of the challenge. These sessions will be held on Thursday, so to ensure the students are not mixing they will be in different rooms and will arrive for these sessions at slightly different times.

Our new year 8 recruits will have their academy session once every 3 weeks where they will be taking part in various STEM based activities such as building spaghetti bridges, Using tech card to build racing cars and countless more including an experience of Lego robotics and programming.
Successes We have had great success with Mr Ryan and the Academy winning the Yorkshire school award for science and technology. We have also won various awards e.g. the annual Lego League challenge such as the Core Values Trophy. We have also had great success at the annual Salters Chemistry competition with our BBEC team winning the bronze award for the university challenge.