Sandringham win team of the year at National Teaching Awards 2016
The secret of any success lies in great teamwork and this is certainly true for one of the teams at Sandringham.
The STEM team from Sandringham won the National Teaching Award for team of the year at the grand final held in the Guildhall, London, last night.
Each year Pearson Education, who sponsor the event, receive thousands of nominations for the National Teaching Awards and have the challenging task of judging the quality of entries and making decisions on winners. We have been successful in the past with a number of regional winners in various categories but this is the first time one of our nominations has won the coveted National Award.
The STEM team, composed of staff from the science, technology and maths faculties, work together to promote STEM subjects by providing an amazing range of extra-curricular activities across the school. The result is that the interest in following STEM subjects at GCSE, A-level and university has risen significantly, and students at Sandringham are able to gain real-life experiences of science and technology in action. Of course, it is not staff on their own who deliver these events. Our wonderful students lead many of the activities and have delivered keynote seminars on STEM activity at conferences around the UK. The latest will take place at Portsmouth University after half term where a group of 12 students will deliver sessions to hundreds of other school children and staff, including Tim Peake himself.
One of the key events of the STEM team was organising the live radio contact with British astronaut, Tim Peake, on the International Space Station in January 2016. This was viewed by millions across the globe via the BBC, ITV and Sky News networks and inspired many thousands of school children in the process. This was the key aim of the event and, whilst it took an immense effort to prepare and deliver, the impact of the work will have a lasting benefit for all.
The judges clearly saw the massive impact of the work of our STEM team, hence judging them to be worthy winners for 2016.
The edited BBC2 TV broadcast with the Sandringham award can be viewed here:
The team are now working on yet more, highly ambitious projects for this coming year, so watch this space (no pun implied!).
Congratulations everyone and well done!
