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Discovery Museum awarded £80,000 to support the education of young people across Tyneside

Image: Pupils from St John's Primary School Benwell, Newcastle at an Inventor in Residence event at Discovery Museum July 2019 © Colin Davison

Newcastle’s Discovery Museum has been awarded £80,000 from the Reece Foundation to support learning and engagement work with children and young people across Tyneside. 

The funding will support a range of youth education and engagement initiatives over the next three years, focusing primarily on STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, maths – and using the museum’s science and engineering collections as inspiration.

“These funds will allow us to enhance and expand the museum’s learning and engagement programme, with the aim of instilling a lifelong enthusiasm in these subjects, arming young people with the confidence to pursue careers in these fields,” explains Thomas Elwick, Discovery Museum’s learning officer.

“Many current and future careers feature STEM subjects, and the activities that we can provide will equip children and young people with transferable life skills too.”

In an ordinary, pandemic-free year the learning team at Discovery Museum hosts sessions for 13,000 schoolchildren. In 2020 a new blended offer including virtual school visits has been developed to ensure vital outreach work can continue.

“We need to make sure this continues into the future and we at the Reece Foundation are delighted to support the museum in showing these fantastic inventions to a new audience of young people and inspiring them to think up the great ideas which will transform the future world,” says Anne Reece.

The Reece Foundation’s overarching ambition is to increase the long-term prosperity of the North East of England. Improving STEM education, boosting training in engineering skills and developing employment opportunities are key strands of its work to achieve this.