We work with sector skills councils and professional engineering institutions to develop long-term strategies for addressing particular skills needs.

Our Whole-Life Skills tool enables our clients to view as one integrated system the many factors and processes that influence careers choices and skills development in their sectors of industry. From this position of greater clarity we are able to work with clients to identify and develop specific interventions targeted at addressing skills gaps.

For instance, as part of a commission for ECITB we investigated we mapped the various engineering-themed careers advice and teaching resources available to students and mapped these to the Whole-Life Skills diagram. Presented in this way, it clear that when compared to physics, there is a distinct lack of influencing factors and attractors visible at KS3 and KS4 to pull young people towards engineering.

Based on these observations we recommended the development of a suite of energy-themed teaching resources that would enable teachers to use examples from the engineering sector to teaching key parts of the science and maths curriculum in schools.

The output of skills strategy commissions, such as work we’ve carried for organisations including CITB, Cogent, ECITB, ICE and IStructE, is typically a concise report providing our recommendations together with fully costed proposals for further strategic interventions, leaving our clients in a stronger position to bid for the funds to implement their preferred strategies.

People tell us that one of the things that makes Think Up stand out is our ability to propose groundbreaking – and sometimes quite audacious – educational initiatives, and then to deliver them.

If this is true, then it is probably because we allow our thinking to be unconstrained at the start of concept development, confident that we can draw upon the resources of the Useful Simple Trust to find a practical way to deliver our plans.

This concept development always starts in response to a clearly defined brief, usually as a result of initial work with clients to identify strategic educational needs. For instance, we identified with the Institution of Civil Engineers the need to create an attention-grabbing experience to inspire sixth-formers to sign up to study civil engineering at university.

Our response was to propose Build Camp, a four-day residential course in which young people would design, build and ride their own section of railway. To turn an audacious concept like this requires civil engineering expertise, experience of working running educational events on site, and also the ability to create a strong visual identity to attract, excite and hold the event together.

For the engineering expertise, we work with our sister company Expedition who were instrumental in setting up the Constructionarium. Their early work on helping students to work on site underpins much of our thinking on how to create high-impact construction education.

For the visual identity elements, we work with our sister company Thomas Matthews. Their early work on projects helps to make our ideas feel more real, and is an important part of helping to bring on board stakeholders and funding.

Between us we have over fifteen years experience of proposing unusual education initiatives and then delivering them, which is probably why our clients have confidence in us when we say to them, “Hang on, we’ve got an idea.”

Professional engineering institutions and sector skills councils commission Think Up to develop teaching best practice guidance for schools and universities. Our work is often related to emergent themes such as teaching sustainably, creativity or skills for employment. These are all themes which are of growing importance in industry, which usually pose a considerable challenge to universities and schools to deliver, and which Think Up is well-placed to tackle, sitting as we do at the cross-roads of academia and industry.

Our recommendations are drawn from our extensive networks in schools and universities and from other organisations also researching the latest pedagoguies. Our recommendations are also based on our own experience: all of the Think Up leadership team are heavily involved with university teaching and we are able to use this time in the classroom to test the latest approaches proposed for tackling the above themes.

The output of work is usually a best practice guidance report that provides teachers with practical suggestions for classroom application. We are sometimes asked to carry out curriculum design, sequencing the recommendations from our reports into a programme of activities. We also run training seminars for teaching staff to help them develop use our recommendations to shape their teaching.