We believe that expanding knowledge and building academic and 21st century skills will create active, collaborative, lifelong learners. Together with educators, we aim to enable every student to succeed in education and be prepared for future life challenges.

Why is your company joining the STEM Alliance?

As our reliance on technology in all sectors grows, so does the necessity to ensure children are adequately prepared for the future.

Two thirds of children will enter jobs that haven't yet been created, so it's important for us to prepare them with the key skills and associated knowledge that will be most beneficial to them in the working world. This is essential not only for their own futures, but to also ensure that our country has the highly skilled individuals needed for the ever evolving and rapidly expanding STEM industry.

In order to do this, it's important to make STEM learning as exciting and engaging as possible. We believe incorporating practical and playful tasks that teach pupils about early coding concepts will help to kick-start a sequence of STEM learning which allows for more creativity and exploration without limitations and certainly without rules! At LEGO Education, we're passionate about equipping children with resources and activities that encourage them to think outside the box and realise that there is never just one right answer, giving them the freedom to try different methods, and develop perseverance, resilience and problem-solving skills.

Why is STEM Education a priority for your company?

We want to help teachers bring STEM learning to life and motivate pupils to plan, predict, test, problem-solve, analyse, and explore, all while developing career-readiness skills.

We believe that creativity is essential across all aspects of STEM, therefore, more needs to be done from an early age in order to encourage, support and nurture engagement. We need to make sure that what we're teaching in the classroom exposes pupils to the types of tasks required in these jobs, and the associated skills needed in order to be a success.

The challenge when it comes to teaching, is the fact that a lot of teachers don't have specialised STEM knowledge, and yet they are expected to have in-depth expertise. We therefore have a responsibility to give them the resources that enable children to explore and learn in a simple, engaging and fun way.

Providing hands-on sets, lesson plans and activity ideas will allow teachers to take a step back and become mediators, rather than instructors, inspiring pupils to use their imagination and creativity to solve a given problem. This way of learning – which can easily be incorporated across all subjects – sparks creativity, develops critical thinking skills, and ignites career possibilities.

Making activities relatable is also important in capturing the imaginations of pupils and helping them to understand the purpose of lessons. Children need to be able to have insight into real careers, real concepts and real scenarios. After all, there's no use teaching them about STEM without showing them exactly how it works in practice. It's only when they understand the purpose of what they're learning and how it applies to real-life that we can adequately prepare them for their futures.

What does your company want to achieve with its support to the STEM Alliance?

It doesn't matter whether it's preschool, primary, secondary, higher or further education; the skills that are introduced through STEM learning are transferrable and will be relevant in whatever job pupils choose to do. Therefore, the sooner these are introduced, the better and this should then be reinforced throughout their whole educational journey.

Together, we want to inspire our future generation and ignite a real passion for STEM, so that the future generation continues to learn, innovate and create.