Surrey’s Top Scientists, Engineers and Mathematicians of the Future?

SATRO had a particularly busy spring term with our Science, Engineering & Maths Challenge events attracting well over 1200 participants from across Surrey and the wider South East. We used the opportunity to conduct our annual survey of 6^th formers to see where they are hoping to take their qualifications – the results were very different to last year!

You might recall that in 2012 there was a great deal of discussion about the newly introduced university fees – last year our survey revealed that 24% of boys, and 10% of girls had decided not to go to University as a direct result of the introduction of higher fees.

Of those students who had decided they would not go to University, most were intending to go straight into Employment or Apprenticeships – but all of them indicated that they were not really sure how to find vacancies and were worried about their future.

The 2013 Survey reveals that the vast majority of A level students taking part in our Challenges this year are intending to go straight on to University – although there is still a worrying 16% of respondents who feel they have received insufficient guidance from their schools/colleges about their options. Again, they indicated that they did not know how to look for non-University options such as apprenticeships or jobs (clearly their schools and colleges should be talking to SATRO about how we can help their students find out the full range of options!).

There is a very interesting trend in the variety of subjects being studied – as our Challenges involve Engineering and Maths, the vast majority of our respondents were studying for A levels in Maths, Further Maths or Physics. For young men, these were typically taken alongside Chemistry and/or Economics. For young women, there was a much broader spread of subjects appearing alongside Maths – Biology, Chemistry and Physics scored highly, but other subjects ranged from Textiles, to Philosophy, Politics to History.

It is always a pleasure to meet the hugely impressive young people taking part in our Challenges – and we wish them all the very best as they go on to even bigger and better things! We hope that taking part in our events has spurred them on to even greater success!