By Mrs Smart (Head of Science)

On Monday, we welcomed a team from National Highways with a diverse range of backgrounds from construction, engineering, chemistry and psychology.

The team ran a road building challenge with our Year 8 students. The challenge was to build a road between two towns, as short as possible, getting as close to industry as possible for extra points and keeping away from Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs). There were also extra points for naming three historic forests and three SSSIs. Students were only given five minutes to look at the site because engineers only have a short time to take a site survey before heading back to the office to plan.

The team spoke about the wealth of different positions available within National Highways, including AI. They are responsible for 900 miles of concrete roads out of 4300 total strategic road network. Most concrete roads are 40-60 years old and are coming to the end of their life. They will be replaced over the next 30 years at a current estimated cost of 4 billion pounds. The team at National Highways are responsible for world class designs in concrete, including self-healing concrete and even self-reporting concrete. They are currently working in conjunction with Cambridge University and are always looking out for good project managers and engineers.

All our students employed excellent strategy planning and managed to build a road in five minutes, apparently some PhD students from Cambridge didn’t manage to get any pieces down at all in 10 minutes!

Some of our Sixth Formers also took up the opportunity to have a practice interview with the team to practise their interview technique. They were provided with feedback to help them to improve in the future.

View photos from the interactive workshop here.