College students in Bristol are to set up and run their own company, under a Year 14 project in which they design and manufacture parts, prototypes and products for local companies.
Students at John Cabot City Technology College in Bristol are to set up and run their own company, under a Year 14 project in which they design and manufacture parts, prototypes and products for local engineering companies, other organisations and direct sale to consumers. The company will be based at the college's new state of the art manufacturing centre, which is equipped with a number of machine tools from Unimatic Engineers' eduCam range. These are actually industrial machines, which, because they are used by manufacturing organisations around the country, allow students to seamlessly cross the education/industry divide.

Six A-level students are to stay on an extra year to set up the business and take it through its initial phases.

They will be working closely with Head of Technology and Art, Nathan Jenkins, the ICT Development Manager, Colin Coles, and sponsors such as Rolls Royce.

'Apex Pumps, who make centrifugal pumps are to be joint sponsors with Rolls Royce, and several others are in the latter stages of signing up too,' says Jenkins.

'Our students will be working with them to design and develop prototypes and possibly even production parts.

This will all be done in a commercial environment: a company will be formed and they will have to make competitive tenders to win the work.' The students will receive a small bursary during the project and it is hoped that sufficient revenues will be generated to finance a second year for another group of students.

However the overriding objective is not to make money but to give the students an unrivalled set of experiences that will stand them in good stead throughout their adult careers.

One of the practical attractions for the sponsors is access to the college's manufacturing centre, which will free them from having to find time for one-off and short-run jobs on busy production machines.

The college has been using eduCam equipment for about five years, and was happy to equip the new centre with further units from the range.

Unimatic also supplies all the software for the associated computers.

This is mainly the Pro/DESKTOP suites of programmes, although there has been some bespoke programming to match Cabot's precise requirements.

Like the machine tools, Pro/DESKTOP is also used extensively by practising engineers and designers, who like the simplicity and clarity of its graphical interface and the speed with which it creates CAM (computer aided manufacturing) instructions from CAD (computer aided design) drawings.

'Unimatic has recently installed for us a fairly large CNC (computer numerically controlled) router, upgraded an existing router and supplied one of its smaller machines, an eduCam 2,' says Jenkins, 'which we are busy demonstrating to lots of other schools in the area.' The eduCam 2 is used by the whole college, right down to 11-year-olds in Year 7.

Many of the schools coming to see it are the feeder primaries, which encourage children with an aptitude for science and technology to apply to John Cabot.

So successful is the technology college that last year there were 800 applications for the 100 first year places.

Asked about the potential success of the new project Jenkins bubbles over with excitement.

'We already have younger kids in the school interested for when they have completed their A-levels; there is real enthusiasm amongst the sponsors, and potential sponsors are contacting us of their own accord.

But best of all is that we already have a track record: one of the students has already designed a ascender for abseiling, which is going through the process of being patented and we have several manufacturers lining up to license the design for production!