Extra-Curricular Opportunities

We encourage you to expand your participation in school life beyond academic work:

• To help you to remain well-balanced;
• To help you to make more friends;
• To develop your talents;
• To develop leadership and teamworking skills.

There is a wide range of societies and activities available, with sport, drama and music drawing heavily on Sixth Form expertise.
All these activities allow you to pursue your enthusiasms and develop your talents...!

You might help to run an activity for younger pupils, or get involved in the Engineering Education Scheme (EES), Headstart, or the Nuffield Bursary Scheme.

You could write a paper for discussion at the Supper Club, be a School Council representative, take part in the Model United Nations, join Amnesty International or help develop this Website!

Engineering Education Scheme (EES)

This has been offered to the Lower Sixth for a number of years and is now well established. Teams of four pupils are placed with a company where they are given a specific and real engineering problem to solve. Teams are given technical support by a contact engineer, and over the years have produced some first-rate solutions.

Bancroft's is grateful to the following companies for the tremendous support that they have given Bancroft's EES teams over the past ten years:
Glaxo SmithKline, Pitney Bowes Ltd., The Ford Motor Company, Merck, Sharp and Dohme, Nortel Networks, Lloyd's Register of Shipping, The Docklands Light Railway, Infraco BCV, The Bank of England Printing Works, PFE International, BOC Process Plants, Thames Power Services at Barking Power Station and Hawker Siddeley Power Transformers.

Part of the experience includes three days working in the Engineering Department of a University. Many of the participants decide to read Engineering or a related course as a result of their experience in the EES

This year four teams are working with the following companies: Ford Motor Company, Glaxo SmithKline, Pitney Bowes and Merck, Sharp and Dohme. The University Workshop will take place at the University of Surrey in January 2005. This will give teams a close look at engineering at university and the opportunity to get a great deal of work done on their projects. To date 166 Bancroftians have benefited from this fantastic scheme; this is the highest number of pupils to participate from any school in England.

Click here for more details about the Engineering Education Scheme in England

The Headstart programme is part of the Royal Academy of Engineering's BEST programme of activities to support anad promote engineering as a career. David Laban took part in the Engineering Education Scheme linked to the Ford Motor Company and then went on to take part in the Headstart programme which organises engineering taster courses at university. Here is an account of his experience on Headstart course during the summer 2004. David received a Richardson travel grant to assist him with his Headstart activities.

During the summer, I went on the Headstart course in Southampton and the HSHI course in Colorado. Mr. Woolley introduced me to the Headstart organisation and I found out about the HSHI through them. The courses were both residential for about half a week which gave me a chance to get an idea of what the university was like for things like halls of residence and catering as well as the practical and lecturing facilities offered by the university. During the day, we were pushed into competitive events like aeroplane and boat design which let the university show off its wind tunnels and towing tanks. Southampton's Engineering School was typical of what I have come to expect of engineering buildings with their labyrinths of alleyways only just separating one building from another and equipment filling many of the practical areas with only just enough room for two people to pass in many places. It was the kind of environment in which an engineer would feel entirely at home, with test rigs left out because everyone knew what was theirs and what wasn't. I got the feeling that it had been tidied up a little to make room for the two groups of around ten teenagers that invaded the workshops each day but the department as a whole had lost very little of the sense of ordered chaos characteristic of engineers.
The American HSHI had a very different feel. The university had been taken over by the eight groups of thirty-odd students and all other engineering projects seemed to have been put on hold and packed away for the summer to stop them from accidentally walking off with the students as they left. It was more of a tourist's guide to the university than the residential workshop offered by Headstart in the UK. It is possible that I was working under a false assumption when I chose to attend the HSHI course as an American equivalent to Headstart. When I talked to other students, they referred to it as a "summer camp" and I realised the error of my ways. The HSHI was a larger organisation with more participants. This gave it the ability to let the students have a wider choice of activities so the course could be specialised for each person's interests. It wasn't any kind of mirror of the Headstart course but this wasn't a problem because it told me all of the things that I didn't find out from Headstart, like the difference between computer science and electronics. The professor of electronic engineering referred to computer science as "learning how to learn how to use computers" which brought a smile to my lips whereas electronics teaches the fundamentals like circuit design as well as the programming required to complete engineering tasks. By the end of the HSHI course, I had decided that electronic engineering was the choice for me. I can't say which course I preferred because each had its merits. The American course seemed to run more smoothly and with more choice but it wasn't as challenging and there was less teamwork involved which was a shame. I'm glad the school introduced me to the scheme and provided some funding to let me go on them both.

David Laban U6W (Old Bancroftian)

Click here for more information about Headstart courses

Each year we have a number of L6 students taking advantage of this scheme - they will be willing to give more details of their experiences at a variety of UK Universities.

The Nuffield Bursary Scheme is intended to give sixthformers studying science subjects the opportunity to
undertake a short period of research during the summer holidy at the end of the lower sixth year.
For more details of this scheme see Mr Woolley or science department staff.
Full details about the scheme and how to apply may be found on the Nuffield Foundation website.