About Us

The Trust’s aim is to maximise the opportunities available to young people in all parts of the UK’s educational system and is now focused on science, particularly physics. Our first initiative was the provision of scholarships and bursaries at 60 of the UK’s leading independent schools. These were available to high achieving students from state primaries who would benefit from such an opportunity, but where the family could not afford to pay. This was not solely an opportunity for the students, it was an opportunity for these schools to widen their access outside their traditional intake. These now operate exclusively for students from 16-18 wishing to take maths and physics at A-level in the independent sector.

Our second initiative was to provide funding to the state secondary school system through the Specialist Schools Programme. We have sponsored over 50 schools in technology, the arts, sciences, engineering, sports, languages and business and enterprise. From January 2004, we have concentrated on science colleges. Our third initiative was to support schemes to encourage students from the state sector to continue their maths and physics studies at university through the provision of undergraduate scholarships. We have a very close relationship with Durham University, where we have also established Science Teaching Fellowships for post-graduates in local secondary schools. This programme has been led by the Centre for Fundamental Physics at The University of Durham and has been extended to 6 other universities.

All the individuals and institutions we have supported share a common theme: the potential for high achievement, often from challenging circumstances. All our scholarships are means-tested. In many cases funding from the Trust has been the catalyst for raising substantial matched funding from other sources - government, corporate and private – and this remains our policy.

Although these initiatives were set up as discrete programmes, the Trust used the opportunity to exchange ideas and share best practices amongst the different institutions and individuals, in a series of initiatives involving both independent and state sector secondary schools, together with university departments.  The result has been a number of schools science partnerships, supported by a university science faculty, which are now also helping to enhance science teaching in primary and secondary schools in science across sectors, from primary through to post-graduate. The first was launched in Wakefield and Pontefract in 2005, supported by the University of Leeds, and the second in Bury in 2006, supported by the University of Manchester. Six more are planned.

The Trust believes that by providing funding for programmes for state secondary schools to work with independent schools and universities, the result is better opportunities for all students. The systems may be different, but the teachers are equally dedicated, and the ablest children want to learn, whatever their backgrounds. We have no political hang-ups, the Trust is working to forge these links.

These links could have a significant impact in the teaching of science in schools. In 2003 there were two British winners of the Nobel Prize in sciences, but the number of university science graduates is declining. It becomes a vicious circle: the less science is taught in schools, the fewer the students studying science at university; the fewer the students graduating with a science degree, the fewer the science teachers and the less science is taught in schools.