A community approach to addressing the STEAM pipeline 
At Westlake Girls High School,we have been working hard to break down barriers leading to under-representation in STEAM.
Our partnership with the parent community has allowed us to reach untapped potential and collaboratively create authentic learning opportunities that address the lack of exposure and unconscious bias that our students arrived with at secondary school. However, to effectively and sustainably tackle the problem, we require a collective/community approach and earlier intervention at primary and intermediate levels.
Pictured above: E-STEAM students taking part in mini-internships at IAG, Genesis Energy, The Warehouse Group through in collaboration with our parent community.
We are very excited to be STEAMing ahead to plan our first STEAM Power-Ed community event, through our Pupuke Kāhui Ako which is made of two secondary, two intermediate and five primary schools, listed below.
The Pupuke Kāhui Ako STEAM Power-ED community event will take place later this year in our new event centre. The main outcome of this event is to provide us with the opportunity to engage the parent community as STEAM Ambassadors, to help our Kāhui Ako address issues and barriers around the STEAM pipeline, by accessing untapped potential within our parent community. Some of these barriers are highlighted in the Drawing the Future and Digital skills for our Digital Future reports, such as lack of exposure and understanding of STEAM pathways and under-representation in STEAM.
We held a co-design workshop to ensure its success in engaging the parent community as STEAM Ambassadors at our STEAM Power-ED community event. The workshop benefited from the participation of students, educators, parents already supporting our schools and advisors from the MoE, which is supporting this initiative.
Above left: Susana Tomaz, STEAM Coordinator and ASL for the Pupuke Kāhui Ako with Ariana George, Year 13 and STEAM/E-STEAM ex-student and Future Engineer. Addressing the lack of representation in STEAM.
Pictured at top: Vanya Walker, Agile Coach at the Warehouse group, co-facilitating the workshop.
Please email me at [email protected] to find out more or be involved.