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Now in its eleventh year, International Women in Engineering Day (INWED), the international campaign from the Women’s Engineering Society, celebrates women in engineering and promotes the amazing work that women engineers across the globe are doing to support lives and livelihoods every day.

This year’s theme is #Enhancedbyengineering and INWED is giving women engineers around the world a profile when they are still hugely under-represented, with 2021 figures indicating that in the UK only 16.5% of engineers are women. As the only platform of its kind, INWED plays a vital role in encouraging more young women and girls to take up engineering careers.

At The Smallpeice Trust we recognise the important contribution women are making to world of engineering and one of our biggest challenges is to encourage and inspire more young women into pursuing careers in STEM related industries. Our Girls into Engineering residential course at Loughborough University, proudly supported by GE HealthCare and Leonardo brings talented, young women between the ages of 12 and 14 together, who aspire to be the next generation of women engineers. During this three-day course, female students get the opportunity to learn more about the world of engineering through engaging practical projects, plus gain valuable insight from leading industry professionals from both GE HealthCare and Leonardo.

Our whole summer course programme enables students to fuel their passion for STEM subjects. These multi-day courses give an insight into life beyond the classroom, introduce students to industry leaders and get young people with similar interests working together on hands-on projects. As women in the UK engineering sector are currently underrepresented, and we aim to fill all our courses with an equal 50/50 split of female and male students. During the last academic year, 2022/23 we inspired nearly 60,000 students to take part in our activities, of which 50% were girls or non-binary students.

As a Trust we want our courses to be accessible to all, so we have a small number of fully funded bursary places available across our paid courses. The Dr Cosby Smallpeice bursary is funded by The Smallpeice Trust, with a commitment to offer 10% of places fully funded across our summer course programme. We are grateful to our partners who support these life changing courses, helping to make the course places more affordable, helping to widen participation. Some partners offer additional funded places on courses, helping us to more young people the opportunity to attend.

There are still paid places available on some of our summer engineering courses, please visit our events page here for more details.