Students “see inside manufacturing” at GKN

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Last week, 14 Year 10 students went to GKN Filton to participate in their “Seeing Inside Manufacturing” open day.

The day began with an introduction and health and safety briefing, including an explanation on how GKN manufacture the wings for planes. Students were then taken on a tour of the site to see various manufacturing techniques, including 3D printing, which were explained by GKN employees. They were able to see where the wings are manufactured and walk around the manufacturing area.

After lunch, students were divided into groups and given a task. They were required to construct parts of a plane without any instructions, which led to them realising that the parts they were given didn’t all fit together. GKN then supplied teams with instruction booklets and they had to go to the apprentices to collect the necessary parts they didn’t have. At each stage of the build, students had to get their booklets signed for a quality check. Congratulations to Sol, Adam, Nadia and Mikolaj who were on the winning team!

Finally, GKN apprentices delivered a talk to explain how they got onto the GKN apprenticeship scheme and the advantages of doing an apprenticeship. Our students asked lots of questions and were inspired to think about apprenticeships as an option for the future.

Ryan Milton from GKN commented: “Seeing Inside Manufacturing events are an important part of our calendar at Filton. It’s fantastic to be able to give students a unique experience, exploring cutting edge technologies used in modern day aircraft manufacture. Our Apprenticeship programme is a cornerstone of our business and we hope these events can help inspire young minds to potentially explore careers in engineering.”