Last week Emily and Jemma from the Isle of Wight Coastal Scheme team within the Environment Agency paid a visit to our year 12 and 13 Geography students. They came in to update us on the improvements to the sea defences along Sandown Bay.
It was great to hear the professionals talking about coastal defences using language and ideas that we teach at The Island VI Form. It was also very exciting to hear plans for increasing biodiversity by 20% along the new flood defence schemes. We were astonished at how long the stakeholder consultation takes and the time between getting the idea through to finding funding, to then actually completing the work.
A number of our students were inspired by the career routes into the Environment Agency. Not only did students hear from an apprentice but they were also given information on the funded degrees in flood defence engineering. Emily showed us lots of photos of her working in the field on incidents as well as fun rafting and camping as part of the LGBT+ group at the Agency. It looked like a lot of fun!
We are very grateful to the officers for taking time out of their busy schedule to come speak with our students.
