This project seeks to complement and to extend traditional public awareness activities by bringing together schools and universities in the context of an engineering focus. Using Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) as a pilot study, this will involve staff and students from schools and universities working together to create exciting and innovative programmes for school children, supported by world leading engineering research groups. In universities the focus will be on collaboration to redesign first year university programmes to build more closely on the experiences of young people as they move from school to university. To embed ideas in the education system, the project will work with policy makers, local and national, to develop policy implications from research and practice for the school university interface more generally. A primary objective of the project is to secure permanent awareness of engineering as a valued profession within the school community and through this, to increase the participation rates of young people embracing engineering as a career. Centred initially within the Scottish Education system, the findings will be disseminated through the provision of e- learning courses and information packages, ensuring uptake on a UK national basis.

Reading comprehension is vital to the success and self-esteem of school pupils, so much so that it is a high priority in the Scottish Executive's current education strategy. Yet it has proved an intractable problem for teachers. In recent years this has led to a prolonged and sometimes heated debate over the advantages and disadvantages of varying teaching methods, such as the method of synthetic phonics. However, this debate has focussed on problems of 'decoding' text rather than comprehending it. 'Decoding' means turning letters into sounds and words, and it is of course a crucial stage in learning to read. But research has shown that many pupils are proficient at decoding a text, yet when they are asked what the text is about, they find it difficult to answer. \n\nThis is where research on the history of reading and prose style can provide some answers. Dr Jajdelska's work on the rise of silent reading in the eighteenth century has shown that writers who assume a silent reader (as almost all writers do in the present day) construct their texts differently from those who write for readers who speak the text to themselves or an audience (as almost all writers did before the eighteenth century). Since the eighteenth century, texts have been constructed so that readers need to imagine a 'narrator' in order to make sense of it. If the reader cannot imagine this narrator, they will have great difficulties in understanding narrative, because they won't be able to make sense of movements in time and space. For example, if the narrator explains that a character has left the room, the proficient silent reader can adjust their mental model of what's happening accordingly. But if the reader has problems imagining the narrator, and working out the narrator's imaginary position, they will have problems both in creating and adjusting their mental model of the narrative in this way. In other words, they will have problems with comprehension, even though they are perfectly competent at decoding the text. \n\nDr Jajdelska's work explains in great detail exactly which kinds of textual features are likely to be difficult for readers (such as those in the early eighteenth century) who have learned to read but find it hard to follow texts written for silent readers. Given that these findings arose in an academic field unconnected to educational studies, how can this knowledge be made available to teachers? Ideally, the method should involve the teachers themselves and take place in a context of pupils reading. The literacy circles developed by Sue Ellis, a researcher in literacy and education, are ideal for this purpose. Dr Jajdelska and Ms Ellis will choose texts for children which highlight the comprehension problems in question. We will then work with teachers to explain the nature of these comprehension problems and how to spot them. The teachers will establish literacy circles, a reading context which maximises pupils' motivation to read. When comprehension difficulties arise, the teachers, with continued support from the researchers, will be able to identify and remedy them more effectively than in the past. In the final stage of the scheme, the researchers will help the teachers to write up their experiences in a suitable way for fellow teachers for the Learning and Teaching Scotland website.\n\nWe believe that the Dr Jajdelska's findings may prove invaluable to teachers. Communicating them this way will ensure that they are well understood by individual teachers in the first instance, who will then by responsible for communicating them as effectively as possible to the wider teaching community.

The last deep coal mine in the UK closed in 2015. The Coal Authority has a record of 177,000 known mine entries. This proposal examines the potential to use abandoned mine shafts for interseasonal storage of curtailed wind energy in the form of thermal energy. In 2020, wind curtailment payments in the UK were £282M: enough to power 1.25 million homes and equivalent to £4 per MWh of energy generated. There is 120GW of 'spare' electricity in East Ayrshire alone. Thermal stores have been studied previously but are limited by size and the need to insulate. Flooded mine shafts are ubiquitous across much of the UK, yet the thermal storage opportunity within shafts has never been explored. The rock mass around the shafts are insulators and pilot work by our consortium has shown that as the rocks heat up the efficiency of the heat extraction rises considerably in as little as three years. We will investigate the feasibility of using the spare electricity on windy days to heat up water in abandoned mine shafts, to be extracted on cold days by heat pumps into homes and businesses. The UK is peppered with mine shafts from the days of coal mining - we want to turn these holes in the ground into thermal stores to help balance the electrical grid and to decarbonise homes and businesses. Mine shafts were lined with concrete or brick (sometimes unlined). To safely and efficiently utilise this legacy subsurface infrastructure we need to understand the effect of heating up the water in the mine shafts on: the water body in the shaft, which may be naturally stratified and will contain minerals that could cause contamination or scaling; on the lining material, which is likely to have degraded in the decades since mine closure; on the surrounding rocks and the water they contain (in pores and fractures). We will develop sophisticated coupled thermal-hydraulic-chemical-mechanical (THCM) modelling informed by case studies we develop from an assay of the UK's shafts, as well as data collected from a test site. We will also take a whole-systems approach to looking at how such an energy store could sit within the wider energy system, taking into account the economics of such a project, and any carbon emissions generated through construction and operation of a site. We are planning a test at a site where we drill into a shaft to retrieve samples of water and capping materials for analysis, and then monitor the injection of heat to validate our models. The example shaft that we are proposing to work on is the Barony colliery, once the deepest in Scotland. Our project partners, East Ayrshire Council have funding for an observation hole close to the site that will provide a baseline of data for the modelling and for observing the progress of our experiment. The outputs of this work will be applicable for assessing the mine shaft thermal store resource at mine shaft sites across UK coalfields, any risks associated with utilising that resource, and the optimal way to use that resource within the local energy system. We will also provide useful new data for the more well-understood concept of extracting natural geothermally recharged heat from mine workings; for consideration of the best way to abandon active mines so that they are thermal storage-ready; produce a fully coupled THCM model of mine shafts and the surrounding rock mass; and develop the first integrated energy system model to include subsurface infrastructure and geology.