Who’s Involved – Private Sector: The Muir Group

Headteacher: The Muir Project aims to develop leadership skills in our sixth year students. It focuses on the planning up to the implementation and the building of a house which will serve as a construction skills training centre.

John Muir: Inside the building there will be various areas for the various trades.

Student: Plumbing, electrician, joinery, carpentry, bricklaying – basically everything that a modern day construction worker would need to have.

John Muir: All of these trades can be done inside this particular building. It becomes a hot house of design, of ideas and things that the pupils have to take ownership for and become involved in.

Student: It’s basically our job, as the pupils, to push it forward, bring everyone together.

John Muir: The industry desperately needs that. It needs fresh ideas, fresh minds, new ideas and it needs leadership.

Student: I think this is good from the Muir Group point of view because they're helping pupils, which are looking to get into the industry that they're working in. You’ve got people looking for jobs all the time in that industry.

John Muir: When you involve children in something like this, they have ideas that you have not tapped because they have no barriers. And so, it could be with these children who don’t have their barriers, who don’t have their trade hang-ups – lets do it a different way. I'm sure that we're going to get more than we hoped for from this project.