Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment she has made of the performance of the Year of Engineering 2018 campaign.

The Year of Engineering 2018 campaign was a success thanks to the support and enthusiasm of more than 1500 partners right across the sector.

The efforts of our partners – scores of passionate individuals from businesses, professional institutions, charities, schools and colleges - helped the campaign deliver more than five million direct experiences of engineering to 7-16 year olds across the UK, well exceeding our set one million target.

We have seen first-hand that when young people get the chance to enjoy problem-solving activities or meet an engineer face-to-face, they are more likely to consider it as a job. It was fantastic to see that for those young people aware of the campaign, desirability of engineering careers increased substantially – by 35 percentage points for 7-11s and 14 percentage points for 11-16s

We aim to create a lasting and meaningful legacy for the Year of Engineering by continuing to show young people from different backgrounds what they can achieve in engineering. We will work together across the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Department for Education and the Department for Transport and other departments to build on the success of the campaign through a long-term engineering legacy campaign and through continued collaboration across industry.

We need more engineers to help us meet our Grand Challenges to ensure the UK leads the way on the AI and data revolution and the global shift to clean growth, harness the power of innovation to meet the needs of an ageing society and become a world leader in the future of mobility - the way people, goods and services move.