A girls' school, a custom electric vehicle, and a Top 10 finish
Somewhere on the Sandon Road site of Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School, Sixth Form and Year 11 students have been building an electric vehicle from scratch — chassis welded, safety harness ergonomics designed, steering mechanism installed. Not as a thought experiment. As an actual car.
That project sits alongside a 2026 national competition result that is harder to dismiss than most school press releases: KGGS's Electric Racing Team placed in the Top 10 nationally in the STEM On Track Alpine F1 Competition, finishing among the leading entries from more than 150 schools. Students designed the car livery and decal and competed at the level of design engineering, not just decoration. Mr Mears Sagoo, of the school's STEM Faculty, described the combined effort plainly: 'Together, we are not only building an electric vehicle but also nurturing the next generation of engineers and innovators.'
Elsewhere in the school's programme, the LEGO League team entered the 'Submerged' challenge — building and programming autonomous robots to present engineering solutions to judges. STEM Roadshows delivered by the RAF, Royal Navy, and BAE Systems bring professional engineering into the classroom, including hands-on coding sessions with 'Lexi', a robotic dog. These are not optional enrichment afternoons. They form a visible, recurring strand of what KGGS does — at a selective girls' grammar school, in a Lincolnshire market town, in 2026.
Three institutional choices behind one engineering culture
Three distinct institutional choices converge at KGGS — and their combined effect matters more than any one of them alone.
The first is single-sex education. Department for Education data shows girls in all-girls schools are 2.5 times as likely to take Further Maths and Physics as girls in mixed schools; Chemistry uptake is 77% higher, Computer Science 72% higher. UCL's analysis of A-level entries, submitted as parliamentary evidence, confirms the pattern holds at scale: girls in single-sex schools take substantially more STEM A-levels than their peers in coeducational settings. The mechanism is not fully settled — whether it is reduced stereotype threat, peer culture, teacher expectation, or some combination — but the correlation in subject choice is robust.
The second condition is selectivity. KGGS admits girls who are already high-attaining and academically motivated; its sixth form filters further, requiring grades 5–9 across six GCSEs to study science A-levels. A 99% A-level pass rate and 35% of grades at A*-A are the measurable result. The school is working, in part, with students who already intend to succeed academically.
The third — and the most deliberate — is extracurricular investment. Competitions, industry partnerships, and the electric vehicle build do not happen by accident. They represent a sustained institutional decision to convert academic advantage into something more embodied: an engineering identity that students carry into the world rather than just grades on a certificate.
None of these conditions is independently sufficient. The data on single-sex schooling applies broadly; the grammar pipeline is a structural feature of Lincolnshire's admissions geography; the extracurricular culture is a choice KGGS has made. It is their intersection that produces what the school's STEM programme now looks like.
The gap KGGS's pupils are being prepared to cross
The numbers behind the engineering gender gap are striking precisely because of what they don't explain. Women hold just 16.5–17% of jobs in the UK engineering and technology workforce — yet at GCSE, girls are outperforming boys in STEM: 28.2% of female entries earn grade 7 or above, against 25.3% of male entries. The academic ability is there. What erodes is everything else.
The Royal Society's Science Education Tracker finds only 12% of girls feel engineering fits with who they are, and just 16% consider it a suitable career. Researchers call the period between ages 9 and 14 the 'dream gap' — a documented decline in STEM confidence that starts earlier than most parents would expect: children as young as six have already begun associating engineering with 'jobs for boys.' By post-16, only 35% of high-performing female GCSE students continue into STEM subjects, a figure that drops again to 25% at university. The leakage is not at the point of competence. It happens at transitions, when identity and belonging matter most.
One finding cuts through the structural complexity: girls are 33% more likely to consider STEM careers if they personally know a female engineer — not a television presenter or a poster, but a person encountered in a context that felt real. That makes the sustained institutional choices of a school in Grantham — competitions, workshops, industry partnerships, repeated year on year — something more consequential than local pride.
What research says actually changes the trajectory
Peer-reviewed research published in 2025 offers a clearer picture of what actually builds engineering identity in girls, rather than simply exposing them to it. Two studies confirm that structured STEM education develops what researchers call 'engineering habits of mind' — collaboration, systems thinking, creativity, and communication — and that family involvement amplifies these gains further. The crucial caveat is the word structured: short-term, one-off events produce measurable enthusiasm but limited lasting change.
National policy is now catching up to that finding. In October 2025, EngineeringUK and the City & Guilds Foundation launched a five-year bursary programme for secondary schools, explicitly designed to replace 'sporadic, one-off STEM events' with an embedded culture of sustained engagement from Year 7 through to Year 11 — targeting the students most underrepresented in engineering. The programme's framing is a tacit acknowledgement that a single careers fair or visiting robotics demo rarely shifts a student's sense of who engineering is for.
Talent 2030, the UK's girls-only national engineering competition, takes a similar approach to long-term identity: winners receive Women's Engineering Society membership and mentoring from engineers at firms including Rolls-Royce and Centrica — connecting a school competition entry directly to a professional community.
What KGGS appears to have built — recurring competitions, year-on-year industry partnerships with the RAF, Royal Navy, and BAE Systems, and multi-month real-build projects — is precisely the sustained model that policy is now trying to scale. The school has not been running a STEM programme; it has been running a culture.
The selectivity question: does this model travel?
None of this is straightforwardly replicable — and it is worth saying so plainly.
KGGS's intake is selective: entry is by prior attainment, which means the school works with students who have already demonstrated academic motivation and, in most cases, family support for education. That is not a criticism of its achievements; it is a structural fact that shapes what those achievements can honestly be said to demonstrate. A mixed comprehensive in Sleaford or Bourne, drawing from a broader spread of prior attainment, faces a different institutional starting point.
The three conditions at KGGS — single-sex, selective, and deliberately invested — may be cumulative rather than simply additive. Remove grammar selectivity and the peer dynamics shift. Remove single-sex status and, on current evidence, girls' subject-choice freedoms narrow. The compound may matter as much as any individual ingredient, and disaggregating the three is not straightforward.
What the national policy picture does suggest is that some elements travel independently. Sustained culture, competition participation, industry mentoring, and extended real-build projects do not require grammar status to function. The EngineeringUK bursary programme launched in October 2025 explicitly targets schools without these structural advantages, and Talent 2030 is open to any girl aged 11–18 regardless of school type.
The honest question — worth sitting with rather than resolving quickly — is what a comprehensive school in Lincolnshire would actually need to replicate even part of this: sustained funding, willing industry partners, and a staffing culture with enough flexibility to run a year-long vehicle build alongside a full timetable. Those are not small asks.
What this means for a market town of 44,000
Grantham is a market town of around 44,580 people. It has a railway station, a retail centre in partial decline, and no dominant tech employer anchoring a local engineering economy. That absence matters when reading KGGS's achievements: the school is not feeding a pipeline into nearby industry in any straightforward sense. The careers its students are being prepared for — in aerospace, defence, advanced manufacturing, software — are mostly elsewhere.
That raises a question the school's results do not settle: is KGGS building Grantham's technical future, or equipping a cohort to leave? Both things can be true at once, and neither cancels the other. But in a town without concentrated engineering employment, the honest answer is probably the latter, at least in the near term.
There is also the question of which Grantham this reaches. Grammar admissions are open across the catchment, but selectivity means the pipeline runs through a filtered slice of the local population — girls who cleared the 11-plus, whose families navigated the process, who arrived already on a particular educational trajectory. The students building electric vehicles and competing nationally are not a random sample of girls growing up in Lincolnshire.
What may be more durable than the direct pipeline is something harder to measure. Girls are 33% more likely to consider engineering careers if they personally know a woman in the field. A school that visibly produces young women doing engineering — year on year, in public competitions, with industry partners — performs a cultural function that extends beyond its own cohort. Whether that function reaches the girls who did not pass the 11-plus, in the schools and streets nearby, is the question Grantham has not yet answered.
- [1] Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School. https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=7090513 https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid=7090513
- [2] Supporting Girls' Engineering Habits of Mind With STEM Education. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.23461 https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.23461
- [3] The effect of family-involved STEM education on girls' engineering habits of mind. (2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2025.2496314 https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2025.2496314