SGS Berkeley Green launches Esports BTEC
SGS Berkeley Green UTC (university technical college) has launched a new Esports BTEC.
The Esports BTEC has been designed as a stepping-stone to thriving industries like creative media and games design, providing students with a portfolio of relevant, technical and transferable skills.
Esports (or electronic sports) is a term used to describe competitive video gaming.
Head of Digital, Rich Williams, explained: "Esports is an area of enormous growth internationally and it fits perfectly alongside our digital curriculum. Students will be able to study a single level 3 Esports course alongside other digital or engineering qualifications, or even A Levels. We are the only school in the area able to offer such a specialist course.
"The UTC is in a prime position to deliver the BTEC as students have access to unrivalled facilities and probably the largest specialist teaching team of any school in the region. Expertise from key stakeholders has been used to develop an engaging course that enables students to progress and enter the workplace confident and well prepared.
"Over the last year, we have seen online employability thrive and specialised jobs in digital technologies have opened up at an extraordinary rate. To be able to provide a course that is so current and that captures this movement shows that we really are providing an education for the future."
Opened in September 2017, SGS Berkeley Green UTC is Gloucestershire’s newest educational institution. The new £15 million campus at the former Berkeley Laboratories, accepts students for their GCSEs in Year 10 or A Levels and Technical Qualifications in Year 12.
UTCs are government-funded schools with a STEM focus.
They offer a secondary-age education for Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5 (usually age 14-18) with some starting earlier at Key Stage 3. By recruiting at age 14, UTCs provide a fresh-start for many young people in a supportive, smaller school environment.
As well as providing a strong grounding in the core subjects of English, Maths and Science, each UTC has one or more technical specialism linked to their local industry partners. The curriculum provides a blend of academic and technical learning and UTCs invest in young people’s enthusiasm and aptitude for science, maths and technology, and in doing so accelerate their progression to a career in a technical field.
Exclusive data from Barclays Games and Esports released today reveals that the games sector has seen one of the largest increases in spending in 2020, with an increase of 43 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019, 11 per cent higher than the increase in entertainment streaming services (music, video and books, 32 per cent) and fourteen percent higher than general retail (29 per cent).
