5 min read - 17 Sep, 2025
The ERA Foundation celebrates 25 years and over £20m funding for engineering initiatives
Yesterday, the ERA Foundation celebrated 25 years of supporting engineering and manufacturing engagement, including funding and partnering with hundreds of projects to promote engineering in schools, research and business worth over £20m.
Sir John Lazar CBE FREng, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, who gave a keynote speech on the Academy’s strategy and its focus on skills for engineering, was joined by ERA President Sir Alan Rudge CBE FREng, Chair Andrew Churchill OBE FREng, and 130 guests to toast the support of a long list of pro-engineering activities, from value-creating enterprise hubs to engineering fellowships, and teachers whose work has showcased engineering to school children across the UK.
The ERA Foundation was a founding donor of The Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub, ranked for the second year running in the top three enterprise hubs in the UK, and 14th in Europe by the Financial Times and Statista. The Hub’s activities have contributed to the creation of nearly 6,000 jobs.
The Foundation has funded 55 industrial Fellowships, linking university research to businesses to help solve engineering challenges more quickly and help society. It has helped fund over 100 young students via the Smallpeice Trust’s Arkwright Engineering Scholarship, that sponsors students aged 16 to 18 to pursue engineering training with mentoring and access to STEM events.
The fellowships it has supported, jointly with both The Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and The Royal Academy of Engineering, involve some of the UK’s best physical sciences research that has advanced space exploration, net zero energy, battery storage, flood detection systems and much more.
The non-profit foundation, 25-years old but with roots that go back 100-years, also runs The Clark Prize that recognises hard-working teachers who help students to experience engineering and connect with technical careers, awarding prizes to 16 teachers and schools since 2016.
Since 2001, over £20m has been dispersed to programmes that align with the foundation’s goals of inspiring, influencing and implementing, through grants and awards, activities that promote engineering and manufacturing, especially to educate and empower young people.
Engineering enterprise and engineering for all society
The Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Hub was founded in 2013, supported by an ERA Foundation grant. Since then, the Hub has supported over 600 researchers, graduates, and entrepreneurs, who have helped create nearly 6,000 jobs and whose members have successfully secured over £1.3bn in additional funding. Hub member startups have raised £3.8bn to date.
Not only the large and glamorous programmes have benefited, though.
With ERA Foundation’s help, the Smallpeice Trust has funded more than 100 Arkwright Scholarship students through their ‘A’ levels, Scottish Highers and International Baccalaureate exams, connecting them to industry opportunities through mentorship. Smallpeice also runs courses to inspire girls to choose physics and engineering, which the Foundation has previously funded.
Last year, ERA Foundation supported five British women who enrolled on an electrical and electronics engineering degree, part of the Electrical Association of Women Centenary. And it has funded numerous Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Follow-on Grants, as well as Royal Society Mercer medal winners.
Rewarding invention in universities and schools
Examples of supporting research include Samuel Winter of BT Group, who is the 2025 Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Industrial Fellow, supported by ERA Foundation. Working with the University of Bath, Samuel developed variational quantum algorithms that optimise telecommunications systems, which will lead to cost, energy and time efficiencies. He is now doing a PhD in quantum physics linked to this work, while working at BT’s research centre.
Clare Doherty, a teacher at St Mary’s College in Derry, has devoted 29-years to technology education in schools and initiated the first TeachMeetTD in Ireland, an event that shares best practice among STEM teachers. The work of Lucy Hart, a teacher at Caroline Haslett Primary in Milton Keynes, led to the school being recognised as an iBelong Champion in December 2024, a scheme to encourage girls to study computer science.
Clare and Lucy are two of four winning teachers of the 2025 Clark Prize, funded by the Foundation, which is named after former Foundation Executive Secretary, the late Dr David Clark.
Andrew Churchill OBE FREng, the new chair of the ERA Foundation, said: “It is very exciting to celebrate the commencement of our 25th year of the ERA Foundation. We are very privileged to be custodians of a foundation that has the means to support such an array of brilliant projects right across the spectrum, from big investments like the Royal Academy of Engineering’s ‘Enterprise Hub’, which has funded over 600 entrepreneurs, to the primary schools of teachers such as Lucy Hart and Tracey Ellicott, who infectiously share the excitement of engineering with school children from a young age.”
Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE, chief executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, added: “We congratulate the ERA Foundation on its inspiring work to promote and enable future engineering innovation and skills over the last quarter of a century. I am delighted to be able to work with this far-sighted organisation, which has played such an active role in supporting the work of our Academy and particularly our successful and growing Enterprise Hub.”
Digital platforms extend influence
ERA Foundation has moved into the digital and social age, establishing the Born to Engineer video platform with films that share the experiences of young engineers, and teacher resources, to help young people connect with engineering careers. From this activity, five content creators have benefited from ERA Foundation grants to boost their engineering-centric social media and get this content onto platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
And over its 25-year history, ERA Foundation has collaborated with and supported Engineering UK, STEM Learning, Primary Engineer, Kids Invent Stuff, WISE (women-centred EDI in STEM), In2Science and many other programmes, pump-priming these projects.
With a new industrial strategy in development at a time when the UK badly needs economic growth, the ERA Foundation is a quiet but substantive partner to many far more visible organisations that are driving engineering, and therefore more invention and high-value growth in the UK economy.
