Robotics is something which a small number of schools across the UK offer, filling in gaps left by the current curriculum, especially for students wishing to go into STEM careers.
The few thousand students across the UK with access to robotics gain an immense amount of both opportunity and experiences, however, to most students, these are off-limits.
For the most part, school-based robotics teams raise the money necessary for parts, entrance fees and transport through fundraising and sponsorships (most teams set up successful fundraisers and create connections and partnerships with brands). However, this is only an option for established teams: for most schools, robotics is simply inaccessible due to the £400 registration fee. For this reason, hundreds of thousands of students miss out on the incredible opportunity that is robotics (and consequently a potential career in STEM) simply due to a lack of resources in schools.
The goal of STEM Advance is to allow every school in the country a one-off budget of £400 to allow them the opportunity to join the First Tech Challenge programme. This covers the entrance fee and basic parts which allows a team to compete. Once this has been started, teams will be able to fundraise or find sponsorships to pay for any additional kit they wish to purchase in the future.
FTC is a competition for secondary-age students with over 30,000 teams worldwide. From September to June, working in student-led teams, young people design, build and program a custom robot completely from scratch – these robots then compete in 2v2 matches to complete set tasks; there is also a strong focus on building soft skills (e.g. teamwork, project management, communication to name a few), developed through community outreach, fundraising, mentoring and promoting robotics.
In October 2025, we were part of a team of five students from Langley Park School for Boys in Beckenham, London. We ranked the #1 robotics team in the UK, and in October, we represented Great Britain in the First Global Challenge (often known as the ‘Robotics Olympics’), alongside students from nearly 200 countries in a competition which inspires the next generation of global changemakers by empowering students to collectively tackle the world’s most pressing challenges through an education in STEM.
“For me, robotics has been an incredible and life-changing experience, and I want to allow every student the opportunity to have that, no matter their circumstances.”
Adrian Gupta, Project Lead
As we enter 2026, here’s an update of where STEM Advance is now: Team Great Britain Team Great Britain, the initial starting force of the STEM Advance project, competed in the First Global Challenge in Panama City in October 2025. They performed competitively and returned home with the ‘Video Submission Award’. They were also…