Covid-19: CITB chief exec update – 6 April 2020

Good afternoon,

I hope you’re keeping well – in my update today we launch Go Construct Buildathon competitions - exciting challenges that we hope will provide support for children and parents alike during this prolonged school shutdown.

Amid all that is going on, we’ll be making the best use of our existing resources to continue to inspire the next generation of the construction workforce. These challenging Minecraft competitions will allow children and their families to learn more about the sector while having fun together.

Competitions

I saw recently first-hand at schools in Wales how Minecraft is phenomenally popular with young learners, so starting later in April and continuing through May and June we’ll be holding Go Construct Buildathon competitions for each of the home countries of England, Scotland and Wales. This is one example of a suite of support to attract children and young people into construction.   

Children aged 5-12 and their families will be able to find out about the exciting variety of roles within our sector by designing and building a construction project through Minecraft Education, with fantastic prizes from Microsoft.    

Supporting parents

Our partner Aspire 2Be will host live webinars to support parents and carers, providing instructions on how to access Minecraft at home for free and how to participate in the competition challenge. 

We’d really appreciate your support in getting this message out to parents, children and schools in your locality to demonstrate another way of how the industry is coming together in this time of national crisis.

Get involved

You can register for the Go Construct Minecraft Buildathon competitions. If you are interested in getting involved with judging the competitions, please contact donna.griffiths@citb.co.uk

The Go Construct Educate page also has extra resources and lesson plans to use at home.

CITB’s COVID-19 updates page is being refreshed daily and includes information on a range of subjects, including Grants, Funding and the NCC. 

You can also read the range of support measures made available to UK businesses and employees by the UK Government.

Kind wishes,

Sarah Beale

Chief Executive