Nine Sussex school pupils from schools in Lewes and Seaford, including five year 7 students from Seahaven Academy, were rewarded for their hard work this year with a trip out to sea on a crew transfer vessel visiting the Rampion Offshore Wind Farm(1).
Three of the students have been on work experience at the Rampion Operations and Maintenance Base in Newhaven all week, including Thomas McKay from Priory School in Lewes, Rose Allen from East Sussex College in Lewes and Franklin Macrae from Seaford Head School. Another, Connor Carruthers, a budding young environmental videographer from Haywards Heath, filmed the trip.
“The work experience students have been helping out the team onshore, learning the ropes on how the wind farm creates clean, green energy, and now they have experienced the awe-inspiring sight of the turbines close-up,” said Dan Allen-Baines, General Manager of RWE-operated Rampion Offshore Wind Farm.
“We are committed to supporting young people in Sussex into careers in the wind energy industry and have also recruited this year’s intake of three apprentices, who will start their three-year Turbine Technician training in August. We are proud to have now supported training 16 apprentices.’
Nine of Rampion’s apprentices over the past few years are now fully-trained wind turbine technicians, six of them employed full-time on the Rampion turbines as part of the Newhaven-based team who work daily to operate the wind farm.
Currently, an engineering student from the University of Sussex is on a one-year placement at Rampion, and a young graduate on the RWE early careers programme ‘New Spirit Offshore’ is completing an inspiring internship.
Rampion is also working with the University of Brighton to launch a new bursary for living expenses to a second-year engineering student who is from an under-represented group.
A spokesperson from the University of Brighton said, “We are proud to be partnering with The Rampion Fund at Sussex Community Foundation on the STEM Progression Scholarship. We understand that financial support can make a big difference in a student's journey.
The £3000 scholarship is to support a talented second year full-time undergraduate STEM student from Brighton & Hove, East Sussex and West Sussex and from a minority ethnic and lower socioeconomic background, who is eager to make their mark in the dynamic offshore wind industry.
The scholarship will be open for applications in Autumn 2025 and for further details please contact giving@brighton.ac.uk or visit the University of Brighton website for more details - Scholarships and awards.
Now in its eighth year of operation, Rampion Offshore Wind Farm creates enough clean green energy to power almost 409,000 homes(2). It started generating energy in November 2017 and all turbines were fully commissioned and generating energy from April 2018.