Having spent the summer volunteering at Professor Sir David King’s Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair, Ananya was invited to COP to experience and to learn. She is also there in a professional capacity, gathering ideas for the @down.to.earth.cookbooks plant-based recipes project that she and her Putney Young Enterprise team are working on this year.

Ananya is not alone. She joins other Putney students who will be heard this week on BBC Radio 5 Live, as they talk to The Naked Scientist about the psychology of climate change and how it affects their lives day to day.

Another sixth-former, one of our design scholars, Maddy in Year 13, has been using her Design Technology lessons to combat the problem of landfill, designing an eco-friendly bin that slowly melts plastic into cubes, more readily digestible by recycling machines.

Despite there being four times more applications from men than women to university engineering courses, the last ten years have shown a 96% increase in female undergraduate applications. This increase has been borne out at Putney, with Design Technology seeing a surge in popularity and numbers wishing to study the subject at GCSE and A Level very much on the rise. This could be partly due to what Miss David describes as, “developing a landscape where all students are empowered to be bold, ambitious and seek out challenges that respond to real world problems”.

Putney’s new Engineering Club is run by two keen Sixth Form engineers. Scarlett and Ekaterina in Year 12 have started their club sessions with Mechanical Engineering, “looking at the building of things” with Years 7-9; Chemical, Civil and Software will follow.

“It’s the problem-solving and the hands-on approach that really appeals,” they agree, and both are excited to be inspiring younger pupils. The club’s appeal is down to a lot more than matchsticks and marshmallows and demonstrates how easy it can be to attract female talent in engineering. One keen participant, Thea in Year 7 explains, “They don’t really give us a set of instructions on how to do something, so it improves our independence and we can learn for ourselves the process of making something.”