February 2026 – Amey ‘Construction Awareness Days’
Amey Collaborating with Developing the Young Workforce (Glasgow Branch).
Two of Amey’s Transport Infrastructure Contracts covering the Greater Glasgow area; NMC South West & M8 DBFO, in collaboration with Developing the Young Workforce (Glasgow Branch), invited S3 students from three Glasgow secondary schools, to join them for a day each, for a ‘Construction Awareness Day’ at their Polmadie Depot in Glasgow. Twenty-seven students from the chosen secondary schools took part in the pilot project, completing phase 1 of 3 phases being planned over a 2 year period.
An introduction to the business was delivered by contract heads Garry Head and Stewart Allan, with engagement sessions from Chris Weir; Paul McCabe; Brian Wilks; Adam Brown; Elaine McFarlane and Garry McCool. The three separate days were facilitated by Claire Graham (main speaker) and Martin Cochrane.
The S3 pupils toured the office and depot, visiting the Salt barn (2nd biggest in Europe); viewed specialist machinery including gritters and explored the Trunk Road Incident Support vehicle (TRISS) to understand how the network safety is maintained every day of the year.
During the road awareness sessions, pupils used RC trucks within a live traffic management set-up to complete a scenario based exercise, highlighting how quickly risks can escalate without proper control measures already being in place.
‘Real Life’ collision examples via video footage, reinforced the importance of safety both at the depot and out on the trunk road network, with fast moving traffic, in close proximity to our roadworkers, being an ever present danger.
The immersive VR sessions allowed the S3 students to operate diggers and view an inspection walk along the high suspension cables of the Forth Road Bridge towers, some 500 feet (156 metres) above the Forth estuary.
The day concluded with networking sessions during lunch and a bridge engineering challenge, were pupils worked in pairs to design & build their own bridge, whilst managing a budget.
M8DBFO Bridge Engineer Adam Brown, assisted by graduate engineers Ross & Jay, give students from St Thomas Aquinas Secondary (Jordanhill) a Bridge Building PowerPoint input.
Feedback from the visit showed increased awareness of infrastructure careers and strong engagement with the practical, hands on activities.
Ends.