Young engineers are studying at the JCB academy, Britain’s first university technical college (UTC), which opened for its second academic year on 22 August, writes Chris Arnot at the Guardian.

JCB may be the first UTC, but it won’t be the last. Next month, the Black Country academy will open, also in Staffordshire, and the current education secretary, and the chancellor, George Osborne, has already announced funding for another 24 by 2014. Baker envisages between 200 and 300 in 10 years’ time.

Although they sound like higher education institutions, in fact UTCs are non-selective colleges for pupils aged from 14 to 19, sponsored by universities.

The colleges teach practical subjects such as engineering, product design and health sciences, which require specialized equipment, as well as English, math, science, humanities, foreign languages and IT. Pupils also do 40-80 days’ work experience a year.

“This is going to be the answer to all the mistakes we’ve made in British education,” Lord Baker told the Guardian earlier this year.

The former education secretary chairs the Baker-Dearing Trust, which developed the idea of technical colleges.

“And it’s my belief that there are a group of youngsters out there for whom this is a preferred way of learning. If you can provide them with that, you can enthuse them,” says Jim Wade, principal of JCB, which is supported by five universities, including Cambridge.

The curriculum covers maths, English, German, at least two sciences, IT and business enterprise, as well as engineering.

“We break the school year into eight-week blocks, each one based around solving an engineering problem in teams,” Wade explains.

“Each problem has a business element to it. And we try to build the rest of the curriculum through engineering. So, if we’re designing a pump for a Rolls-Royce jet engine, we might be writing about it in English.”

The school has the sort of equipment, staffing levels and work ethos that other schools would envy.

It’s easy to be persuaded that we need more like it to meet the demands of a second industrial revolution so very different from the first, writes Arnot.