Education
We support education in a variety of ways. Having funded an exciting research programme that identified innovative methodologies and tools for anatomy learning at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the Company now funds an eponymous £50K research fellowship named after Dame Clare Marx, a former President of the College and a member of the Company, to follow up that programme. Our McNee Awards are made to mature medical students who already have a non-medical degree and therefore do not qualify for student loans, and we work with BMA Charities to allocate nearly £40K per annum to the right students all of whom are interviewed. And our support to King's College London, for more than a decade, to give pupils in non-selective London schools the self-confidence and self-belief to read Medicine at University; these are young people whose family and friendship networks are unable to give the support and guidance needed, and the programme has, as a result, enabled hundreds of talented young people to become doctors. The core recipient of the Barbers' Company assistance in this area is the King's College London Extended Medical Degree Programme which receives £50K per annum.
The Barbers’ Charities support a wide range of other medical education related activities. We find our grant making most effective when we work in partnership with experts in the field. For example we take great pleasure in providing a series of Clinical Nursing Scholarships in partnership with the University of East Anglia. Awards are offered to encourage qualified nurses to undertake research projects in connection with their clinical work. A joint panel from UEA and the Company interview all applicants. At the other end of the spectrum we provide prizes to around a dozen inner London schools for STEM related studies. The prizes are financially modest, but the impact is disproportional in the uplift it gives a pupil to be singled out for excellence. We adopt the same approach further up the educational pathway, sponsoring competitive essays for the British Orthopaedic Training Association whose annual competition produces extraordinarily high quality applications that create real admiration amongst the senior surgeons and physicians in the Company who see the panel's recommendations.
From the Raven Bequest, awards are made to surgeons, usually specialist registrars, who are travelling to an overseas centre of excellence where a new or highly specialised technique or procedure can be observed and mastered before the recipient returns to practise or teach the technique in this country. There are also awards for educational projects undertaken by members of the Medical Artists’ Association.