The PEARL Prize - A Celebration of Young Creative Minds

Rush hour, a wheelchair user almost nudged out of their chair onto a packed platform at Stratford. At London Bridge train station, a carriage’s door slides open, alighting and boarding commuters clash as impatience swells. Pregnant women are in the mix of the phalanx, their precious extensions bumped into and ignored by the hurrying crowd. At the Dagenham East train station, an elderly woman labours up the stairs, a young man hurries past her, almost knocking her over as a weary crowd looks on, some aghast, others unbothered.

The above scenarios, as eyebrow-wrinkling as they are, are common at train stations, and forty students from Mayfield School, Jo Richardson Community School and Brook 6^th Form & Academy, set out to provide creative solutions to some of these challenges.

The students took part in the PEARL Prize competition and worked to a brief set by PEARL’s Community Team. The competition’s cycle saw the students take part in a two-day workshop at the PEARL facility in November, where they presented their ideas based on the brief and received feedback from researchers and professional staff on the first day of the workshop. Day two saw the students create cardboard designs of their ideas in PEARL’s main laboratory. After a deliberating period, the winner was announced at a ceremony held at the PEARL facility on the 13^th of January, 2026.  Each participant received a certificate of completion, and the winners, from Brook 6^th Form & Academy, took home a trophy and £50 vouchers for their creative efforts.

At the ceremony, Professor Nick Tyler, PEARL's director, said, 'PEARL was conceived to enable people to experience making their imagination real and the PEARL Prize aims to encourage local students to do this. It is fantastic to see this challenge being taken up so creatively by the school students.

Mr Luke-Isaiah Rowlands, lead engineering teacher from Brook 6^th Form and Academy was grateful for the opportunity afforded to the students and expressed his gratitude by saying, ‘It has been a great opportunity for our students and has deepened their understanding of user-centred design. The project greatly improved their research skills, carrying out both secondary and primary research, such as interviewing pregnant women, the blind and elderly etcetera, whilst using feedback from their users to improve their ideas. Just to name a few benefits our students got from the project: enhanced confidence, public speaking skills, team work skills, research skills, sketching and model making skills.’

Wrapping up the ceremony, PEARL’s Community Partnerships manager, Helen King, praised the students for delving into the depths of the creative wells to produce outstanding designs that made picking a winner a difficult task.