Welcome to COYO Headquarters
YOU’D BE AMAZED WHAT CAN BE ACHIEVED WORKING HERE – IT’S THE PERFECT ENVIRONMENT FOR OUR TEAM TO CREATE THE EXTRAORDINARY!
Welcome to COYO Headquarters
YOU’D BE AMAZED WHAT CAN BE ACHIEVED WORKING HERE – IT’S THE PERFECT ENVIRONMENT FOR OUR TEAM TO CREATE THE EXTRAORDINARY!
Alison Watson MBE
Founder and Chief Executive
Fiercely passionate with a big heart, Alison is an unshakable optimist, always smiling and approaches everything she does with the same cheerful enthusiasm and pragmatic approach.
Alison is married to a fellow lover of all things ‘great outdoors’. She’s Mum to a music-mad future Live Sound Engineer and Step-Mum to a horse-mad groom at the Royal Mews.
She’s a former Land Surveyor and always called it the ‘best job in the world’ – until she started COYO of course. She now ploughs her energy into helping young people discover what they might ordinarily miss.
Alison cares deeply about the future of the construction industry. Her enduring ambition to enable the development of home-grown talent through the Design Engineer Construct! Learning Programme is now being fulfilled globally. This is thanks to her hugely dedicated team and the support of the incredible COYO ‘family’ of like-minded education and industry professionals.
In recognition of her years of commitment, Alison has been awarded a Doctor of Engineering honorary degree from the fantastic Heriot-Watt University, elected Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors and awarded the President’s Award and Richard Carter prize. She was nominated to the Board of the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre, represented Youth and Learning for the Construction Industry Training Board Council and honoured with an MBE for services to education in HM The Queen’s 2018 New Year Honours.
Daniel McDonagh
Teaching Development Manager
Enthusiastic and energetic, friendly and outgoing, Dan is a shining example of the positive impact DEC can have on teachers, and indeed that teachers can have on their DEC students.
Teaching since 2008 in the UK, Dan has taught DEC since 2012 at Levels 1, 2 and 3 in an 11-18 Manchester school. His nine-year experience developing and leading DEC made him the ideal candidate to move to COYO in 2019.
Dan is always available to support and develop our family of new and existing DEC teachers and their learners. He is passionate about empowering young people to take control of their own futures through employment-focused learning.
In addition to being awarded the Institution of Civil Engineers “ICE 200 medal” for his outstanding contribution to raising awareness of the sector, Dan is a qualified teacher, a Specialist Leader of Education and holds a Masters in Education with a focus on creativity.
