A veteran carpenter who came out of retirement to pass on his passion and skills to primary school pupils has been honoured by the Rotary Club of Hamilton.

Kevin Bean, a former Bermuda College lecturer, was asked to teach woodwork at Paget Primary School in a pilot adopt-a-school programme in 2022.

The scheme was the idea of Hamilton Rotary and was designed to encourage younger students to become interested in the trades.

Eight boys in P4 and P5 were selected for the first course, and, three years on, the programme has been expanded, with more youngsters eager to join up.

Before Mr Bean accepted his award at the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club on Tuesday night, the school’s principal told a packed audience how the programme had benefited the students in a wide range of ways.

Sonia Raynor said: “For the boys that sustained the two and three years, you will be amazed at seeing how they are standing tall now, their shoulders are back and they’re talking.

“I think it’s a blend of things that makes the difference.

“I believe that exposing children to as much as we can is important and for those boys who have been in it for three years … you can see the light in their eyes.

“They are so excited. There’s a level of pride.

“It’s more than woodwork. It’s building confidence, critical thinking skills, there’s some creativity in there, and there’s absolute discipline. All those things build character.

“And if the boys choose not to do woodwork in the future, they will always have that in their toolkit.”

She added: “I appreciate Kevin, because he’s so calm. We have one male teacher, who’s the PE teacher, and Kevin’s the other male teacher, who shows up twice a week and is an excellent example, an excellent model, to our young boys.

“Many of our children are from families that don’t have a father and so Kevin plays that role. You can see the impact.“

Accepting his award, Mr Bean said he seized on the opportunity of teaching primary school students because he felt that children needed to be exposed to crafts at a younger age.

He said: “It’s just a love that I have because I’ve been doing carpentry for aeons, I would say. I’ve had a love for it since the age of 5, so I’ve been doing it for a while.

“I know that the Technical Institute took on boys when they were 11 years old. If you were 12, they wouldn’t take you, because I tried. I wanted to go to that school but it didn’t happen.

“We knew that it would be easier to get these students into a technical mindset if we get them earlier and so that’s how it came about.

“We didn’t want to just talk — we wanted to see some action.”

Mr Bean acknowledged that there were some teething problems when the programme started.

“Because of my training I had never taught young people — it was always high school or college,” he said.

As a result, tutoring a class of seven-year-olds was as much a lesson for Mr Bean as it was for his students, particularly when it came to the foundations of carpentry, such as mathematics.

He said: “I think woodwork is applied maths. If a student can’t measure, it’s going to be very difficult for them to make something productive.”

Learning fractions was particularly challenging for his young charges.

“If they had stood up, it was still going to go over their heads,” Mr Bean said.

“I also want them to listen because I know that young boys have a problem with listening and keeping still. They have to listen to the instructions.”

Mr Bean believed that girls were more adept at learning what has traditionally been viewed as a male trade.

He said: “I always know that when I take on a bunch of females, they are going to excel, because I don’t have any bad habits to break.

“They listen carefully and they follow instructions to a T. The boys want to get it done so I have to slow them down.”

Thanking Hamilton Rotary for kick-starting the initiative and then following it up with sponsorship, Mr Bean said: “The only problem I see with this programme is that we don’t have enough of it.

“You will see how the boys — from the beginning to how they get to the end — basically one step at a time, their confidence level accelerates.”