Quantum Technology, Quantum Education

Bristol’s QET Labs quantum summer school runs for twelfth year

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August 27, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Eighteen A-level students received free instruction in quantum technology at the University of Bristol during the week of August 3-7, as QET Labs hosted its twelfth annual Quantum in the Summer school. The program covered topics ranging from superposition to quantum computing applications, and organizers were impressed with the students’ quick grasp of complex concepts and insightful questions.

“We were impressed with how quickly the students grasped the concepts and demonstrated their knowledge through asking excellent questions,” said a QET Labs spokesperson. Beyond lectures, fully funded social activities like stargazing at We The Curious Planetarium aimed to build a lasting sense of community among the students.

QET Labs Hosts Twelfth Annual Quantum In The Summer School

The week-long program combined theoretical sessions with hands-on experiments, covering topics from quantum superposition and entanglement to practical applications in computing and measurement technologies. Students visited a board game cafe, participated in an escape room challenge, went bowling, and experienced stargazing at We The Curious Planetarium, building connections that extended beyond academic pursuits. The program’s structure aimed to create lasting connections between aspiring quantum physicists, supporting collaboration and knowledge-sharing. The final day featured a careers panel designed to broaden students’ perspectives on potential pathways following a physics degree.

Christy Nunns, Founder of Wavelength Studio, joined academic and industry researchers Freddie Burns, Dr Rachel Clark, and Sabrina Wang, to discuss their experiences and career trajectories. Students were able to ask questions about navigating careers in both research and commercial settings, gaining insight into the diverse opportunities available with a physics background. Funding for the program came from QET Labs, the Quantum Engineering CDT, QCi3 hub, QEPNT hub, and QCS hub, enabling the fully funded experience for all attendees.

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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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