On the final day of last half-term, we were joined by Prison Me No Way who have now been running for over 30 years!! Both staff and students enjoy this annual event each year as they deliver engaging workshops and presentations to the students in Year 9, highlighting the impact they can have on their lives and others around them when wrong choices are made. Students met employers from organisations including the Prison Service, Police, St Johns Ambulance and the Youth Justice Service. It was an opportunity to see and hear about the work they do and to ask questions and get a real insight into working life.  

We have now begun preparations for the Year 10 Careers Week in July. Students have recently completed their ‘My Future’ Post-16 Questionnaire, which highlights the areas in which they require additional support and information with regards to post-16 options, post-18, sectors/industries and personal support. We use this information to plan our programme of workshops and presentations and create bespoke timetables for each student. Three days of Work Experience are embedded into the programme which the students are very much looking forward to as we now reach our placement deadline on Friday 25 April 2025. 

We have been doing a lot of work with students around raising aspirations and aiming high, so keeping in with this theme, this year as part of National Careers Week (NCW) there was a focus on Higher Education and particularly, studying a degree. Students took part in a fun quiz looking at celebrities and the degrees they have achieved, did you know Rowan Atkinson (aka Mr Bean) has a degree in Electrical Engineering!? An important message to take away from NCW this year was ‘’ Even if you choose to take a different path in life, your degree will always remain with you…  you never know when you may need your degree in the future, and the skills and knowledge gained will be useful throughout life and set you apart from the rest!’’ And this goes the same for aiming high with GCSE and A-level grades! 

Some of our Year 10 students attended the Careers Networking Brunch, this event is fully embedded into our careers programme as we entered our third year of delivering. We invited a group of external employers into school from various businesses and the students were provided with a ‘question sheet’ in which they were required to have discussions with the employers about the skills and qualifications required for their role, this in turn opened further conversations about the students' own interests and future plans. The aim of the event was to develop confidence and push the students out of their comfort zone by encouraging them to speak to people they have never met before and to get used to speaking about themselves, which is a vital skill for the future, particularly when it comes to interviews.  

We have now received our up-to-date destination data for our 2024 school-leavers, please see below.