It has been an exciting few months for our Year 8 students. Alongside choosing their GCSE options, they have been in Careers workshops with Mrs Brennan and Mrs Cocksedge using an online careers platform called Start. This package has been developed to help students explore their career aspirations and understand why their school subjects are important.

Working in small groups, students have reflected on their skills, qualities, interests and potential future work preferences. Based on this information, Start has then suggested jobs that they may be interested in or want to explore further. The aim of these sessions is for students to open their eyes to jobs and opportunities that they might never have heard of.

Each job suggestion includes real up to date labour market information on salary and availability in the Yorkshire area, along with a description of qualifications that would be required. Lots of interesting jobs have popped up and many students were really excited to see that they were suitable for jobs that they were already interested in. There was also a lot of interest in securing a career as a Judge, when we discovered that their average salary is £185,000 each year!

Students are now registered on Start and can access their profiles at any time and work through the different sections. All students will have had the opportunity to partake in a workshop before the Easter holidays. Further information on Start and how to access it, can be found on the Academy’s Careers Information Advice and Guidance section of the website.

A group of Y8 students were also invited to be part of the Buddy Programme which is run by INTOUniversity in conjunction with the University of Leeds. The aim of the Buddy Programme is to inspire students and help them to view university as a tangible future goal, as well as promote the importance of STEM subjects.

Students took part in two engaging and interactive workshops in school. The first was Learning Techniques where students applied different techniques to aid their learning. By the end of the workshop, all students could count to ten in Japanese by using a technique called ‘chaining’! The second workshop was Pathways to Success and students were introduced to different educational pathways, including A Levels, BTECs, apprenticeships and university degrees.

The students were then invited to spend the day at the University of Leeds, where they met students, had a campus tour and participated in an engineering workshop. Students worked in teams with a Student Ambassador where they were provided with the challenge that they had been hired by Oxfam to get aid to a remote village cut off by road. They had 30 minutes to design and make a model of a solution to protect the cargo during the drop from a plane. Each team had a budget of £25 and the resources they could buy included paper, string, sponges and balloons. The cargo was an egg! They worked brilliantly together to decide on team roles and there were some fantastic designs.