During the duration of the year, our year 9, 10 and 11 students engage in 5 full days of ‘Empowerment’. The purpose of these days is to educate students on the outside world and empower students with the knowledge to succeed in their life beyond school.
- The topics that students covered this time around were focused around:
- Relationships (with a particular focus on consent)
- Money and budgeting (which we planned in as an immediate response to our student voice)
- Mortgages and tax
As a school, we always work to ensure that the sessions we plan are contextualised for students; we want them to understand the sensitive issues in relation to their own lives and what they might face.
Students had also asked for more debate and discussion in these types of sessions, so we were really happy to observe a number of excellent conversations taking place around these important topics.
One of our year 11 students Aine commented: “The mortgages and tax session was really good. I didn’t really understand how tax worked and so actually having an understanding that a yearly salary isn’t the end product that you come home with has helped me put future earnings into perspective.”
As always, we will produce another student voice for feedback as to how we can improve the next Empowerment Day. We are keen to get in more guest speakers as this proved to be highly successful in the last Empowerment Day. Watch this space for how we educate our students next half-term!
