The school places great emphasis on developing and encouraging pupils’ aspiration for future achievement and employment. This aspiration leads staff to arrange frequent real life, purposeful learning experiences that broaden the pupils’ knowledge and understanding of the opportunities they might encounter in the future.
Annually, the school provides the pupils with the opportunity to experience working with employment advisers from Jobcentre Plus. They provide a morning workshop, curriculum vitae planning and mock interviews. This enables pupils to have first hand experiences with potential career planning, job seeking and future aspirations. This is directly linked to the school’s ‘Meet the Worker’ event. This is an organised occurrence where the pupils are asked to suggest possible careers that they aspire to experience. The school then invites representatives from these careers into school and the pupils ask them questions that interest them in a ‘round robin’ format. This has developed into a large event that is recognised as innovative practice and has allowed pupils at Clwyd to meet dozens of workers from a wide ranging group of professions including: doctor, firefighter, solicitor, actor, welder, engineer, police officer, midwife, vet, scientist, footballer, bricklayer, hairdresser, entrepreneur, paramedic, armed forces, librarian, bank worker, accountant, plus many more.
The pupils have the opportunity to apply for some of these jobs and experience a one to one interview in front of their peers. Feedback from the interview is given to the candidates by school staff, the employers and other members of the panel. This has been a very powerful way of preparing pupils for future challenges they may face. It has also highlighted to them the skills that might be required to gain future employment.
Putting the skills into action has then been a focus. Clwyd Pop Up Shop is organised, stocked and supervised by pupils. This is an opportunity to work in and run a local shop unit within the community. They design and make most of the stock and man the tills, create rotas, problem solve and advertise. This also gives pupils the opportunity to think creatively to design products. As part of planning for the Curriculum For Wales, the pupils calculate budgets, profit and change, and develop real life, purposeful lkiteracy and numeracy skills. Every year, this has developed a range of different and essential life skills that fit in perfectly with the skills discussed during ‘Meet the Worker’ day. The rewards and profits from their hard work in the Pop Up Shop have resulted in the school being able to afford to buy a school minibus. A real, practical example of pupils’ hard work paying off.
In addition, and on a yearly basis, Year 5 and Year 6 pupils participate in The South West Wales Reaching Wider Partnership (SWWRWP). This is funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. The aim of the programme is to raise the aspirations and further and higher education awareness of young people who are currently underrepresented in higher education. This is done through activities and workshops, which take place at higher education institutions, colleges, schools and community settings. Pupils attend Junior ACE days and Subject Taster Days at Singleton Campus, Swansea University. Pupils also work with student leaders to undertake a series of group activities.
To help determine whether the activities are helping participants move on from school into further education, higher education and employment, the programme records information about the outreach activities and the pupils who take part in them so that they can track the educational journey of the outreach participants into university and beyond into employment.
