Our ‘Design Your Future’ event is a collaboration with the ‘Learning to Work’ charity which gives students from Year 9 to Year 13 the opportunity to meet potential future employers and discuss possible career paths with a wide-ranging choice of delegates.

In the Summer term, for Year 12 students, there is a 'Futures Week' dedicated to focussing once again on their career development pathways.

We also plan a drop-down day when the whole Year 8 cohort have a full day encounter with a local employer– VISA. 

A large team of VISA ambassadors visit our school and run an interactive day to showcase the diversity of careers that are possible in technical companies such as VISA. The day involves creativity, problem-solving, technical challenges and presentation skills. We are grateful for the external support from our local business network.

Years 8 and 9 take part in the ‘Tenner Challenge’ which is run by The Young Enterprise Organisation

For this, individuals, or teams of up to 4, are lent £10, and they have to use this start-up funding to create a short-term business which will trade for 4 weeks. There are some national challenges to compete in and some in-school prize-categories for which students can compete for. The students can be creative with goods and services alike.

In Year 11 (KS4), we run the ‘Year 11 Post 16 Conference’ which is an action-packed and informative day, where the students hear a Keynote presentation by an invited guest (usually alumni) and the ‘Learning to Work’ charity provide us with several delegated from local businesses who represent key career areas such as; IT, Engineering, Law, Medical professions, Creative Industries etc. The day concludes with a talk from the National Apprenticeship Service and a Q and A session with the Head Girl Team about life in the Sixth Form and their future choices. All this informs our student of their post 16 and post 18 options.

Year 9s have a drop-down day to carry out an exciting enterprise activity involving designing a board game to a specific brief. Teams work with high-levels of productivity to research and design a playable board game, in which all parts of the game need to be designed: the board, how it fits into a box/bag, playing pieces, cards, spinners, props and rules. Finalists pitch their game prototype to a panel of judges (guests from local creative businesses) and the most successful team wins a prize.