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Employer Impact in a mainstream setting
Berkshire Careers Hub worked with Justin Southwood, Deputy Headteacher and the team at Sandhurst School to develop and deliver a program whereby employers could be introduced to the school to help embed careers in the curriculum. This is recommended as good practice in mature Careers Program delivery (Gatsby Benchmark 4). See below for some more details on how the program came about and its impacts.
What challenge did the school face and how was this identified?
Ensuring that the career touch points were meaningful and adding value to the curriculum.
The school identified that students struggled to understand key concepts in Maths. Particularly optimisation in the subject of Maths for year 9. The objective was to work with a cornerstone employer to jointly develop and co-deliver a part of the maths curriculum at Key Stage 3 (KS3).
What actions did you take to address this challenge?
Worked closely with Subject Leaders to understand the opportunities within their curriculum areas and married this with strong business partnerships. The intention was to create relevant curriculum-based activities that would engage both class teachers, students, and businesses.
The school with the help of the Berkshire Careers Hub, via our Enterprise Coordinator, created a curriculum project involving the Maths teacher and Vodafone. By linking the together our Maths teacher and an employer we were able to explore a specific example of how Vodafone uses optimisation in a project to provide some context for the students. The teacher then created lesson plans incorporating the new insights.
What were the outcomes of the actions you took?
Current curriculums were modified in conjunction with opportunities available from business. Supported by the department’s curriculum lead, training was put in place and the activities were delivered. The impact of this was captured with student voice and feedback from staff and the businesses gathered.
Subject Leaders acted as champions, discussing the positive experience they had during the project and in so doing, encouraged other departments to come on board.
The school was able to build upon the current Maths curriculum and integrate the new insights, so learning was embedded. The activity will help show the students relevance of the curriculum to the world of work. Differentiating the activity supported students of all abilities to engage.
What are your next steps?
- To expand the programme across a greater number of subjects, to refine those we have delivered and maintain relationships with the business community so the programme can be repeated in a sustainable way.
- To use the Maths in the Curriculum project as a template for other employers to get involved in a similar project in Maths or in different subjects.
- To ensure that the project is fully integrated to enable learning to be embedded and that the activity shows the relevance of the curriculum to the world of work. Ideally, the activity should be jointly delivered between the class teacher and the employer. The face-to-face nature of the employer co-delivering helps to have an impact on the students as they see the impact of the specific Maths topic on the world of work.
Berkshire Careers Hub is excited about the work we have done with Sandhurst School and are excited to see how the program evolves and impacts on other subject areas.
If you have any questions on how you too might drive this sort of change at your school, then please contact the Berkshire team at careersandenterprise@thamesvalleyberkshire.co.uk.
