SEND Hub good news stories

In this months guest blog, we gain insight from schools within the hub, detailing how being in the hub has strengthened their careers strategy

Askham Bryan College 

Alexandra Moran ‘’As I am new to My post with Askham Bryan College as a careers advisor specialising in send and HE I have found the hub really useful in finding out information and networking. 

I contacted Matthew as I was setting up some new processes within the college regarding send Transitions and opportunities. Matthew gave me the details of Wakefield College where I spoke with Laura lavender and Debbie Moss. They were both kindly give me their time and discussed processes they use within their college and give me advice on how to move forward with some of my ideas. This is really useful for me as it gives me confidence from speaking with people who are already doing similar things and give me the opportunity to explore the best way of moving forward. It’s nice to know I have people who are so readily willing to support me in helping our students.  

Matthew also introduced me to the Lighthouse trust which is a fantastic organisation in Leeds offering support internships. Currently we don’t provide support internships within Askham Bryan college and they kindly went through their systems and processes and invited me to open days and spoke in length about the services they provide students.  

From this meeting we are in the process of arranging some joint working and for the Lighthouse trust to attend Askham Bryan college to speak with students and parents and also staff about supported internships and other exciting projects that they are developing. It’s also been useful to find out information events that they are delivering which helps me offer further support to our parents and students. Due to developing these relationships we can then discuss specific students needs and ensure we are providing specific and tailored support and information to them’’ .  

Alexandra Moran 

Askham Bryan College  

Careers Advisor & Employability Coach 

St Thomas a Beckett

Carl Brooks ‘’As a new Careers Lead, with no prior careers experience, at an 11-16 school with a barely functioning Careers Programme, Matthew Boyd, as my Enterprise Coordinator, has helped me in several ways this year. 

He has helped me to partner with our new Enterprise Adviser, Ollie Ratcliffe – an ex student who is employed by Taylors of Harrogate and works on all the Yorkshire Tea digital marketing campaigns. Ollie will work with our school on a number of careers related activities in the future and is keen to be involved and help move the careers programme forward. Utilising his digital marketing experience and his contacts in the industry, Ollie has already begun to work with myself on the planning of a number of career experiences for our pupils, some of which include: a careers insight into working in the digital marketing sector and how he managed to get to where he is today, utilising his contacts to arrange employer talks, visits, helping with mock interviews and being involved in careers fairs and other vital careers experiences for our students. 

Matthew has also been instrumental in setting up a meeting with Jess Jones from Horbury Academy. As an experienced Careers Leader, Jess helped provide an overview of their careers structure at Horbury and helped me to identify several quick career wins for our school. Since our meeting, I have now managed to arrange ASK to visit our pupils and talk about apprenticeships, traineeships and T Levels, and this is now part of our careers programme. She also helped me to think about the structure of the programme and the events we do. She helped me to identify easy activities for particular year groups, such as university visits for our year 8 pupils. We now have a partnership with Huddersfield University, they will visit our students and talk to them about a variety of different further education topics, help with Y10 interviews, and next year we have visits to the university planned for our Years 8s and these activities will be regular features within our careers programme.  

Jess was so supportive and really helped me to get a foothold on what I can do, how to do it, and which external agency I needed to contact. This has really helped me to add essential provision for our school and our pupils and has helped me to begin to put together what is starting to look, more and more, like what good careers provision should be’’.  

Carl Brooks  

St Thomas a Beckett  

Careers Lead  

Castleford Academy 

Mentoring For Success  

A bespoke mentoring programme is bringing inspiration to Castleford, thanks to regeneration and services specialist ENGIE.  

Fifteen students at Castleford Academy are currently reaping huge benefits of taking part in the Mentoring for Success programme through which ENGIE staff team up with Year 10 students to guide them through some of life’s career choice challenges.  

The mentors link up with pupils once per-term and steer them through a programme of activities, discuss career aspirations and plan together steps to reach their goals.  

In a relaxed way, the mentors help to prepare the youngsters for the world of work by offering an insight into skills employers are looking for and by acting as a positive role model.  

Benefits of the mentoring programme include identifying goals and a sense of direction, being empowered to achieve goals, increasing confidence and learning from the experiences of others. The programme also supports mentees to build their communication and interpersonal skills.  

As part of their next mentoring session the students will be visited by a group of ENGIE apprentices who will share their experiences to inspire the students and talk about how they have progressed and learned in their roles.  

The students, who are all studying Construction, are also working towards their GCSE’s in a variety of sometimes ranging from Engineering to French, History and Geography as well their Maths, English and Science.  

“It’s been fantastic to finally get the programme up and running after what seems such a long time of planning and preparation. After just the first session it was clear to see the impact on the students involved from the feedback received from both them and their mentors.”  

“The partnership formed across between ENGIE, GHWY and Castleford Academy has really been a successful one in helping students become inspired about their future career options.”  

It is envisaged that the same programme will be rolled out to future cohorts of students following the success of the first mentor-student partnerships.  

Katie Oldroyd  

Castleford Academy  

Careers Lead