Amiosec attended the Business Breakfast in the newly refurbished Design & Technology block at Tewkesbury School to find out what’s happening.
Date
Wednesday 3rd April 2019
Location
Tewkesbury School
Description
Amiosec attended its first Business Breakfast at Tewkesbury School to find out what is happening at the school and how Amiosec could get more involved. It was a great opportunity to meet the heads of departments at the school, and to network with other businesses in the area.
The morning started out with a complimentary bacon roll and some coffee in the newly refurbished Design & Technology block. We were welcomed by Rhys Adams, Deputy Head, who gave an overview of the GCSE and A Level subject options offered at the school and how many students have chosen each class. He then went on to discuss the destinations of students after leaving school – how many go on to university, to apprenticeships, to employment etc.
The talk was then followed by a presentation from Pump 17 (Skate Park Youth Committee). They showed an impressive promotional video about the work that they are doing to raise funds and get approval for a new skatepark in Tewkesbury. We are excited to see how this progresses and what support Amiosec can give the committee to help them get their skate park.
Finally, we had a talk on the Careers Programme by Clare de Glanville, Assistant Headteacher. She explained that schools are measured on their careers advice and guidance by eight Gatsby benchmarks, and she detailed the progress that they have made against these benchmarks since starting their new careers programme in 2017. Tewkesbury School are doing excellently for 6 out of the 8 benchmarks, but she explained they needed help from the local businesses for the following two areas:
- Linking curriculum learning to careers
- Experiences of workplaces
She would like the teachers to work closer with local businesses in order to understand all the different career routes and options that their subjects lead on to, so that they can then give the best advice and guidance to their students. At Amiosec, we believe this is an excellent idea and are keen to get more involved with teachers to promote computing and engineering career routes, specifically those in the Cyber Security industry.
Additionally, Clare talked about work experiences – they have work experience options for their Y12’s but struggle to find opportunities for Y10’s, mostly due to the fact that the age group (15-16 year olds) is often too young to attend certain work environments. She would like to liaise closer with businesses to see what opportunities we could make for Y10 work experiences. Amiosec have not offered any work experience opportunities before, but as we are now expanding and have plenty of keen engineers, this is something we will definitely look into to see what exciting projects we can come up with to offer Y10 students.
The morning then finished up with a tour around the Design & Technology block, given by the Head of Technology Rob Fallows. The department has great engineering facilities, with a computing block, metal and woodworking areas, a design and textile classroom and a food technology room. We think it is great that the school has this area for the students, and that all students will get a chance to experience a wide range of engineering activities. It is so important that students get exposure to as many different subjects as possible so that they can work out what they are passionate about, and hopefully help guide them to the right career for them. Amiosec would love to return to the school and work on an engineering project with the students in order to promote careers in cyber security, so watch this space!
