St Michaels, Chorley
At St Michael’s we aim to provide every opportunity for our pupils to flourish as a child of God; to grow in body, mind and spirit and experience ‘life in all its fullness’ and this is reflected in our comprehensive and effective careers programme.
We are proud of the depth and quality of experiences offered to our pupils across all years and feel it prepares our young people for success in the future, whether this be in higher education, training or employment.
Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance (CEIAG) at St Michael’s forms an essential aspect of every pupils’ personal education and future well-being. Within Living Education, all year groups are taught about different aspects of Careers. In Year 7 we start by trying to raise our pupils’ aspirations and to challenge career stereotypes, while also getting them to start using KUDOS (a career development service).
As our pupils take their options towards the end of Year 8, we focus the Careers unit of work in Living Education to choosing their options and picking out strengths, interests and aspirations. In years 9 – 11 they begin learning how to write personal statements, their online reputation and learning what and how to use the labour market information.
In addition to Living Education, in Year 10 pupils also study a Careers lesson once every 4 weeks, where we have local colleges come in to school to teach our pupils about their different college pathway options and they are also taught ‘one off’ lessons on subjects they haven’t studied before that they can choose at A-Level to give them a taster e.g Sociology, Pyschology, Law etc. The feedback we get from our pupils year on year about this programme is really positive.
We are currently in the process of developing our curriculum area learning by embedding more Careers. Some subject areas already do this, but we are making it whole school that all departments do by the end of 2019/20.
The Gatsby Benchmarks are a national framework, which are 8 guidelines that define the best careers provision in schools and colleges.
We are currently in the process of completing an audit of our current provision and we are planning to deliver all of the benchmarks within our revised CEIAG programme, in line with the national careers strategy.
Leader in Learning (Careers and Enterprise) – Mrs Rachael Rackstraw