Clue Yourself Up

Oldmachar Academy

The “Clue Yourself Up” Project Planning for a Successful Future Beyond Oldmachar Academy

e-Magazine

Inside this issue What is Clue Yourself Up

4—5

Personal Development Award

6—7

Benefits for Our Learners

8—9

The Role of Parents

10—11

The Opportunity for Employers

12—13

Planned Outcomes

14

Special Features Read about Senior Phase Planning Future Mentoring Scheme

“You need to have parallel plans—a plan A, B and C. Keep options open and get as much information as possible. You can never be too clued up. We will support you in making your plans. But, in general, you should take control of your own future.” Mr Brown

Our Planning for Learners Oldmachar Academy takes seriously its responsibilities to support all our young people in planning a positive destination from school. To achieve this aim we need to raise the awareness of students, parents, carers and staff of the career options and pathways that are available to them.

We also need to build powerful new partnerships to help the young people. We have ambitious plans to do this, as part of Clue Yourself Up Scheme. This scheme is a plan to help young people learn about the exciting worlds of work and study that they might end up pursuing. It is also to help the school build intelligence that can help the young people. Lastly, it is designed to enable meaningful engagement between education and employers, around the very simple idea of helping everyone understand and help each other. We hope that parents might take the opportunity to become partners in the scheme and help our young people.

This leaflet is designed to inform students, parents, carers and partners about our planning to ensure that the needs of all of our young people are met. In it: Young people will find important information about Senior Phase Planning Parents and carers will read about programmes of learning we have developed Partners will find out how they can become more involved in supporting our Clue Yourself Up scheme

What is “Clue Yourself Up�?

At Oldmachar Academy, learners start planning their destination beyond school as part of the broad general education. A number of planned inserts to the curriculum make them more aware of the opportunities and challenges presented in different careers.

Young people have opportunities to personalise their curriculum within broad parameters from the start of S3 onwards, with increasing specialization as they progress through the senior phase. The curriculum map for the senior phase focuses on delivering two key entitlements young people have. The first is that: All young people are entitled to support to gain as much as possible from Curriculum for Excellence All young people are entitled to support in planning a positive destination from school.

The second of these is a particular challenge for us, that involves developing particular ways of working with parents, carers and partners. It also requires that we make young people aware of their responsibilities to seek out information that might help them to plan their future. To do this, we need to investigate sources of information and reach out to people who can help us.

Clue Yourself Up is a universal project of community based learningbuilt in Oldmachar Academy that aims to do this.

Oldmachar Academy’s Senior Phase Plan

Clue Yourself Up for Students Students follow programmes of learning about the world of work. The focus is on providing them with comparative information to allow them to work out general areas of career interest. These programmes lead to accreditation, under the SQA Personal Development Award scheme.

Then it focuses on giving them the opportunity to speak to people regularly who can help them. Lastly, it gives them an opportunity to spend time in a work place environment, learning about the industry, or sector.

Clue Yourself Up for Parents Parents are a key part of the process of helping young people to find important information and a source of guidance for them in determining their futures. However, all parents can benefit from improved information and sources of advice.

The scheme will provide this.

Parents can also help by signing up to be Future Mentors for our S4 students—a role we explain further on in this leaflet.

Most importantly, parents are our partners in supporting the young people.

Clue Yourself Up for Employers / Partners Employers can benefit from early engagement with potential employees. The interface between school and work can be hard to manage from both sides. Clue Yourself Up provides an important learning opportunity for employers, and a meaningful way to engage with education professionals.

They can join in our learning programmes, our information management systems and our future mentoring programmes.

All of these things are featured in this leaflet.

The Clue Yourself Up Programme Explained The Personal Development Award SQA Award (Personal Development) As part of the Clue Yourself Up programme, all young people in S4 will work towards the SQA Personal Development Award. This award begins with young people reflecting on their skills and qualities and undertaking activities that help them to prepare for the future. Part of this is undertaking challenges and relevant learning activities that challenge them. These activities will be structured during S4 and concluded by the end of the year.

Course Options Process (March—May: S3) They will begin this work as part of the Transition Process from S3, which begins with the Course Options process from March onwards. At this point they will be introduced to the concept of the Senior Phase Plan, which will shape our interactions with them over the course of S4—S6.

Induction Week (May: S3) During a week of induction activities, they will attend a Careers Fair, complete their S3 Profiles and compile their Senior Phase Plan. The activities of the week will be designed to filter particular industries they are interested in.

Industry Awareness Week (June: S3) During a week of workplace experience, partners will introduce the young people to their industry and the career pathways that might be available. This replaces the traditional Universal Work Experience provision, which focused on particular jobs. The new focus will help ensure that the experience is a valuable source of learning.

Entitlements Programme (August—May: S4) Students work through a weekly programme of two units of learning, which is designed to help them to develop and document Skills for Learning, Skills for Life and Skills for Work. A number of key staff deliver inserts into this programme.

Future Mentoring Scheme (August—May: S4) There is regular engagement with a Future Mentor, as part of a series of visits to their workplace and at school (as part of the Entitlements Programme). Also, Future Mentors will schedule a week of Tailored Work Experience as part of this arrangement to take place during one of the holidays, which we hope will involve some form of payment to the young people, if this is possible. The work experiences will be designed, based on the dialogue with mentors throughout the year.

Clue Yourself Up: The Benefits for Learners Planning Universal Support for Learners Young people need to be at the centre of planning in the Senior Phase of Education. From S4 we begin the process of gathering experiences and qualifications that will help them move successfully to a future beyond school. To that end we aim to ensure that curricular and support programmes are successfully integrated for the benefit of our learners.

Finding Your Pathway Planning pathways can be difficult, as young people do not often know exactly what they want to do and yet have to make decisions in line with the stages of the education programme that they are at. Sometimes, this can cause frustration and anxiety, especially if others are more certain about their pathways. When young people feel like this, it can affect confidence and motivation. Clue Yourself Up, helps young people stay motivated by providing a structured programme of support. It structures the opportunities to learn and consider options. It provides rich sources of information and advice. Mostly, it focuses on tailoring learning about careers towards the individual young person’s needs.

Documenting Learner Journeys Oldmachar Academy is engaged in an on-going project to gather information about Learners’ Journeys and Learners’ Pathways. The learner journeys we document are those our current students are embarked on through the Senior Phase of Education. We highlight in a regularly updated e-magazine stories of our young people’s successes, especially in programmes of learning which young people may need important information about.

Documenting Learner Pathways The Learner Pathways we describe are those of our former students who have left us in recent years. We tell the stories of what they have gone on to do and what they think they want to do next. We do this to inspire current students to think about possibilities. In all of our documentation, we are conscious of the need to describe pathways directly to the workplace, to further education and to higher education.

Course Options Information Feedback from young people has told us that they found the material on course options we provided to be dry and overly technical. They told us that they would prefer to read something they can access more easily and which would make the options more clear to them. We are publishing a magazine of course information for Higher courses in S5 based on this idea. The course descriptions are written by S5 students, for S4 students. Young people describe their learning up to this point, reflect on the value of what they are learning and speculate about what they want to do in future.

Information About Careers In Clue Yourself Up, we are building a rich source of information about careers, based on our current links with employers. We hope many partners sign up to the Clue Yourself Up About Jobs project, which will lead to regular publications of information about the jobs our partners actually do. This information will be a learning resource for students, teachers, parents and carers. Those involved describe their jobs, reflect on how they got there, and speculate about prospects for young people might gain similar employment in future.

Planning Pathways Students follow programmes of learning which can open up different pathways, until they are certain about the direction they wish to go in and can make sure that they have the skills, qualifications and experience to do so.

All of our planning coheres with this approach, and key staff are trained to provide guidance towards this end at important moments of transitions planning

Industry Awareness: Criteria for Success I have had experiences which informed me about an industry I am interested in I have met people at different levels of the organisation and found out what they do

Industry Awareness Week In June young people will undertake a work place based week of industry awareness raising, facilitated by the Work Experience Unit. This experience will focus on helping them find out about a range of opportunities that might be available in a particular industry, or career area.

Students can find their own opportunities, should they wish to. However, it is important that any placement meets the

I am clear about pathways for me in the industry, or career area if I choose them

criteria for success for this part of the project.

A Careers fair in May will launch this work.

Future Mentoring In the programme, young people meet with a mentor from a career area, or industry of their choice. The mentor will meet the young person regularly throughout the year and will help them to learn about the career options available.

The mentor will also provide a week of tailored work experience for the mentees at some point during the year, during one of the holidays.

Mentors will also support our Entitlements Programme as the year progresses.

Clue Yourself Up: The Role of Parents The Most Influential Source of Advice Parents are the most influential source of information and guidance for young people when it comes to planning careers and choosing course options. However, parents can sometimes feel at a loss when it comes to having the right information and sufficient understanding to advise their young people. Personal contacts and parents own experience of work are invaluable sources of information, but these alone may not be enough to help their young people.

Harnessing the Power of Parents Clue Yourself Up seeks to take advantage of the rich resource that our parents as a collective body could be.

Parents can get involved in several ways. Firstly, by engaging in regular dialogue with their young people at the key moments of the programme, especially to ensure that they grasp the way their young person’s ideas are developing in light of the experience we are providing. However, the knowledge and experience of our parents can be of more value than this alone.

Parent Volunteers To support this programme, we are seeking to enlist a bank of Parent Volunteers to help us ensure that everyone in the community has the information they need about careers planning. Parents can get involved in various ways. They can provide us with information about their jobs and career routes. They can offer to act as Future Mentors for one or more of our students (not their own young person). This involves them having the support of their company or organisation to do this.

Feedback and Evaluation We place a strong emphasis on gaining effective feedback to inform our planning. Indeed, the recent Survey of Parental Perceptions highlighted the fact that parents are not as confident in our systems for giving careers advice as we would like them to be. With that in mind, we are making some adjustments in developing the Clue Yourself Up project. We need the support of parents to contribute to this programme, as we have explained above. However, we also need their help to evaluate it. This will involve surveying their attitudes and hearning their views on the experiences we provide for young people.

Building Our Learning Community Finding meaningful ways to get parents to engage in the school’s programmes of learning. Improving our network of connections in different industries and areas of work, will help us to ensure that we are a more powerful learning community in future. We are asking everyone to get behind our school and our young people and help us to secure the opportunities and experiences that will be important to them.

Information about Parents’ Careers Parents can volunteer to provide us with summary information about their career. They can do this through a simple survey, which asks them to provide the following information: A brief description of their job A short statement reflecting on how they got to this position A brief outline of the opportunities there might be in their field of work in future.

Parents as Future Mentors Parents can also volunteer to act as Future Mentors, a scheme which is described in more detail in future sections.

A group of mentors will operate as part of our planned programme of Personal Development for all young people in S4.

This programme will create great opportunities for all of our young people and also for employers to engage with them.

For our parental group, it will provide more engagement in school life, allowing them to make an important contribution.

Parents as Guides Most importantly, we understand the importance of the role our parents have in guiding their young people with regard to their future career plans.

We want to help them by providing information and support.

The Clue Yourself Up Project has as one its key aims, such support for parents.

We are open to ideas about how best to do this. If any parent has a suggestion about this, please contact us.

Parental Survey feedback showed that Careers’ Advice was one of the key priorities for improvement. Please help us address this issue by getting involved in Clue Yourself Up.

Clue Yourself Up: Opportunities for Employers Please Help Our Young People We seek the support of employers in a range of areas of work and industry for our Clue Yourself Up programme. This programme will run from July 2014 and will affect all S4 students at Oldmachar Academy. We have already secured the support of a number of key partners and want to make sure that we develop a strong set of partners who are capable of helping us to develop our programme.

This section describes the ways in which employers can get involved in detail.

Clue Yourself Up About Jobs Do you do a job that one or more of our young people would benefit from finding out about. Are you willing to describe it for us? Are you also willing for us to publish this information for our student body, so that they can learn about what you and others do?

If the answer to these three questions is “Yes�, please send us your information by completing a simple survey.

You will be asked the questions displayed on the slide shown here (left). Only factual information about your job will be required. We will publish it in an emagazine for all young people, which will be regularly updated.

Clue Yourself Up: Future Mentoring We need to recruit a group of Future Mentors for our S4 students next session. These people will have a key role in providing support for our young people, especially to develop their thinking about career opportunities.

We need to recruit people in a range of different industries and careers. We want to have mentors from the private and public sectors of employment. We want to represent different types of work. All of our young people are different and we would aim to pair parents up with someone who would benefit from their input.

Please let us know of your interest, by completing a short survey monkey survey at the following link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ClueYourselfUp.

Work Place Visits Imagine the opportunity to build a relationship with a future employee or colleagues! A young person would visit you in your work place once per month and you could show them your organization and how it works.

The young person could gain awareness of opportunities that there might be and the pathways that they need to embark on in order to be successful.

Your organization would benefit enormously as a result, as they would get the chance to build a relationship with a person who might turn out to be a future employee.

School Talks Could you spare half an hour so, once every few months to come and speak to some of our young people about what you do for a living?

If you feel that you could, you could become one of our Future Mentors. Providing this support for us is a critical means by which we can improve the quality and range of our careers’ advice, which is a very complex issue for us, as jobs are changing so much.

Your input could be a source of inspiration for one of our young people.

Tailored Work Experience Could you facilitate a week of work experience, during the Easter or October holiday for one or more of our young people? If so, you could make a valuable contribution as a Future Mentor within our programme.

We aim to provide such opportunities on a tailored basis for all of our 160 S4 students next session and hope that you will be able to contribute to this scheme.

If your company would be prepared to pay the young person for the work, this would be desirable, but not essential.

What We Hope to Achieve for all of our Young People

By June 2015 we aim to have the following outcomes.

All our S4 young people will have: Completed the SQA Personal Development award Undertaken a successful transition to S4, including building a Senior Phase Plan Undertaken a week of Tailored Work Experience, focused on raising their awareness of an industry Had monthly visits to meet a Future Mentor in their Place of Work Completed our Entitlements Programme In doing all of the above things, we are fulfilling a major commitment to help all of our young people plan a positive destination from school, as well as to ensure that each of them gets as much our of the experience of Curriculum for Excellence as possible.