Sanders School is a mixed-ability Secondary School in Hornchurch, Havering, consisting of approximately 700 students, with Pupil Premium at above national average by 5%. The school is very inclusive and we celebrate originality and diversity and promote student wellbeing.
The Progress 8 scores have improved over the last 3 years with our results being in line with national average. We do not have a sixth form and so teach up to GCSE only, but we do promote Further Education and Higher Education and push students to be aspirational in their plans for studying after their GCSEs.
I became Careers Lead and started to promote careers in the curriculum and I found that students were not able to articulate where they exhibited key employability skills, such as teamwork and leadership. Year 11 students were unable to write about themselves in a personal statement, and so I was keen to work with Skills Builder, to promote employability skills, and show students how they could improve these skills, to give them key skills to secure employment after their studies.
The programme has most definitely improved key employability skills in Year 7 and has given the students confidence in using these skills more than they would have previously. It has also made them better citizens, being more respectful to one another. Staff have also found that using Skills Builder has helped them to develop ways to improve those skills in other lessons and provide activities to enhance these skills in lessons.
We wanted to embed Skills Builder gradually across the school, so it would be carried out really well by a small amount of people and then grow. So we began with just Year 7. This year group have Skills Builder delivered to them by their form tutors twice a week, totalling 30 minutes. This means that these form tutors are very skilled in delivering the activities and have done this every week, monitored by myself and the Head of Year. So the language of essential skills is used regularly in Form time. We have also done an award ceremony where the top students from each form, and the top form, were given prizes. The key skills are advertised by posters in all of the Year 7 forms.
Moving forward I want to embed the skills into further year groups and have more staff teach these skills in form time and use the essential skills and highlight the use during lessons as well. I also want to look at developing a project where these skills are used or purchase an enterprise challenge to carry out in the next academic year, once [Covid] restrictions have been lifted. I want to communicate this to parents as well and encourage them to ask their child to demonstrate the skills when at home, to further embed the skills into everyday life.
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