Opportunities in the City

On Friday some 6th Form Business Studies students attended a careers session in the City. It made quite an impression on some them, not least because they could see that with a little hard work it is possible to find yourself working in a major bank --and poentially find yourself (like one of our guests) making 6 figures!


As a follow-up the Brokerage has approached me with another program, designed to help students finishing 6th Form in 2008, to prepare for a career in the City.



Funded by the London Development Agency and the European Social Fund, this Futures program aims to enable students to gain qualifications and training towards entry level jobs at no cost to themselves.


The program is aimed specifically at students who are about to finish A-levels. If you are interested in this or other opportunities in the City (i.e. in banking, finance, insurance or jobs like that). Please talk to myself (Mr Woods) in room 256.

Student Enterprises

Please put the word out about student enterprises (click here for a definition). I would love to hear from any student (i.e. yourself!) wishing to gain management experiences, or really to develop any skills outside of the classroom, in an independent way. One school down south went so far as to shut down their entire Sixth Form building, turning it into a hotel that students managed, did the bookings, catering for and the cleaning --all just to give students experience with a start-up.

One less drastic example is the Writhlington Business and Enterprise School which helped students set up an nursery on the school grounds for growing and selling orchids. They now send students around the world every year to collect new species of Orchids to hybirdize and sell. All this came about because one student thought it would be a good idea.

Toward a Model of ELearning for Schools

Not finding a model of eLearning in the journals, I've had a go at creating a model, based on a service gap analysis.

The four potential gaps are areas where infracturcture (systems) are required. Technology can be used in any of these, for example to automate processes or increase their efficiency.

Gap 1: Supporting Teachers

Gap 2: Supporting Internal Processes

Gap 3: Supporting Student Activities

Gap 4: Supporting Teacher-directed Student learning

We tend to think of eLearning in schools as simply supporting Gap 4, as a way of helping teachers help their students, but it can also be used to improve learning and fill any of the other gaps as well.

For each of these their are opportunities for innovation. For Gap 2, using online training programs to help support staff learn and improve Gap 2. A Gap 3 filler can be things like BBC Bitesize, which allows student learning to progress without the teacher always directing it.

Hopefully as students progress they become less and less dependent on their teachers for direction. So we may find that 6th Form students will particularly benifit for the development of online resources. I have found this to be the case in my own experience at least.

Implicit in the theory is the idea that learning is important throughout the organization, not only to help students help teachers.