Penketh High Schools Careers policy ensures that all pupils at this school are provided with independent careers guidance from year 7 to year 11. The independent careers guidance provided:
- Is presented in an impartial manner, showing no bias or favouritism towards a particular institution, education or work option.
- Includes information on the range of education or training options, including apprenticeships, traineeships and T-Levels.
- Is guidance that the person giving it considers will promote the best interests of the pupils to whom it is given.
Careers guidance at Penketh is a progressive journey from Year 7-11.
The aims of the Careers programme at Penketh are:
- To develop positive attitudes in the pupils towards study and work.
- To develop employability and enterprise skills, such as teamwork and communication.
- To help students to plan and take control of their future making informed choices at key points in their education.
- To provide students with the relevant careers inspiration and guidance that is suitable to their personal needs including age, ability, attitudes and aptitudes.
- To provide students with a comprehensive understanding of opportunities post 16 and post 18 including traineeships, apprenticeships, school leaver programmes, HE, FE, employment and training opportunities.
- To help students to reflect on themselves – their abilities, skills, aptitudes and attitudes – so that they can use this knowledge to consider their development.
- To provide students with impartial advice about options that is available to them.
- To provide equal opportunity of access to careers inspiration and guidance.
Implementation of Careers Education
The intent of every aspect of school life is rooted in the three strands of aspiration we have for our provision and for our young people. We strive to ensure that pupils are developed academically, are developed holistically with an enhanced and wider skillset and that, in combination, these facilitate positive life chances for our outstanding young people.
The role of our careers provision is to not only inform pupils about their potential next steps but to build aspiration and provide access to a range of experiences and information that will shape these decisions.
At Penketh, pupils are asked to consider and indicate their current thinking around their chosen career path at the outset of each academic year. Pupils are then assigned a career cluster group that is centred around careers from their chosen field. Across the year pupils in each cluster are exposed to a range of experiences that help to inform pupils about this chosen career pathway these include;
- Employer talks
- Work related experience visits
- Impartial career advice
- Targeted visits to college and HE provision
The intention is that this range of experiences will help pupils to consider and validate their career choices or consider alternatives. We consider pupils deciding that careers are not for them based on a range of comprehensive information is as important as validating a choice.
Pupils will have the opportunity to experience a different area, should they wish to, during the following academic year and in Year 10 and 11 pupils will also undertake individual one-to-one career interviews to discuss their choices in even greater detail.
The “career cluster” programme, supported by advice to pupils from Career Connect – a service operating in school two days per week – meet the requirements of the Gatsby 8 benchmarks, so integral to the DfE’s career strategy and central to the statutory guidance for careers. The 8 strands of the Gatsby 8 benchmark are;
- A stable careers programme
- Learning from career and labour market information
- Addressing the needs of each pupil
- Linking curriculum learning to careers
- Encounters with employers and employees
- Experiences of workplaces
- Encounters with further and higher education
- Personal guidance
Our comprehensive enrichment programme also has clear links to careers in order to support decision making and supporting pupil career choices.
Year group specific provision
Students in all years have access to the career cluster program and will access the 4 experiences as detailed above. Careers learning forms part of the PHSE curriculum and in conjunction with our dual curriculum programme is looking to prepare students to be successful in life beyond Penketh. In addition to this, independent guidance support starts in Year 7 through introductory lessons allowing the students to reflect on where they are now and on what they want to do in the future, this continues with guidance in their cluster groups in Year 8 and further group guidance in Year 9 to support with their option choices for GCSE. All Year 10 and Year 11 will have a 30minute 1:1 independent guidance with a careers advisor from careers connect to support their applications for study beyond us. In Year 10 students will also have taster days at local colleges in addition to their career cluster experiences. Year 10 and Year 11 also have application writing support as well as CV workshops and mock interviews.
Students and Parents / Carers
We actively encourage students to be thinking about their future and research careers and further choices from the start of Year 7 and throughout their journey at Penketh. We recommend parents and carers also use the career cluster info graphics to look at the clusters with their children and to support conversations at home.
