Young People Wow DFE with Work Related Learning Presentation
On 19 July young people from three schools across the Southwest , accompanied by RIO’s Carole Sartain and creative consultant Dawn Melville, visited the Department for Education (DFE) to present their year-long project on work related learning.
Commissioned by the DFE in September 2009, RIO has been working with Keystage 3 students to develop a work-related learning programme for 11-14 year olds and the invitation to present to the Curriculum Policy and Languages Team at DFE was an chance for young people to share their findings.
Over the last year, young people have been developing social enterprise ideas and working with a wide range of practitioners, mentors, businesses and organisations with the aim of developing a scalable and replicable approach to learning.
The idea was that once devised, through the implementation of the programme, 11-14 year olds would be able to engage in enterprising and exciting ‘real work’ related learning, while building confidence, personal skills and self esteem. On top of that, along the way the young development team have built up skills in project management, budgeting, PR, marketing and developing a business plan.
Some of the ideas to emerge from the developing programme have included a scheme to recycle bikes and rent them to students and parents, an iPhone App for a cycle route and bespoke fancy dress made out of recycled materials available for hire or purchase by schools and parents. An inspired idea, the ‘School of Scrap’ was spearheaded by a team of students in one of the rural schools who came up with the social enterprise concept of locating suitable clean scrap from local farmers and turning it into sculptures, furniture or ornaments for sale, or selling it as material directly to the creative professionals in the area. Similary innovative, ‘The Freedom Bus’ was another idea grown out of a rural location, where young people addressed their need to get around rural communities without having to rely on adults.
“This project has proved that students can work together, have good ideas and talk to professionals and businesses confidently,” explains one of the school's teachers. “Through their work they have started to believe that they can help themselves and potentially help others on the way.”
The presentations were very positively received by DFE and the success of the work-related learning programme itself has seen the schools involved lay plans to change aspects of their curriculum from September 2010 to allow the work to continue and develop, enabling other young people to get involved and benefit from this way of working.
