Senior Pupils Lead SoA Business Engagement Evening

Senior pupils from Stromness Academy and Kirkwall Grammar school held a business engagement evening last Wednesday at Kirkwall Town Hall in an attempt to establish more formal and sustainable links with local businesses and agencies.

A gathering of over 15 business and agency representatives attended the meeting.

The program for the evening entailed a welcome from the pupils and highlighting the experiences and opportunities they had already undertaken in both the school and out of school working environments.

Following on from the senior pupils, two guest speakers, Mrs. Marilyn Richard, Assistant Director of Education, OIC, and Mrs. Hilda De Felica, Learning Unlimited Scotland gave presentations to the audience.

Mrs. Richards gave an overview of the learning intentions of the new curriculum for the 21^st century entitled ‘A Curriculum for Excellence’, and proposed new National Qualifications. Central to these initiatives is the need to provide a curriculum that provides real opportunities for skills for life and skills for work. The proposed National Qualifications will allow for a new raft of qualifications which will provide accreditation for vocational courses undertaken during the third and fourth years of a pupil’s secondary school life. In addition to this, there will be separate National Qualifications to assess Literacy and Numeracy competency.

Mrs. De Felica provided a series of thought provoking statistics in relation to information age of the 21^st century. For example, by the time a student has reached the 4^th year of their degree course, the information taught in the first 2 years will already be out of date. There is a clear need to provide a transformed curriculum that will meet the needs of our pupils and future employers faced with globalisation and emerging new economies of the world. e.g. how will Scotland be able to respond to the impact of China upon the world economy? In attempt to address the changing needs of schools and businesses, examples of joint school and business projects across Scotland were presented. The ability to make learning ‘real’ was stressed as a major outcome of these experiences and as such, pupils had a better understanding of the curriculum being delivered in school. These experiences have also had an appositive impact upon subsequent examination results.

During the second half of the evening the senior pupils ran a question time event, where six questions were asked of their guests.

1. What do you see is the value of wider achievements in supporting an application for a job?

2. What skills, generic or specific, do you want from potential future employees?

3. What importance do you place upon formal qualifications? Do businesses understand the current SQA qualification structure?

4. What leadership skills do you see as important?

5. What ITC skills do you think future employees should possess?

6. How do you envisage they could contribute to the curriculum so as to ensure future employees are better skilled for the workplace?

The pupils and guests wrote down responses to the questions for future collation and feed back.

To conclude the evening guests and pupils had the opportunity to view the wide range of responses and then ask further questions of the guest presenters and pupils.

Initial evaluation from the evening reports that the event was both informative and productive as some of the guests have initiated further discussion as to how best take forward closer links with schools in terms of supporting a transformed curriculum.