Students bitten by Apple bug

Posting by Ranjit Hayer, Career Academy Manager and Business teacher

           

The Apple store in Touchwood played host to me and the second year Business Career Academy students last week and what fun we had when we visited.

The students, all in their second year of the BTEC Business qualification, were on their first fieldtrip since their return to College from their summer internships.

The fieldtrip was hosted by Shiva Patel, who spent the afternoon with us and showed off Apple’s fantastic gadgets. This included the Mac Book Pro and Shiva demonstrated how the students could use it to enhance their BTEC coursework using the ‘Pages’ software. The students used their current coursework assignments for the Market Research unit to design posters that they would then use as part of the market research for their Business Plan unit.

The students experimented with the fast and efficient way the Apple software worked and even had one-to-one support on how their assignments could be improved with a touch of Apple sparkle. At the end of the fieldtrip the students were given a copy of all their posters to take away with them to print off in College

Apple also gave the students their very own Apple t-shirts, which they wore with pride.

It is visits such as these that form part of the Career Academy experience. The College is working with Career Academies UK to implement this national scheme which raises the aspirations and employability of young people by offering not only visits, but also guru lectures, mentoring and paid internships. The students on this recent visit all recently completed six-week paid internships at local businesses.

These recent internships saw the students at a range of local businesses, from hotels to building societies, and solicitors to council offices.

For student Sam Wallace, it was Coventry Building Society who offered him an internship. He spent six weeks at the firm and his duties included serving on the counter, processing customer transactions, answering queries and arranging meetings with the advisors. He also took part in a community event in Chelmsley Wood and partially completed his Customer Service Assistant Taskbook, as well as working in the firm’s banking hall as a meet and greeter.

Meanwhile, the Village Hotel offered fellow student Nadia Begum a similar internship. During her six weeks with the firm, the former Langley School student worked in all departments of the hotel.

Chartered Accountants Grant Thornton were also part of the scheme. They offered an internship to Rittika Sharma, who spent time working in the firm’s audit department. This time was split between external audit and government audit and involved checking the clients financial records to source invoices and preparing the income and expenditure statement for the service charge. She also worked on an NHS corporate governance project.

Another accountancy firm, BDO, offered an internship to Ryan Fryer. He worked in the Market, Sales and Clients Department, carrying out data management and cleansing tasks, as well as supporting marketing events. He also performed a number of research tasks, involving researching companies and industries.

Away from accountancy, another student worked with Chiltern Railways. Munib Altaf was employed setting up an inventory programme for the small on-board shops that Chiltern run from Birmingham to London. Whilst he enjoyed the job it took a while to get used to getting up at 5.00am to get the train to London. His internship was also extended by a few days, so he could train other members of the team on how to use the inventory programme he’d been refining.

                                        

Meanwhile, five students went to Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. Dipesh Sharma, Dipesh Chauhan, Siobhan Williams, Primal Chhaya, Fatima Az-Zahra took on a variety of roles in several different departments at the Council.

I’m really proud of the students for the work they did over the summer. They are now into the second year of the Business Career Academy and I can see how much they have developed in confidence and experience over the first year, which is great to see.

Open Day Tops Hectic Term

Posting by Bev Bishop, Marketing Co-ordinator

What a busy spell we are having at The Sixth Form College, Solihull. Indeed, so hectic is it at the moment, that already today I have sent out four press releases to the local media!

With so much going on, I thought I’d share with you just a taste of what goes on at a vibrant College like this.

The peak of our activity came last Saturday, when we held out Open Day. We were open from 9.30am until 3.30pm and we had just over 1,400 prospective students visit us. All those students brought at least one parent and many brought both parents and brothers and sisters, so we had thousands of people on campus.

It was a wonderful, if exhausting day. Huge thanks go to all the staff and to the students who worked all day to help show our visitors round and answer their questions. We had staff and existing students in every subject area, as well as Principal presentations taking place. The student guides, in particular, were outstanding and spoke with such maturity and enthusiasm about the College as a whole and their particular subjects. Parents were so impressed with them and it made me feel so proud of them all.

We had so many positive comments from prospective students and parents over the course of the day and many said they would definitely be applying to come here next September, which is very encouraging. Already we have had more than 400 applications for September 2012, but students have until 30 March 2012 to get their applications in, so there is no need to panic yet!

We all felt like we needed a rest after Open Day, but there is never time for that at a big College like this. We had a timetable suspension day on Tuesday, so lots of students had no lessons, but don’t think for a minute that we were idle. Teachers were having meetings with their Year 13 students to review progress and these reviews will be made available to parents.

Business students have also been busy this week. The College is entering its second year of the Business Career Academy, which is a scheme which offers students a chance to get real-world business opportunities by way of visits, talks, mentoring and paid internships. Last year’s first cohort of students have thrived on the scheme and they were present as a new intake of students applied to join the scheme. Representatives from Lloyds TSB came into College to help us conduct the selection process and ten students (some of whom are pictured below) have been accepted into the programme.

The College dancers have also had a busy week. They have formed a dance company called Collision and they took part in a dance showcase at the Solihull Arts complex on Thursday evening called Bounce 11. Their performance (pictured above) was called “Time to Waste”, which explored through dance the idea of waiting in its many guises, including the excitement, worry and anticipation that waiting can evoke in people. The piece was choreographed by Dance teacher Jessica Morgan and the students and set to a compilation of music and sound effects.

There is more to come next week and in the following weeks too. On Tuesday next week it’s Autumn Fest, as we celebrate the cultural diversity of the College. Law students will be visiting Birmingham Crown Court on a fieldtrip on Thursday and there will be more student reviews taking place too.

We are also gearing up for some end of term events too – the College Production this year is “Little Shop of Horrors” and it takes place at 7pm on Wednesday 7, Thursday 8 and Friday 9 December, while the Christmas Music Concert is on Wednesday 14 December. Tickets are available for both events by calling 0121 704 2581.

Before all that, tonight the Leisure Studies students are holding a charity event at College called Race Night and there will be more news on how that goes soon.

Now, hopefully you can see what I mean about what a hectic place The Sixth Form College, Solihull is and this is just the tip of the iceberg. An awful lot of great learning has been going on too, with challenging and enjoyable lessons in each of our 43 A level subjects and 8 BTEC Diploma courses too.

Perhaps the only pause this week has come today – 11-11-11, better known as Armistice or Remembrance Day. The College paused for a period of silent reflection at 11.00am today, to mark the moment that the First World War came to and end and to remember those who lost their lives.

Guru Lecture with the LIVE Group

Posting by Ranjit Hayer, Business teacher & Career Academy Manager

Second year Career Academy students enjoyed a fascinating guru lecture this week, as they were visited by Theresa Crockett from the LIVE Group.

The LIVE Group is an events management company and Theresa Crockett is an account manager with the firm, based in Westminster. Theresa met the students at the end-of-year event at Arup last July, and on this first visit to the College she was eager to find out how their summer internships had gone. The students used the time to tell her all about their experiences, what they enjoyed and what they learnt about the working full-time.

Theresa then told them all about her work, including how her job works and how the world of events management has changed. She brought some of the latest technology that is used by the LIVE Group with her to show how conferences work. The students had a chance to take part in an interactive discussion in which new technology called a palmlet was used to vote on questions, opinions and to even rate speakers during the time they were talking at conferences.

The students were impressed and amazed at how conferences now worked and how important it is for businesses to closely follow new technology, as it is certainly changing at a fast pace.

Real world experiences like this are a valuable part of the Career Academy venture. The students are in their second year of a BTEC Extended Diploma in Business course and are getting unique opportunities with the Career Academy. This includes not only guru lectures like this, but also visits to businesses, mentoring from real business people and six-week paid internships, which the students have just completed over the summer.

More news on the internships coming soon!

Snakes and Ladders

Posting by Ranjit Hayer, Business Studies teacher

My A2 Business Studies students borrowed an idea from A level Law this week by adapting a popular children’s board game to help them with their studies.

Snakes and Ladders was the game and the students split into groups to complete the exercise. They all wrote their own Business Studies-related questions and answers, which focussed on topics like production methods, costings, economies of scale, business objectives and other issues covered in the course. These questions were tested on opposing groups as they shook the dice and played Snakes and Ladders.

It was a really fun way of helping the students to get to grips with the complex subject matter and of course there was more than a little element of chance involved too. The teams were really competitive and more than one roll of the dice saw the teams slipping down the board on a snake!

It was all in good fun, but there’s a hidden agenda too, as it was a good way to get the students to think about their revision without being boring. Fingers crossed it has helped; they now simply need to revise!! Good luck to them!