On Tuesday 03.11.2015, twenty five Year 12 students took part in the first mentoring session of the Community-Apprentice programme between HGS and Interserve. This is an exclusive programme offered by Envision, which only runs at select schools in London, Bristol and Birmingham. We are pleased to continue working closely with senior executives from Interserve to support our students with their community projects. Interserve is a multi-billion pound global firm that operates as one of the world’s foremost support services and construction companies.

Aims of the session were to:

• Build a sense of team
• Explore skills that can be developed this year, and their relevance to the work place
• Set a skills goal for each young person
• Give mentors an overview of the issues the students have chosen to tackle and allow mentors to give advice and feedback at this stage

The session kicked off with some speed interviewing, with students and mentors getting to know each other and finding common ground; chatting about topics such as “Who inspires you and why?” and “What is/was it like to be 16?”.

The second activity involved Tom Martin, a Senior Engineer at Interserve, giving an introduction to the business and explaining his credentials and that of his colleagues who attended the session (for more information about Interserve, please visit www.interserve.com).This was then followed by students and mentors being divided into groups to explore the skills that the mentors use in their daily roles. They worked together to categorise these under the six core skills that young people will develop on the Community Apprentice Programme: Organisation, Teamwork, Leadership, Resilience and Problem solving, Empathy, and Communication. The mentors supported the students to choose one skill to focus on this year, and together they came up with a brief action plan and set goals to help them increase their personal development in this area.

After sharing this with the group, select students from each group presented an overview of the issue they had chosen to explore and why it was important to them. This was then followed by mentors engaging the two teams to help them come up with three SMART targets to help them advance their projects and make good progress towards achieving their goals.

Feedback from Steve Dannan, Mentor and Head of Innovation at Interserve:

“It was amazingly uplifting to hear how passionate both teams are about their projects, and I’m really looking forward to seeing their projects develop over the next few months.”

Each team, produced an early draft of their promotional video to introduce their project. These videos can be found at:

Team Mentality: https://vimeo.com/143232337

Team Concept: https://vimeo.com/143021425

Taking full advantage of some of the new facilities available in school, Form 10N recently took part in a table-tennis tournament.  The keenly fought competition saw Shoaib beating Husain in the third place contest, and Rayhan beating Gugandeep in the final to win the new (and now highly coveted) Nelson Trophy!  Well done to all competitors for their fine display of sportsmanship; no arguing or attempted foul play was in evidence!

Mr P Jones

The word of the week commencing 2nd November 2015 is: Procrastinate

This means delay or postpone action; put off doing something.

“the temptation will be to procrastinate until the power struggle plays itself out”

The display is produced by the student librarians.

This display can be found in our Library.

Football

The Year 11 Football team recently beat Aston University Engineering Academy 10 – 2 in an Aston League match. Congratulations.

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British Gymnastics

Kai Ho in 9 William is a National Level Gymnast for the British Squad. He trains 5 days a week at Earls Gymnastics Club as well as attending regular training camps at Lilleshall Training Centre in Telford where he is coached by the British Coaching team. At the recent British National Level Competition he attended he was first overall in the Parallel Bars (making him British Champion in his age group) and was third in the overall competition. Kai is aiming to get into Team GB for International competitions. Congratulations and good luck.