Envision Community Apprentice Programme
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
