Last week several colleagues spent a significant amount of time exploring our post 16 curriculum offers and pathways.

As you will recall, New Bridge was one of the first schools in the country to develop a pre internship pathway – we called it Bridging the Gap.

Twelve years on and we continue to work in the Royal Oldham Hospital and Manchester Metropolitan University (Covid allowing).

We’ve also developed many Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5 curriculum pathways.

I blogged last week about the superb contribution Lumenus made at our Governors conference.  We’ve so many great stories about the young people who presently are engaged in the pathway and those that are now professional actors (and work/volunteer in the industry) after going through the pathway.

We’ve since developed Activ8, Digit4ll, Pre-Internships and a Living Skills Pathway – each one specifically designed to meet the individual needs of any learner within the Trust.  Any school.

We also set up our very own Specialist college – Future Finders – to ensure more young people achieve their ambitions of moving into the workplace.

Over the same period, we set up our post 19 offer and Horizons continues to do an amazing job of supporting many of the people who benefit from the facility.

One of our shared ambitions is to ensure we get the same continuum of provision for our Tameside children and young people.  A clear ambition and pathways for the children (and their families) from the age of 4 (when they join us) through to community placements/work when they are 16,17, 18 or 19.

So, what did our discussions centre around over the last week or so?

Many of our young people and school staff believe we should explore the whole area of practical trades, construction and the service industries.  We’ll have more news to share in the next few months.  We’re looking at premises, courses and staffing.

We’ve got some of our best people thinking about how we develop this further – for all young people in all our schools.

Short and sweet this week.

Please take care and stay safe,

Graham

You can find all Graham’s previous updates and blog entries here