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Passport to your Future
Start date: Sep 8, 2014, End date: Sep 7, 2016 PROJECT  FINISHED 

In order to equip our students with the necessary employability skills to meet the needs of current and future employers, we as education providers must understand these needs and improve our current practice to safeguard and nurture prosperous futures for our teenagers today, regardless of their socio-economic or academic backgrounds. Despite our best efforts, the cohort we often in the UK refer to as Pupil Premium (PP) continues to be the Achilles heel of our institutions as time and time again these students fail to meet the desired and expected levels of progress largely down to the fact they do not believe they can and will achieve academic and employment success. This is partly due to the lack of role models within the family, or complex family situations that apparently limit the aspirations of the individual. The objective of this project is simple; to make it easier for all students to see that success is available to all through quality education and sound careers guidance. We now need to evaluate our own practice and the practice of others across different European nations to examine the way in which we instill ambitions and encourage all individuals to make themselves an active member of a global society, with good career prospects, especially those from a more disadvantaged background. We strongly believe that through working with teenagers in other countries, our most vulnerable students who for some have never left the country will develop a desire to raise their own ambitions and aspirations, and even consider aspiring to work in another European country in their long term career. This project should therefore help students to identify what career pathway they want to pursue, increase their desire and efforts to succeed academically to achieve the best grades possible to get the jobs they really want to pursue in later life. This will help us as a consortium of schools to narrow the gap and improve attainment for the lower academic achievers in all our schools. We will recruit a team of 30 'Employability ambassadors' aged 13-16 in each of the 4 schools who will contribute to the project over the next two years, each of them visiting 1 other partner school to explore similarities and differences between the career education and pathways, employment prospects and employability skills in each country. They will then produce (with support from teachers, mentors and business partners) 4 key intellectual outputs - A guide, website, App, and lesson plans to help raise awareness of the importance of and improve Employability skills of other European teenagers. The expected result will be better job prospects for all users as they develop the skills that employers are looking for on a local, national and perhaps International level. Activities will include: Initial interviews on camera and via attitudinal surveys about careers and employability skills development; develop hypothesis on employability and test this against local employers’ attitudes; devise a menu of employability and aspiration/ambition projects; develop some of these and test, rate and review; select the best and most valuable 3 projects to partners and trade; publish and share via website and App; evaluate wider impact and use reviewing tools to measure/gauge strength of a project though online survey and App quiz; Feedback and disseminate to media and educational groups in all 4 countries; complete and be awarded employability passports at a grand ceremony at the end of the 2 year project. In terms of methodology we will employ the PDR cycle of improvement for each project. Expected outcomes and results will include: All participants to achieve more positive scores re: school reviews e.g. all green on track to achieve best results possible for the individual; All participants to have a clearer aspirational life/career plan; All participants to have a much greater attitudinal scores than the baseline data; All participants able to articulate and demonstrate what employability skills are and how to improve life chances through an international employability passport signed and endorsed by all partner schools. Long term - As part of the study we will look to receive updates and follow up from the participant ambassadors well into their future employment, with a plan to bring them back on an annual basis into school to promote their achievements and the work that helped them to get into employment. We would hope that in the longer term, the resources will be used by a wide variery of schools both on a national and International scale thanks to the shared website/App development and users will improve their employability skills to help them become 'work ready' and achieve their first job or training course beyond age 16.
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