Easter In Review

Monday 20th Apr 2020

Easter In Review

By Chris McNamara

Easter flew by didn’t it!? At Pathway CTM, we have continued with our daily webinars, as 87% of our webinar student attendees have said how Easter didn’t feel like normal, with students appearing to appreciate continuing activity to be involved with during this isolation. So that was the story of our holiday period, more webinars and coaching calls with students! In fact, I am delighted to say we had 13 employer webinar sessions over the two-weeks. Here are some of my highlights.

Personally, I loved seeing the dedication of students, with many being involved in our daily community webinars (key employability skills sessions), and then continuing later that day onto more specific webinars (brand specific). A really good example here is the phenomenal support we have from Cappfinity, to ensure our students know their strengths and can speak about them at interview, to then learn and practice before the online assessments with Accenture. While we are on the topic of assessment, Danny Matthews, on behalf of The Co-op, led two great detailed sessions on apprenticeships, and (the most popular over Easter), Assessment & Selection. This session had a lot of interest from our network of educators too, with one Chair of Governors using it to upskill their Governor team and stating ‘I had no idea that game style testing is taking place’.

“This is exactly what our students need. The real-life contact which they’d never normally get. These sessions make a huge difference” (Head of Careers, after Assessment & Selection Webinar with The Co-op).

It is this teacher and network feedback that encouraged the decision to put much of our recent content on our YouTube channel, so access is now open for this content, and events plus teacher resources also on our website too. I’m delighted to also announce we will be picking the ‘webinar of the week’ and putting this onto our podcast channel, so parents and teachers can access the sessions we think they need to know about most.

I’ve really enjoyed working with The Financial Times. By turning up to these webinars, Pathway students have now been confirmed on a really unique work experience opportunity there. I’ve seen great LinkedIn profile, covering letters and CV’s – exactly what our webinar series is all about! Yet more deserving students, who have shown this excellent attitude, have also obtained work experience opportunities with Insurance Company ED Broking . I really want to thank our employer network for still providing opportunities and working with our engaged student base, it’s pretty awesome!

Entering our 5th week of lockdown, (and our webinar series), we kick off this week with a Mindfulness session with Sarah from Pret A Manger. Emphasising the importance of being mindful in this tricky time for us all. We are progressing this piece with a four-part mental health and wellness series in weeks to come, so watch this space students and teachers! In addition, as we round off April, we will be conducting a Lunch And Learn with teachers and parents this week; to keep moving our services forward with sharing learnings and changes to education and student recruitment. I’m sure will continue to see inspiring stories from Cancer Research and Pret A Manger and all our other supporters too, I really enjoyed hearing the different stories provided to us and our student-webinars in the last fortnight.

Schools/Colleges are ‘back’ this week. I’m hearing from my network, even if they are permitted to go back and out of isolation, unless there is enough PPE equipment in place, you will be seeing lots of parents not sending their children back to school (and what about teachers?). Every week we get closer to July, it will be even more likely perhaps, that even with a staged return, we will be unlikely to see much physical attendances before the Summer break. Therefore, looking ahead to September, which is a daunting but perhaps realistic outcome we can expect?

Keep safe and thanks for reading.

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To be involved in our webinar series please email me at [email protected]