Careers Day

In June Year Six hosted its annual Careers Day.
 The idea behind Careers Day is that children are encouraged to ask a parent (or grandparent) to come in to school to talk about their career. It is a fascinating day and once again we had a variety of careers to hear about. A police inspector, army sergeant, football scout, human resources manager and district nurse proved to be very popular.


The brief for our visitors is to give a 15-20 minute talk about their career to inspire the children. Each person presented slightly differently - many used PowerPoints this year, others preferred to bring in work-related items to share.


The purpose of the day was to give the children a taster of the possible careers available and to encourage them to think about the future (although not necessarily to make their mind up about a career).


The day was a valuable addition to our money and careers topic.

Money topic

Over the last couple of weeks we have delivered a short unit on money.

Our main focus was our Grow A Pound Week. This exciting week begins when the Friends of the school give the children a pound each to form a business. They team up into teams of up to four and decide on a service they would like to provide. They put together a business plan and carry out market research to find out prices and try to estimate the popularity of their idea. They then spend their pounds and prepare their business for opening.

The children run their stalls at lunch time. The businesses this year vary - from games to shoe shining, from caricature drawing to jewellery making. The children in the rest of the school are able to visit the stalls and purchase items/services. Parents are also invited to attend.

During the week each business keeps accounts which are used to prepare graphs.

What is interesting about the week is the way their ideas evolve during the week, aiming to meet the demands of their customers. I like how the children work well as a team and interact with their customers, changing their sales pitches for older pupils and for the children in Foundation.

In the end £57 was grown into nearly £500 - each pound given out was grown into over £9! The money will be used to pay for a leavers' treat to go bowling, and also to buy something for the school (at the moment they are thinking about buying head microphones).

It was also interesting to see the lack of awareness of how much money is worth. Prices were sometimes plucked out of thin air and the unrealistic ideas of what they can buy with their money revealed a naivety which needed to be addressed. Lots of guidance was needed with this and the children's understanding improved during the week.

During the project we also completed a classroom project on money. We used the Bank of England's resource 'Pounds and Pence' to do this. This is a very child (and teacher) friendly package which enabled the children to meet with concepts such as what money actually is, interest, savings, loans and inflation.

This resource is available to download here. There are videos included, but these can also be found on YouTube.

The topic certainly engaged the children after their SATs.

Grow A Pound Week

In June we held our annual Grow A Pound Week.

Each child was given a pound by our Friends of the school association with the intention of growing their pound into more.

The children had to form companies of up to 4 people. Each company had to carry out some market research at break times before preparing a business plan where they indicated what service they planned to offer to the other children. Business ideas included lots of game stalls, jewellery making and hats and headwear.

Each company had to prepare a billboard poster, a radio advert (using Audacity) which was played in the school corridors and give a presentation to the children in an assembly.

The week went well and the children were really busy during their lunchtimes offering their services and goods for sale.

Each day the children kept accounts to show the sales and expenses for their company. They also wrote a 'secrets of our success'-style business biography about their stall.

In the end they made over £450 (in four days), meaning their pounds grew into over £7.50 each! The money raised was used to fund a leavers' treat and also to purchase a few items for the school. The two top stalls chose how the money should be spent.

Careers Day

One of our Summer topics is money and careers. As part of this topic, this year we organised a new special event - Careers Day.

Now I know that Year Six is very early to start thinking about careers, but the idea of the day was to encourage the children to develop goals and aspirations, not necessarily to force them to choose a career. It was intended to be a very exciting and inspirational day where they got to hear about different jobs and ask questions.

A few weeks before we sent out a request to parents in Year Six to ask if they would be prepared to come in to speak to the children about their career. We had eight responses and our headteacher agreed to make this up to nine.

The children heard from a human resources director, a bank manager, a policeman, a graphics designer, a librarian, an animal behaviour councillor, an NHS manager, a teacher and a semi-professional footballer. It was amazing to see how every person had taken the brief for the day and approached it in a completely different way.

The children were enthralled. Many of them had a career in mind before the day, but they said that listening to the speakers had encouraged them to think about personal qualities they needed to develop for the job, and to think about necessary qualifications. Some pupils were inspired by our speakers and decided they might go down a similar career path. Others still couldn't make their minds up. Whatever they felt about their careers, everyone said they had thoroughly enjoyed the day.