Enrichment Opportunities - Sixth Form

Enrichment is an important and exciting opportunity for young adults within our Sixth Form. It allows you to engage in a non-academic based curriculum and develop your interests and your skills. These skills will then help you to become a well-rounded, unique and employable individual who can leave our Sixth Form as an outgoing and confident young adult. Students in Year 12 enrichment is recorded throughout the academic year in their Weekly Planner.  The options students choose to take will help them to develop both as a learner and as a person, whilst also enabling them to develop skills that are linked to their career goals.

Beyond these opportunities, we offer a range of opportunities for students ranging from sports teams and clubs, trips abroad, subject visits, guest speakers and university trips. Our students take part in many local and national competitions in all sorts of fields, from poetry to sport, and from debating to essay writing. There is a thriving Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, and we actively encourage our students to dedicate their time to this. This is a nationally recognised award that is highly valued by universities and employers. Every year we have a number of students who achieve their Gold Award.

The Teaching Assistant initiative forms part of the Year 12 Enrichment programme. It is primarily focused on students wishing to pursue a career in education, psychology, sociology, English, MFL, nursing, business, HR, hospitality/retail. It enables students to develop skills such as patience, positivity, organisation, teamwork, ability to work independently, as well as an understanding of how children learn in different ways. Regular bite sized training sessions are run twice a term where we discuss aspects of teaching and learning that have been observed by the Year 12 students as well as developing relevant literacy and numeracy strategies. Students are allocated two slots per fortnight (one per week) based on their own wishes, and it is their responsibility to turn up to those sessions and have it signed off by the class teacher.

The Paired Reading initiative also forms part of the Year 12 Enrichment programme. Based on the English department's PiRA test, Year 7 students who are Pupil Premium, EAL, and/or SEN testing below expectations have been selected to be given some extra intervention. 

Mentoring Scheme

The Student Mentoring Scheme allows students to enhance their listening and communicative skills by meeting with KS3 students to support them with day-to-day life. Students will also develop time management skills as it is their responsibility to arrive to these sessions once a fortnight for 20 minutes during tutorial. 

This programme is highly beneficial to the school as it allows the students to ‘lend an ear’ to students that are struggling in school. Typically, this will involve supporting students by developing resilience, friendship and educational issues Additionally, they are given the opportunity to give something back to the school community by supporting the pastoral department. This programme involves a 1-year commitment from the student to provide consistent support to our KS3 students. They also receive mentoring training with a certificate of achievement.

Sixth Form Diploma The super-curriculum

We want to provide students every opportunity to develop their love of learning. We have developed a Super Curriculum which gives students a range of suggested activities that take their regular curriculum further. These activities take the student beyond what their teacher has taught them in the classroom and the expectation is that these are undertaken throughout the week in Study Periods. Committing to these learning challenges will help to equip our students with skills for life; to be flexible, adaptable, resilient and relish a challenge and most importantly to become independent learners.