You're Hired!

Anglia Ruskin University Chelmsford is no stranger to working with highly committed young people who are passionate about what they do and give of their absolute best. This coming Monday, 24^th June, sees the university playing host to a group of highly committed, hardworking and absolutely focused secondary school students who are preparing to take on a really significant personal challenge – that of gaining a Grade A* or a Grade A in their English GCSE!

One hundred and twenty Year 9 and 10 students from the eight NEEEP partner schools* and their English teachers will be taking part in an Apprentice style challenge to develop their communication and teamwork skills. Using the University lecture theatre, library and classrooms, each of these aspiring English super stars will attend a series of workshops on blogging, podcasting, speech writing and writing for the press. At the end of the day these A* apprentices will present their campaign to change the way young people in Essex are represented in the national media.  Along the way they’ll get to grips with the concepts and skills needed to gain the highest English GCSE grades.  

The event has been planned by the English Departments of the seven partner schools working together as the NEEEP English Development Group under the joint leadership of Deborah Hollister, Headteacher of Manningtree High School, and Jonathan Tippett, Executive Headteacher of the Stanway Federation.

Deborah Hollister explains the motivation for the Workshop:

‘All of the schools in the NEEEP Partnership are absolutely committed to ensuring that individual students make the best possible progress that they can, and so go on to gain the highest grades possible in their GCSE. This day is about our students working together to achieve more and it’s also about healthy competition between our young people. Alan Sugar would most definitely want to employ these talented young men and women.

We want our highest flying students to know how much they are valued and to be really excited and motivated about aiming for the highest grades by working with their peers from our partner schools in a series of challenging English events. Being able to host this event at Anglia Ruskin is really important for us so that we can show our students how close they are to a University education in terms of their ability and location!  In all our schools we are absolutely committed to raising standards at all levels and working together in partnership to support our students to succeed.’

Jonathan Tippett talks about the NEEEP Partnership:

‘The North East Education Partnership (NEEEP) was formed in April 2012 with the Memorandum of Association signed in July of that year. It is an umbrella alliance of eight convertor academies based in Colchester and Tendring. Currently, we are educating around 7,500 students and jointly employ around 500 teaching staff.  We got together with a very clear focus in mind. We want to ensure that our students get the very highest quality of teaching and learning and to make the best progress possible. By working together the partner schools can exchange best practice, buy-in additional resources and staff and benefit from economies of scale. The individual strengths of each school can be used to support other schools in the partnership so that we go from strength to strength. We believe that we will be able to offer our teachers better support and our students and parents can feel really confident that, as a collaborative group, we are putting our young people at the very heart of all we are doing. We want our youngsters to succeed and are completely committed to doing all that we can to ensure that they do.

This is the second major NEEEP event for students this year following on from the success of the Maths Challenge at Weston Homes Community Stadium in February. I am sure there will be many more occasions like this where we can challenge our young people and celebrate their achievements.’