Case Study: Work Experience for Chertsey High School

We spoke with Tom Corry of Chertsey High School to see how we’ve helped them streamline their work experience programme, making work experience management efficient with minimal staffing.

Can you tell us about your role at Chertsey High School? 

I am the Careers Leader at Chertsey High School, in my time at the school I have also held the positions of Head of Department, Data Protection Officer and Governor. More recently I have become the Director of Careers across a local cluster of Primary, Secondary and SEND Provision schools.

How do you find the experience of managing Careers alongside other teaching responsibilities? 

Careers Education rapidly became a passion of mine during the COVID years, it highlighted to me the reasons behind why we have an education system in the first place, I would frequently put in extra hours to develop our careers provision further to ensure that the experience students gained with us would develop and guide them into careers they deserved. It is a tough gig to carry out while teaching so any support and guidance I could make use of I did, having a network of passionate colleagues and companies to work with is essential.

What are your main challenges as a school when it came to work experience, and how did Changing Education help you address these?

Our biggest challenge was initially the administrative time to contact placements and carry out all of the required checks on them, using Changing Education meant that we only required a small amount of dedicated time to have oversight on the project, as these checks were carried out through the team who would then update us through the app.

How have your students found the programme? Any highlights?

The vast majority of our students thoroughly enjoyed their placements, particularly the ones who took themselves out of their comfort zones and tried something completely outside of their wheelhouse. The feedback that we have received from employers was humbling, to hear how our students presented themselves and engaged in workplace settings was so lovely to hear.

Would you recommend other schools to use Changing Education? Why?

For any school who is thinking of running work experience and has limited dedicated staff to facilitate it, I would strongly recommend the Changing Education Group. The app and dashboard are professional and straightforward to use and have enabled us to put on a work experience programme for our entire Year 10 cohort with minimal staffing.

If you’re a school or college looking to make work experience simple – speak with us to see how we can help you:

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