On the 13th January, All Saints Academy held its 3rd Personal Development Education (PDE) day and it was the turn of our Year 9 students to further develop their knowledge and understanding of careers and the World of Work. As part of this day Middlesbrough Football Club Foundation (MFCF) were invited to attend and to host a Gibson’s Gig event.
Students were asked to work in groups of 7-9 and the aim of the day was to organise a music event at the Riverside Stadium and to play the role of an events organisation company. The day started off with students having to pick from a list of artists and which one they would like to host. If two groups had the same artist then a head to head quiz was used to decide the winner, who could choose their preferred artist, and the losers would have to pick their next choice of act. Surprisingly Ed Sheeran was found to be in high demand!
Students were then introduced to financing the event and provided with some data, they then had to work out ticket prices, programme prices as well as merchandise and food/beverages sales and hopefully after the numbers were crunched, the planned gig should have returned a healthy profit.
Following on from the finance arrangements students then had to promote the event to ensure that it was well publicised and that, like recent music events, the planned gig was a sell-out. This saw students create posters, leaflets and also come up with storyboards for TV adverts and radio scripts to maximise publicity.
Students then had to pitch their findings in front of their peers and were graded on the quality of presentation, effort throughout the day, understanding of the task and the profit generated (some ingenious ideas of how to ‘extort’ money out of the paying public included charging for bag storage, mobile photo printers so fans could print out pictures instantly from their mobile phone to charging for ticket lanyards, were just a few of the novel ideas generated).
For the final session, students all accessed their START profile and completed their “About me” profile which students then explored, to learn about jobs and careers that they were interested in/had been matched to based on their profiles.
Gatsby Benchmarks
Gatsby Benchmarks 1 – Providing a stable careers programme – embedded into the PDE scheme of work and links to Careers work carried out in Year 7 and Year 8. Developed students team and independent working skills as well as improving communication, problem solving and presentation skills.
Gatsby Benchmarks 2 – Learning from Career and Labour Market Information – a variety of career roles were covered including events organisation, public relations, finance and accounting, advertising etc.
Gatsby Benchmarks 3 – Addressing the Needs of Each Student – Use of the START profile to link their skills to potential jobs.
Gatsby Benchmarks 4 – Linking Curriculum Learning to Careers – Strongly linked to Maths (Finance) and English (final presentations) but also Art (advertising campaign) and Geography (Location and considerations of moving large amounts of people in a built-up area).
Gatsby Benchmarks 5 – Encounters with Employers and Employees – The session were delivered by members of the MFCF so students had opportunities to talk to employees and find out more about the job roles.
The PDE included 8 staff members and 143 Year 9 students.
3 members from MFCF delivered sessions 1-4, academy staff delivered session 5
The majority of students that attended and completed the survey were largely positive and the event received a positive range of responses.
From students:
“I really enjoyed the day, the activities were engaging and I liked to do them and hope that we have more PDE days like this in the future”
“I enjoyed the sessions but would have like a bit more time as I would have liked to add more detail to our poster”
“The day was good because I learnt some new skills like working for an events company and how to organise a big event”
“I liked using my maths skills to work out the costs and looking at how much profit we could make and trying to make more.”
