It has been a very busy term for the Careers team at Lister buzzing with exciting activities and events from supporting the East London Business Alliance in breaking a Guinness World Record to celebrating International Men’s Day at Pinsent Mason’s with English racing driver Nicolas Hamilton.
Twenty lucky Year 9 students helped break the Guinness World Record for the largest employability skills lesson earlier this term alongside hundreds of other students from schools across East London. They also worked with business volunteers on their interview skills with 92% of the students saying they felt better equipped to handle an interview and to be more creative in problem solving!
This term also saw the launch of the Inspiring Futures Programme in collaboration with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for 60 Year 7 students. The FCA will be working with these students across the course of the year to support them in building the key skills required in the workplace. In December we will also be launching another long term mentoring programme with One Million Mentors, partnering up Year 10 students with business mentors to support them through monthly meetings to achieve their goals.
Our second cohort of Green Apprentice students wrapped up their green projects this term working alongside construction giant Lendlease to promote ways of tackling environmental issues. Two students from the cohort were also given the chance to complete an exclusive work placement at Lendlease during the October half term.
The last few weeks of this term are also set to be busy with our first Super Learning Day seeing x110 Year 7 students visit Kidzania, x120 Year 8 students attend an insight visit at a company in Canary Wharf or the City and Year 11 participating in the annual Post-16 Options day with over 30 companies and post-16 providers scheduled to attend. Accenture will also be visiting Lister to work with Year 9 female students to promote ‘Women in Tech’ and to wrap up the term, 15 lucky Year 7 students have been invited by Barclays to a LifeSkills bowling event at the O2!
We provide plenty of reading opportunities within the school day too, including DEAR. Introduced last year, DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) has been going from strength to strength at Lister. These fortnightly lessons give staff and students the chance to read a little around their subject. Here in the library we love supporting DEAR with resource provision, finding books, magazines, news articles and websites on all sorts of subjects. It’s fantastic to then go and see these resources used in DEAR lessons in creative and exciting ways.
placement with Avison Young, a global real estate firm and their efforts were also picked up by Barclays, who came in and spoke to the students before creating a short film to show at their Green Frontiers 2019 Conference. Chaired by Barclays CEO Jes Staley and Michael Bloomberg, the conference highlighted the difference the business world can make to their environment on a large scale and it all begins with the small changes individuals can make at home.
The Scholars Programme at Lister Community School aims to close the gap between the opportunities given to high ability students from state schools like ours and their privately educated peers. We want to ensure that they are given experiences which will give them a competitive edge when pursuing further education and careers, and we want to provide them with the freedom to broaden their cultural capital and explore their own interests.
held to celebrate the successes of our participants over the past year. The event was held at the Greenhouse Sports Centre in Westminister and our young people received a surprise treat when they got to meet a professional tennis player who is competing at this years Wimbledon! July has been just as busy. At the beginning of July a group of our most committed year 7’s went on a rewards trip to Wimbledon. We had fantastic seats on Court 1 and were lucky to get to watch Brit Heather Watson and recent Queens champion Feliciano Lopez. On July 4th a group of our aspiring tennis leaders helped umpire at the LYG primary schools tennis event. Our young people worked tirelessly and are well on their way to receiving their LTA tennis leader certifications. Finally July saw the inaugural staff & student mixed doubles tournament. The event was a great success with over 30 participants. Congratulations to Shanae, Darbaz, Mr T and Mr Mullard for winning the trophies and to team Shelley for being the top scoring House.
First of all, we had a the debut of Spider! The Musical. This is an original musical which tells the story of the misunderstood spiders, inspired by our experiences here at Lister. The performance featured the Yr7 Theatre School and Music School. It was a humorous, engaging, fun musical, performed with skill and obvious enjoyment. It was great to see so many parents, staff and students enjoying it too!
Half of our year 7 took part in a Newham Harmony Singing Day hosted by Newham Music Hub in preparation for the Albert Hall performance. The massed performance as part of the Music for Youth Prom will feature over 700 students from across the borough. At Yr11 Graduation there were some fantastic performances from our talented Yr11 students at this year’s graduation. It was such a delightful way to end the year with them and the quality of their performances really added to the occasion.
Having so many young people that show huge potential academically at Lister means that we are consistently looking for ways to challenge them, broaden their skills and experience and really work to support them in developing as a well rounded individuals that will be a credit to any college, university and workplace. As part of this we decided to trial the Higher Project with a group of year 9 students in order to challenge them academically, build their research skills and give them the chance to explore an area that they are really interested in, and passionate about.
Lister hosted some visitors from New York City last week as twenty-five students (and their teachers) from the Bronx Center for Science and Math spent a day with us during their visit to Paris and London, investigating attitudes to immigration and education, supported by PDT Partners.