Well, I know I am certainly looking forward to the Bank Holiday weekend after another busy week at Medtia.

This week I have been over to David Lloyd Gym to see our students ‘in action’ at work! Currently at David Lloyd we have 3 students on placement – Tony, Daniel and Zoheb. It really was amazing to see how well they fitted in, how hard working they are and how appreciated they are by their colleagues.

The David Lloyd Gym is a very prestigious place and I am thrilled to see how well our partnership with them is working. A huge thank you to their General Manager Ian for agreeing to the project – I know they are already sounding out one of our students for a paid job! They really are doing us proud.

To give us a bit more insight, I will hand you over now to Zoheb for his ‘A Day In The Life…’

A day in the life of Zoheb
Café Assistant – David Lloyd Manchester North

I am now working at David Lloyd gym and this week I have been working in the Food and Beverage Department.
My first job of the day is to clean all the tables. I make sure that the chairs, menus and condiments are set for the next club member..

Once I have completed all my jobs front of house, I then move on to back of house where I help as a kitchen porter to keep on top of all these dishes!!!

When the cups and saucers have been washed, I then take them to the counter so that they don’t run out!

I serve the customers and take their food and drink out..

I always say ‘Enjoy your meal’ and I then check if everything is okay with the meal..

This is Darren who I have been working with this week..

I’ve had great feedback for my first week, they said that I worked really hard and because of this I’ve been awarded ‘Worker of the Week’! This is my job coach Genna who works alongside me. I have really enjoyed working at David Lloyd and I am looking forward to going back in on Tuesday!

Not only has Zoheb had an amazing week at work but he has also attended a job interview this week for a local café and has a working interview on Saturday! Good luck, Zoheb! To celebrate your successes this week, you are also our ‘Worker of the Week’!

Meanwhile Faisal and Mubaarak have been working with our job coach Tisha on independent travel training in preparation for making the journey to their new placement, Premier Inn Oldham Central..

We set off from Medtia at 1.30pm to practise the new route to our placement. The first part of the journey was to Oldham bus station, making sure we used safe road crossings..

..before walking through Spindles to get to the bus station where we needed to catch the 409 to Oldham Hospital..

The safest route was then through the hospital grounds rather than walking down Sheep Foot Lane, although we had to take care to use the right pathways as there are so many cars and vans and stay very alert to traffic..

 Learning the landmarks to look out for on the route is really useful!

Both Faisal and Mubaarak have continued to work on their new route and are doing really well. Mubaarak successfully made it there this week with no prompts (although he found the return journey confusing and will be making sure he learns the landmarks to look out for) – he said he is very proud of himself!

On Monday evening, I met with our Future Finders students and their parents to discuss our trip to Salou in a couple of weeks’ time! We are all very much looking forward to our trip to Spain – just another reminder to families to please get in passports and any prescribed medication to us as soon as possible.

For the past 6 months I have been working with Michaela Andrew who is the Careers and Enterprise Co-ordinator for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. I have committed to joining the Careers Leader Programme and we have just been invited to join the Greater Manchester Careers Hub from September, representing SEND schools from across the combined authority.

This week was a really exciting week for us in our collaborative work as I was introduced to our new Enterprise Advisor, who will now meet with me regularly to assist our Group in enriching our already fantastic careers and enterprise offer for our young people, ensuring that all students across the Group have encounters with businesses and employers during their time with us at New Bridge. Our Enterprise Advisor is a lady called Sandra McDonald. Sandra works as the Development Manager for the Chartered Insurance Institute and is really excited to be working with us.

I will keep you posted on the work that we start together in the coming months but by 2020, we are looking to work collaboratively to ensure that our schools are achieving all of the ‘Gatsby Benchmarks’ which were set out by the government in December 2017 as a target for all schools. The eight ‘Gatsby Benchmarks of Good Career Guidance’ are:

• A stable careers programme
• Learning from career and labour market information
• Addressing the needs of each pupil
• Linking curriculum learning to careers
• Encounters with employers and employees
• Experiences of workplaces
• Encounters with further and higher education
• Personal guidance

I would like to take this opportunity to update you on our application to become an independent college which I have spoken about many times previously in this blog. In short, we haven’t heard anything! We are expecting to hear in the next week or so but for now, no news is good news!

All that remains to say this week is have a fantastic long weekend! Enjoy the Bank Holiday and we look forward to seeing the students and staff back on Tuesday.

Daniel
Director of Employment & Co Head of Site at Medtia Square

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