CASE STUDY: Hall Green School, Birmingham

Hall Green School

Download Hall Green Case Study

Key Benefits:

  • Communication with pupils.
  • Communication with employers.
  • Better administration of events with record of attendance, feedback and staff reviews.
  • Organising an up to date careers plan incorporating the Gatsby Benchmarks.

About the school

Hall Green is a comprehensive secondary school midway between central Birmingham and Solihull with 900 pupils on roll. The school was rated Good by Ofsted in spring 2016 and serves a vibrant multi ethnic community and is proud to have better than average attainment and destinations.

CEIAG Programme

Hall Green School  has a dedicated careers coordinator and puts on a range of activities to support the careers programme, many involving local employers. However the school found that pupils had nothing to help document their careers journey through the school and found the burden of administration and events feedback cumbersome.

The school chose to adopt the Grofar programme to better ‘tie togther’ all the elements of  careers provison offered by the school.  In addition Grofar is expected to help find ways to reduce the amount of administration as well as helping have a clearer view of what pupils were experiencing through years 7 to 11.

The school also wanted to find a better way of keeping all their employer contacts together in one place and being able to easily see who they were  and how they would be willing to support the school with services.

Grofar Implementation

The Grofar system was implemented with a link to SIMS that meant that all the pupil data was automatically transferred and updated. Business contacts were imported from a spreadsheet and pupils were invited to create their initial student passports as part of a dedicated Careers lesson using the IT suites.

“A big benefit of the programme is being able to communicate careers events, and notifications by sending messages to pupils. This goes straight to their personal email address, where currently this can often be diffcult to make the time to do.

A useful area is being able to send pupils a request for feedback after an event to get a very quick and easy overview from the pupils involve, which they can do in their own time and doesn’t take them out of lessons.

Events are also added to the Careers plan automatically which helps build an overvall picture of all the careers provision through the year.

I have already run an introduction session on a PSHE day to set up a profile with the current year 11s. This is something I am planning to do with other year groups as well as using the Work Experience lesson plans, recording of placements,  log books and evaluations.”