From challenging stereotypical thinking, to providing a variety of meaningful encounters, an alumni community can help state schools and colleges to boost their careers provision, and reach almost all of the Gatsby Benchmarks. We spoke to Andy Lewis, Deputy Headteacher at St Bonaventure's, about the impact of their alumni network, and how it contributed to the schools recent 'Outstanding' Ofsted report.
Andy Lewis, Deputy Headteacher, St Bonaventure’s, tells us more:
One of the really key things is about employee experiences, where we’ve got careers days and alumni coming in person. We’ve also had video links where alumni have given talks to the whole year group, particularly some of the younger year groups and I think that’s really important.
Providing meaningful encounters with employees and experiences with workplaces
When you’re trying to establish work experience and work placements, alumni can be really helpful if they can set up bespoke ones for your school, which quite often they’re willing to try and do because they want people from their own school coming into their place of work.
We’ve had careers days where some of the alumni have come in and given talks and a bit of an insight into their job role – I think the alumni have enjoyed that and gone back to their employers and looked at different opportunities they might be able to offer such as work experience and internships. It transforms from just a one-off day into something a bit more meaningful. We’ve even been able to appoint some of our alumni as foundation governors too.
St Bonaventure’s has now got an accessible network that we can reach out to, for example, when we were looking for exam invigilators quite a few of our recent alumni have come back. Sometimes they come back to us after university to work as learning support assistants, as cover supervisors, and even as teachers as well.
Ofsted recognise the power of alumni
We’re really pleased that we’ve got outside recognition from Ofsted when they visited around the work of our alumni and that comes to the governance as governors, but also the staff body and the careers and Gatsby provision. As we move forward we want to continue to work out what it is that alumni want and what is it that they want to get back from their school years down the line. Sometimes it is just about popping in and reminiscing and we have found some very keen to give money. So, we’ve set up an alumni fund which is kind of a bit of a hardship fund really, for the current students who are struggling.
At the minute we are setting up a series of events because we haven’t got a long history of alumni events, so we’re trying to set those up as kind of a bit of a an opportunity for a reunion, but also for networking because again we’ve found some of our alumni just love meeting other students if they went to school with them and setting up business and networking opportunities as well.
Raising aspirations and addressing the needs of every pupil
When they have been able to offer those kind of bespoke and unique kind of opportunities I think our current students have really appreciated it because they love hearing the stories of our alumni – those that that lived in the same places that they did and had the same challenges that they had, and you know, the ways in which they overcame them. Their stories of going off to university, their success in careers etc. They really appreciate hearing from people that not only kind of look like them, but have had the same experiences as them and it does often feel like a very unique and very profound experience for them.
I think that the students where they have been offered those unique careers, work experience and internships they’ve built bonds with the alumni that are very special. It happens online through things like LinkedIn and again, current students and former students can connect that way as well. There’s no substitute really for it being in real life, when I come into school and just spend time with our current students, it always naturally just works really well, I think.