From converting alumni into governors and providing work experience opportunities, the team at St Bonaventure's have seen fantastic outcomes from engaging their alumni. We sat down with Andy Lewis, Deputy Head at the school, to find out more about how alumni are essential to raising aspirations of students at the school.
Andy Lewis, Deputy Headteacher, St Bonaventure’s, explains further:
At St Bonaventure’s we’re always trying to find role models in our alumni who can show our current students success in a whole variety of different fields. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on one or two alumni that are well known, famous celebrities, but actually, we know our alumni are successful in a whole range of different fields such as creative arts, drama and so on. We want to allow our students to see a whole range of different alumni so they can follow them, whatever their path, whatever their dreams, and make a real success of them.
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 been able to appoint some of our alumni as foundation governors too, which is really important.
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.
Complementing the curriculum and your School Improvement Plan
I think ultimately any School Improvement Plan is about improving outcomes for the school, and giving the students aspiration through seeing role models in a wide range of different fields. This will hopefully input into those greater outcomes, because students have got a bit of an idea as to the possibilities that are open to them. I think where schools put in a huge amount of work around curriculum and having a of group of alumni that can come in to enhance and complement the curriculum with careers insight is really advantageous.
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 some video links where they have given talks to the whole year group, particularly some of the younger year groups and I think that’s really important.
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.
