Glow Meet could soon be enabling new links between schools and industry across Edinburgh, thanks to Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce’s Education Policy Group.
At today’s meeting of the Group, chairman Ray Harris of Edinburgh’s Telford College identified the development of school / industry links as one of the key themes to be progressed this year. This links strongly with the Curriculum for Excellence principle of Relevance.
Children should understand the purposes of their activities. They should see the value of what they are learning and its relevance to their lives, present and future.
Earlier discussions on this had flagged up that many of the barriers to developing links were associated with the overheads involved in organising the physical travel and supervision. Not only does this present difficulties for schools, there are similar difficulties for organisations faced with hosting school children on their sites. Glow Meet offers the possibility of developing virtual links at much lower cost, so I’ll be meeting with Roger Horam of the Chamber to explore the possibilities and get a pilot link-up organised.
Possibilities discussed included:
- Link-ups with a experienced professionals, to allow students to find out about their jobs
- Link-ups with recent school-leavers, to find out what was and wasn’t useful from school
- Link-ups with specialised people, of interest to only a few students, which could be advertised to schools Edinburgh or Scotland-wide
- Recording of these Glow Meet sessions for future careers staff use
It was also agreed to set up a blog to record progress, which will be set up on edubuzz soon.