Aspiration and Achievement Week
Last year at Millennium we hosted our first Aspiration and Achievement Week and we will be holding this wonderful event again this year from 20th-24th May 2024. The aim is to immerse our children into different jobs, learning about roles and responsibility and to inspire our children.
The idea was born from the observation that some of our children had little or no aspiration for their future. The go-to job was to be a footballer or a You Tuber. 'Aspirational for some', you may say and 'let them follow their dreams', others may say. We did and we still do encourage this, but the children had no real idea of what prospects there were for them, especially our most disadvantaged children. For some of these children, everything was out of reach. Children often aren't introduced to careers from an early age and at the age of 16 they still have to ask their teachers to use the toilet but they are expected to know what to do in their future lives! For more information about the beginnings of Aspiration and Achievement Week, please read this Think Piece written by our Executive Headteacher, Debs Joyce.
Our whole school goes off timetable for the week while teachers oversee a host of careers-focussed activities designed to broaden horizons and support children's aspirations – including hearing from guest speakers, talking about career options and experiencing what it would be like to work in different career sectors.
It is great to be able to invite our guest speakers - including some of our amazing parents - into school to share their experiences with our children through assemblies and workshops.
One of the hardest and most important jobs as a teacher is to inspire and motivate young people so that they lift their sights beyond their immediate environment.
The key message behind Aspiration and Achievement Week is that aspirations are what drive students to be what they will become. It is our responsibility to provide school experiences and environments which will encourage children to do more and be more than they presently aspire to be. Ultimately, we want to develop our children’s aspirations at the earliest opportunity.
Last year, the children met ‘real life’ superheroes from the NHS and fire service, as well as hearing from those working in a host of other jobs, including accounting, art, design, entertainment production, illustration, writing, Human Resources and many, many more.
'Millenn-a-zania'
As part of the week, we set up our own ‘Millenn-a-zania’ where our staff reorganised the school to set up different professions for the children to trial for the day. The children rotated through the different areas around the school across the day and gained an insight into what it would be like to work in different vocations.
We ended the week with parent workshops and a whole school performance of aspirational songs.
We are looking forward to another hugely successful event this year and look forward to having all our school community involved.