Pupils visit The News as part of career fact-finder

Year 9 students at Priory School in Southsea are the first to be part of an initiative run by the school to help them find out more about job opportunities.

Maths teacher at the school and co-organiser of the scheme, Anne-Marie Wood, said: ‘Year 9 is the year in school when you are not the newest and not facing exams and the focus gets lost on the middle section.

‘This is a new initiative designed to help the pupils to find out more about where their GCSEs can take them in the future which we think is important to do early rather than in Year 11 when they are already going through the exams.’

More than 20 students are set to visit and interview a variety of people in different industries and create a portfolio to be shared across their whole year group to provide an insight.

Anne-Marie said: ‘We have a cross section of the year group here so we hope that will mean a good representation of interests in different careers.

The pupils visited The News’ offices at Lakeside North Harbour to gain an insight to local journalism and pick up some tips for interviewing.

Anne-Marie said: ‘We really appreciated our time at The News and in the taxi back one of the pupils said to me that working for a newspaper would never had occurred to them, but they were really taken with the idea of being a sports writer.

‘This is exactly what we hoped for, some sparks for them to think what their education might lead them to.’

The pupils at the secondary school, which recently achieved Good during an Ofsted inspection, have written a list of the different jobs they are interested to find out more about including coding, sports, engineering, music and game design.

Pupil Tyler Gaffney, 13, said: ‘This course shows us different jobs and has given us the insight into how many different jobs there are.’

Fellow student Isobel Hecks is interested in Forensic Science.

The 13-year-old said: ‘I think seeing and talking to people about their jobs will be really helpful and interesting.’

English teacher and the other co-organiser of the initiative Connor Mills believes the scheme is vital to encouraging the pupils.

Connor said: ‘I think that if the students have an idea of where they want to go then that could give them the encouragement to apply themselves in their lessons because they know where it can lead.’