WORKING (EXPERIENCE) FOR PLEASURE!

We, Devesh Chevli and Faisal Arshad, have just completed our two-week Year 11 work experience programme at Study@BWFC.  It has been a great challenge for us, coming from Ladybridge High School and we didn’t expect it to be so much fun.
When we first arrived at the study centre, we were kind of nervous but the staff made us feel welcome. All the staff has been ever so kind and friendly and made us part of the team. We learnt many things whilst we were there, teaching children and helping them to understand the activities, even teaching some junior pupils from our own school. We showed them the process of making robots from Lego and then programming them, which was extremely difficult although it was exciting.
We worked with Andy Davenport, the Assistant Manager, most of the time. He was the person who gave us the confidence in teaching children and also gave us his personal tour of the Reebok Stadium, which was quiet amazing for us. The technician, Ed Wilcox, showed us how a network of computers works and we also solved many ICT technical problems with his help.
Another member of the staff, Philip Moulton, made us feel welcome at the start. He showed us how to improve the centre’s web page and also showed us how to complete the daily readings of the centre’s weather station, a task where we were asked to supervise the children at each teaching session
The Manager, Janet Rhodes, kept us occupied when we thought we had nothing to do, such as joining high school pupils in an egg drop parachute challenge, and we created characters and props for the pupils’ animation projects, celebrating the team’s success this season.
Other members of staff, Alison Williams, Anthony Brownlow and Paula Mead, talked to us quite often, joked with us and just helped our work experience feel better for us. Alison Griffiths, the centre Office Manager, involved us in many activities, supervising our tuck shop management and making us feel very much at home. Tom Hall, the Tour Guide, who often comes into the centre, was very amusing and made jokes and spent time with us whenever he saw us. 
We would like to thank all the members of staff at the centre who helped us with our work experience as we have had a great time and learnt many things. Many thanks also to the club itself for giving us such a positive experience of the world of work.

It was in April 05, when I took on ten days of ‘Work Experience’ at the BWFC study centre.  Whilst I was there I had a great time and wasn’t really looking forward to the idea of having to back to school.  During my time there I gained many skills, these included; how to work with others in a completely different environment from what I am used to (for example students and parents during study sessions and all the members of staff- who were fantastic to work with), in addition to this I also picked up many other office skills like faxing, photocopying etc and learned how to use various new software. 

            During the study sessions I was amazed at how well the children had done over the ten weeks they had attended.  They created some fantastic work in programs called Dance Ejay; this is music making software and one of the students (Tremayne  from Smithills Secondary School) created his own MC to go with his finished music piece.  As well as Dance Ejay they also used other programs such as Amazing Maths, Movie Making and Editing and other educational software to improve their basic skills in Literacy, Numeracy and ICT.

 I had many great experiences working at Study@BWFC, but one of my favourite has to be the ‘egg parachuting’ with the students, this entailed them making a device to transport an egg from the highest accessible point in the stadium (the Gantry/Main Floodlight Platform) to the pitch side. It was eggcellent!!!(This was one of Janet’s not very funny jokes that did not make anyone laugh HEE, HEE, HEE!! I was amazed at how many eggs actually survived the fall and not even a single crack after close eggsamination!

To all who work at the Study Centre and all the students I met over this time thank you for having me, it is certainly an experience I will never forget. NO EGGSAGGERATION!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers

Scott Wrath

Westhoughton High School