Wider Key Skills at Thornleigh Salesian College

Thornleigh Salesian College is a large comprehensive school in Bolton with over 1400 pupils attending. Within the schools mission statement the purpose is to ‘respond to the needs of each individual child, touching the heart and developing the whole personality’. For the first time the school has started delivering ‘The Wider Key Skills’ with great effect and the flexibility of the programme allows the development of this mission statement in the activities and the process of meeting the Key Skills. ‘The Wider Key Skills’ is delivered to a small group of students in year 10 who spend one full day a week engaging in a variety of activities to gain their qualifications.

The flexibility of the programme has allowed students to take on challenges that are catered to their needs allowing them to improve their life skills and improve their confidence as they follow the programme. The group has recently taken part in two group projects to fulfil the criteria related to ‘Working With Others’. Firstly they decided to fill shoe boxes for the Ukraine, collecting all the contents themselves from staff and other pupils and writing to local shops to collect empty shoe boxes for the project. Secondly, with the recent plight of the earthquake in Haiti they decided to run a soup kitchen and raise funds for one of the Salesians schools with which Thornleigh has close links to in Haiti.

The process that the pupils underwent to make these projects work has been invaluable to the students involved. Their planning skills have developed immensely as well as their confidence and self esteem as they had to link in with lots of staff to complete surveys of favourite soups, collecting raffle prizes and making posters and sending invitations for the soup Kitchen. On the day of the event the pupils made the soup from scratch and appropriately decorated the HT rooms to receive the 63 staff that turned up. The 4 weeks build up to this event and the process of working with the other pupils and ensuring they have met their individual tasks made the pupils excited but also nervous as they had taken on so much responsibility. The reaction of the staff had been phenomenal in encouraging them and making them feel so important, not just for the day, but for weeks afterwards.

The students will remember this event for the rest of their lives. The most important thing is that they have learnt how to be an effective team and how to encourage each other even when things go wrong. The soup kitchen served a dual purpose, to raise money for Haiti and to allow pupils to work together, but most importantly to understand the dynamics of working together.