Year 6 became budding entrepreneurs during their visit to St Mary's Senior School

The transition from Junior School to Senior School can be an exciting yet daunting time. While many of our Year 6 students are already familiar with the Senior School, for some even the short journey from Chaucer Road to Bateman Street represents a major milestone. As one of our measures to ensure that the girls’ transition is successful, we held a Careers Transition Morning on Wednesday 27 September, inviting all Year 6 students from the Junior School.

The morning, organised by Head of Careers, Mrs Mead, provides an opportunity for students to experience the school and its facilities to help them feel comfortable and excited about the move up to the upper school. With these next steps in mind, this event also provides an early opportunity to begin considering careers and transferable skills, through fun, future-orientated activities.

To introduce the event, Mrs Mead asked the students to suggest careers that they would like to do when they are older and the girls showed creativity and ambition. Some of their responses included doctor, vet, lawyer, astronomer, engineer, computer coder, architect and musician. Thoughts of these potential goals helped to inspire excitement for their futures and the journey towards them, before focusing on the careers session of the morning – making granola with an entrepreneurial twist.

The girls attended three workshops, designed to explore the full process of creating a product, from making and marketing to packaging and pricing. In one session, led by Jaspreet Kaur, they discussed how to position, market and brand their granola. Drawing their logos, the girls considered their target audience and how best to capture their imagination. The girls considered how to diversify the business in the future and how to reach a global market.

In their packaging design session, led by Mrs Kakengi, the girls decided on their packaging for their granola by following their business plan. With the full process in mind, the girls set to work, while brainstorming their brand’s name: 'Go Granola', 'Koala Granola' and 'Granola Wola' were just a few of their suggestions.

In the Food Room, the girls created their product, instructed by Mrs Landshoff. With their trays in the oven and the delicious smell of baking granola the girls chose extra toppings to individualise their product. One of the students even called this workshop ‘the most fun I’ve had in ages’.

The Year 6 students loved their time at the Senior School. At lunch, they each summarised their experience with one word, describing the day as ‘amazing’, ‘exciting’, ‘fun’, ‘creative’, ‘inspiring’, ‘fascinating’ and ‘intriguing’. In the girls’ own words, they now 'can’t wait to come to Senior School’, while another said that after the sessions:

‘I feel I know more about business and enjoyed working independently’.

We look forward to welcoming the girls to Year 7 next September, and hope that they take the learning points from their first careers session with them as they take their next steps at St Mary’s School.

See a gallery of pictures from the day.