Hear from Kelly Porter, the Careers Lead at Bower Park Academy about how Morrisby enables and guides meaningful career interview discussions.
Kelly Porter, Careers Lead at Bower Park, explains how she's embedded Morrisby into the student and parent community to raise aspirations.
"We were looking for a student facing platform, that students were able to monitor track, and look at their careers journey. We wanted to, have a way that we could record it, that we could see the activities that we were doing, but also that students could check in, log their own activities and see what they've done previously, across the 5 years.
There is the option for the students to allow their parents to access their Morrisby account, and I want all the parents to know that is an option so that we can involve them a little bit more in Morrisby.
I think students engage really well with it. There are a number of students who have liked numerous careers and pathways and have a good idea of how they can use that aspiration survey.
Our Careers Adviser who works across the Trust uses Morrisby. She reads their Profiles in advance, and then he's able to obviously give advice and have a better starting point.
Morrisby is really useful for helping us track the Gatsby Benchmarks. Every activity and every activity that we add ourselves allows you to put the benchmark that you're looking at, you can then pinpoint each individual student as to which benchmark they're covered, maybe which areas they're lacking in, and then we can look at evaluating our program to include those for those year groups or those individual.
We were Ofstedded recently, which was quite challenging. We had a 40-minute deep dive into our careers program with the offset inspector and had to obviously account for it as we did. Having Morrisby, as our tracker being able to show and pinpoint all students and which youth groups had and year groups had taken part, it ensured that we showed that we'd met our provider access, ensured that we had, met each of the benchmarks and showed how we've done so it was really good to have there. And we felt confident being able to present what we offer whilst using it.
In our local area, we have a larger than average number of disadvantaged students, our people premium is above the national average. And sometimes raising aspirations can be quite challenging. I think that particularly with the aspiration survey, making students at an early age aware of jobs that they didn't know assisted and routes into them that don't necessarily require degrees - looking at apprenticeships, looking at vocational qualifications that they can earn and traineeships, etc.
I think that that's been really useful in showing our children that there is a different way and there are lots of different routes into an aspirational and higher level future.
The one thing I love about Morrisby is the thing I love about career education in general is that it can spark and ignite an interest in young people, and ultimately that's what my job is and that's what I'm trying to do.
So if you can support with that, I think that's wonderful."