As part of National Careers Week, Welton Primary School held a career morning on Thursday, 9th March, inviting visitors from different career paths into the school to talk about their jobs.

The whole school got involved with assemblies and workshops from 9am through to lunchtime at 12pm. Eight visitors were welcomed into the main hall to talk about their careers and answer questions from the children.

“We always try and take part in National Careers Week and give our children a chance to find out about new careers they may not have thought about” said headteacher John Snell.

“Children have good aspirations, but not a range of aspirations. What I’m really passionate about is giving our pupils opportunities to meet new people and find out about new jobs that they wouldn’t ordinarily find out about”.

The list of attendees who spoke about their roles included an author, Just Eat copywriter, RAF Officer, submariner, banker, theatre director and a data scientist.

“For me, the excitement then is in the buzz around the school with the children being able to meet new people and think for themselves whether they’d enjoy to do a job they’ve learned about today”.

“We celebrate any job, any career, and help children recognise as part of their aspiration they can do whatever they want.”

Welton Primary School hosted their career morning with help from Primary Futures, who connect primary schools with diverse workplace volunteers to take part in activities and talk to children about their jobs.

Mr Snell explained their purpose further, “It’s an online, free resource which volunteers sign up to. We can then easily find people in our local area to come to the school. If it hadn’t been for Primary Futures, we wouldn’t have been able to do this so easily, it’s so well organised and the volunteers who come in know what to expect. I think all schools should use their resources”.

To start the day off, Welton Primary held a school assembly in the morning, playing games such as ‘guess my line’ where children had to guess careers from one clue and by asking yes/no questions.

After the assembly was over, groups of children got to meet the volunteers, who arranged activities with the children related to their careers.

John Snell said, “The RAF Officer got children making planes out of Lego and the architect encouraged them to draw their dream homes. We had really nice activities going on that the children loved.”

“Daily, we can see the impact we can have with our young people and I think it’s really important to give them the best chance to thrive in life and be the best they can be.”

“We do relate back to careers every day. We keep this conversation about careers going and encourage the children to have these conversations at home too.

“It’s not just about one day a year, we have this understanding of careers through everything we do. We talk about it through our learning, asking children what job they think skills they’re learning might be useful for”.

“The best thing about careers morning is that it teaches children that they can be whoever they want to be. For example, a few years ago, we had a pupil who saw one of our visitors on a previous careers morning who worked on the submarines and was so inspired by that, she’s now following a STEM career project through secondary school.”

“That really shows the impact we can have. That, for me, is the real power. Seeing growth in the children I think is fantastic”.