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Cornwall Summer Schools

116 Year 8 and Year 10 students from Aimhigher target schools attended a series of vocational summer schools at Cornwall College and Truro College this summer.

Cornwall College St Austell

19 gifted and talented students came along to an ICT in Construction and Engineering Summer School based at St Austell.

The purpose of the week was to show how ICT can be applied in these two industries.  Activities included a visit to The Eden Project to see how ICT is used in organisations, and a ‘Formula 1 Challenge’. The latter involved seeing how CAD can be used to design and produce Formula 1 vehicles, which then raced along a superb race track in a nail-biting competition.

Falmouth Marine School

Meanwhile, over at Falmouth Marine School, 37 students developed their engineering prowess by designing and building bridges and cranes from a few basic materials such as paper and yards of sellotape! The final competition took place at the Falmouth Maritime Museum - which provided a fitting backdrop, and plenty of clues on design, with Falmouth Docks. The challenge was to design and build a crane which could lift weights across a dangerous river obstacle.

Cornwall College Camborne

15 students attended the Tourism Summer School on the Camborne campus. The students got a real taste of what it would be like to work in various jobs within the tourism industry. On the first day they visited Voyagers, the college travel agency, and found themselves giving a full safety drill to fellow students in the aircraft customer training facility! They were lucky enough to visit Pendennis Castle, Falmouth Docks and Newquay Zoo. On the final day students prepared a display on careers in tourism to take back to their school. A prize of £250, to be spent on a tourism related resource, was given to the school with the best display, Helston were the hard working winners.

Duchy Stoke Climsland

Duchy College invited 15 year 8 students to engage in some fun interactive sessions in Food and Drink Technology. The enthusiastic group visited Dairy Crest at Davidstow to see how cheese is made and hear about the range of job roles within the company. They then invaded the training kitchens at St Austell to make sausages, burgers and bread for their barbecue at Duchy College the following day. The students enjoyed their food experiments based around ‘Plough to Plate’ and ‘Farm to Fork’.

Truo College

30 students went along to ‘The Sky’s the Limit’ Summer School at Truro College.  Three subject areas were covered – Working with Children and Young People, Health and Social Care and the Environment.  A really interesting range of activities had been devised for each subject to give participants a real understanding of what work within these areas would mean.  Working with Children provided workshops such as Creativity with Young Children and Playwork.  Meanwhile, Health and Social Care included workshops on Occupational Therapy and Speech and Language Therapy, and Working with Older Adults. The Environment workshops included information about Working in Nature Reserves in Cornwall, and a talk from Andy Cummins, of Surfers Against Sewage, on Making Changes Happen. The Summer School ended on a high note with all participants – and student ambassadors – receiving attendance certificates from Bob McCreadie of Pirate FM radio (assisted by dog Phoebe).