In her seventh blog, Emily continues to write about her placement as she starts the new academic year:
The eight week first half of Term One is complete and we have now begun the second half of the term! I cannot believe how quickly time goes by when you work in a school. The eight weeks have been amazing but I have really grown during the last two weeks of the term. I now have support from an Apprentice who has recently joined the Trust Team and for whom I am acting as Line Manager, which is great additional experience that I did not expect to be getting from my placement.
The responsibility I am being given to have a Line Management role in addition to overseeing many different projects, makes me realise how lucky I am to have this placement opportunity within the White Rose Academies Trust.
Before the half term break, I carried out various different tasks which included helping with the recruitment campaign for the Trust Chief Financial Officer role and creating shortlisting packs to be handed out to the Interview panel.
"The responsibility I am being given to have a Line Management role in addition to overseeing many different projects, makes me realise how lucky I am to have this placement opportunity within the White Rose Academies Trust."
The interviews took place on the first week back after half term with various different meetings and tasks being completed by the candidates. Another task I did before the end of the half term was presenting to the Trust Student Leadership Group, which is something I have never done before. Along with the Trust Business Officer and the Digital Communications and Content Officer, we created a presentation based on the different trips that this group will be enjoying over the next academic year. We also discussed the plans for their trip to WE Day in London (ie train, hotel, restaurants) which we will be going to in March 2019. We provided the group with A3 paper to give us their ideas of other things they might like to do/see whilst in London. Being given the opportunity to present to a group of students was very useful for me as I was able to build on my confidence and presentation skills.
On the last week of the first half term, we also had visits from different Catering companies from around Leeds who are included in a tender for the whole school catering facility across all three academies. These companies were shortlisted by myself and the rest of the Catering steering panel.
My role in this project visit was to ensure we had DBS evidence from everyone attending the visits, this involved communicating with each of the external companies; I was then based at our Leeds East Academy on the first day of the visits where I greeted visitors from each company and guided them to the meeting room. The next stage for the new catering provision will be to receive bids from the following companies and then re shortlist for the final interview stage.
During half term the academies are very quiet. However, I put this to good use and spent some time organising my work load and ensuring everything was ready to return for the second half of Term One. Can you believe we are already in the second week of the second half of Term One?
