The Flagpole

At Princethorpe College we believe that Work Experience is a vital part of any young person’s journey, and it has long been a part of our Careers Programme. A good work experience can provide a huge insight into an area of work, but it can also develop skills such as communication, self-confidence, initiative and teamwork.

We expect all of our students to complete at least one work experience placement of around a week, but they can, if they wish, undertake more than one placement or placements of longer duration. These placements can take place during any of the school holidays.

We understand that, owing to the impact of Covid, the opportunities for work experience have been severely compromised and therefore we are especially encouraging students in Sixth Form to complete work experience if they haven’t already done so. This can help enormously with university and careers planning over the next couple of years.

Normally, students are expected to find their own placement(s) through friends, family or through other initiatives; once a placement has been found then the information will need to be added to our Placements Portal.

If any parents are able to offer a work experience placement to any of our students then do please email me.

We are using Unifrog (www.unifrog.org) to manage the administration of the work experience programme – for example collecting information from the employer about their Risk Assessment and Health & Safety policy, as well as getting agreement from yourselves for the placement to go ahead.

Some important logistics:

Students need to agree the placement with the employer first, and then students will get the ball rolling by adding the placement to their Unifrog account (they’ll find the Placements tool on their Unifrog homepage). Please choose my name as the school contact from the drop down list.

The Unifrog system will then email the employer, the parent/guardian, and the school, to collect the necessary information and permissions. For the process to work, it’s essential that students add the initial information about the placement accurately.

If students have forgotten their Unifrog login details then they should use their school email address and click the forgotten password link.

Finding out more:

Unifrog have created a set of guides about placements which you can find here.

Within this set of guides, this is the best one to start with (it includes a short animation of how the whole process works).

Some pupils, might prefer to start with a virtual work experience placement and these too, can be very valuable in giving insight into a particular career sector. These still need to be entered on the Unifrog Placements tool as this will provide a record of what work experience has been completed. There are a great number of these placements available through the following link:

https://www.springpod.com/virtual-work-experience

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any queries. My email address is jacquiquinney@princethorpe.co.uk. 

Jacqui Quinney
Head of Careers