Nature Based Work Experience for Workplace Skills

We offer work experience for groups of six year 10 or year 12 students. Details of a typical week are below. Please contact kim@oxfordearthacademy.org to enquire.

Learning outdoors builds many of the skills that employers are looking for such as teamwork, communication skills, problem solving and resilience. We give students a professional, fun, experience, focusing on developing these skills, while teaching them about how what they do at school can lead them to a career solving some of the world’s most challenging problems.

OEA Work Experience Weeks: Key features

• Students do 4 hours per day for 3 days in a week (ideally Monday, Weds and Friday), and 2 days working from home. Hours are 10 – 2 or 11 – 3, including a half hour lunch break. With the additional cognitive effort of getting to a new place and coping with the new environment and people, this is enough time.

• We have been doing Mondays and Fridays at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Wednesday at a local farm or nature reserves.

• We provide some student friendly information on the opportunity, and the students apply with a paragraph explaining their interest. The school may select or help select the students if needed.

• The week is designed so that the students have the opportunity to contribute something useful, such as a teenage perspective on an issue, or some marketing slides for future groups.

• The focus is on helping them develop skills around workplace behaviour, confidence, collaboration and effective communication, as well as learning something about a particular sector.

• Students are given a document explaining where to go, dress code, an outline of what to expect, and a contact in case of difficulty.

• Their OEA Mentor models friendly workplace behaviour, and treats the students as individuals with respect and as inexperienced adults rather than children e.g. shaking hands, making eye contact, being friendly and welcoming.

Example schedule

Day 1:

1.       Mentor meets the students, welcomes them, learns their names, and helps them relax.

2.       Mentor gives a brief introduction to what the week will entail. We are aware that students may feel overwhelmed and won’t be able to absorb much information at this point. We take it slowly and repeat as needed.

3.       Mentor runs an induction explaining appropriate and effective approaches to working in a professional environment, making it conversational, asking them about any work experience they have had already. We include DofE, volunteering, helping at school etc. We aim to draw out the skills they have developed in doing this.

4.       Students have lunch. Mentor leaves them alone for 30 minutes with instructions about what to do in an emergency.

5.       Students are given their task for the Tuesday – e.g. to create a presentation on a topic related to the activity on Wednesday. Students do one slide each on a different aspect. One student volunteers to take the role of project manager and editor to bring it all together. The students will present their presentation on the Wednesday morning. The mentor suggests some sources of information e.g. industry websites. If this is done before a site tour it gives some focus for a tour.

6.       Students have a tour of the site/area. From the OUMNH we go to University Parks and the meadows on the other side of the river to discuss nature recovery. We recognise that students may be shy about asking questions on day 1, but we encouraged them to do so, praise them if they do, but not criticized if they don’t.

Day 2:

1.       Mentor runs a conference call at 10am with the students on Google Meet (as that is the system they are most likely to be used to) or other platform, to ensure they understand the task for the day, and are feeling confidence to do it.

2.       Students work together either at school or online.

3.       Students can email questions during the day before noon, and the mentor will aim to answer before 1pm.

4.       Mentor checks in with them online at 2pm to see if they have any questions. Mentor should not pressure them or worry if the work is done or not. They can learn to take responsibility. Failure is learning!

Day 3:

1.       Students arrive on site in time for a 10am start. Mentor meets them and welcomes them. The students should be feeling more confident by now.

2.       Students are helped to set up for their presentation. Students present what they have done to their mentor and ideally another staff member. It’s done fairly informally, with support on presentation skills. Mentor and staff member gives feedback on the positives, and some suggestions.

5.       Students experiences something of what the organisation does, in as practical a way as possible. This might be soil sampling, or invertebrate sampling on a farm.

6.       Students are given a task for Day 4. This will be creating another presentation on what the company does, it’s environmental issues and what it is doing about them. One slide per students, and one manager/editor (a different one to the previous time).

Day 4:

1.       Students work from home or school as a team. No check ins from the mentor but they are available to answer emails if needed.

Day 5:

1.       Students do their second presentation back to the mentor and ideally someone else from the organisation and have a discussion about the issues they looked at and give their views on how to present this to a teenage audience. The mentor aims to get useful information on how to reach a teenage audience so that the students are contributing something of value.

2.       Mentor runs a debrief against the issues covered in the induction. Students have time to do their own review of how they did. This has their names on it and the mentor takes a copy to use for feedback to the school.

3.       Students then they give feedback on their work experience week anonymously – using What Went Well and Even Better If. If this is in their own words it can be more useful than box ticking.

4.       We do something fun and relaxed to finish with.

“Dearest Kim,

 Thank you for the opportunities you gave us for the MAD [Larkmead School's Work Experience] week, we thoroughly enjoyed each day. The experience was amazing, and we all agree we would do it again in a heartbeat, as the time we spent with both you and Tinker was awesome, educational, and above all fun.

I know that we love Tinker [the dog] and were very vocal about it during the week, but it also extends to you, thank you so much for being a such an incredible guide, the snacks and the food were delicious, and the activities we did were calm and relaxing especially under the forest setting. 

The staff and scientists there were super nice, and it was great opportunity to meet them, and it has persuaded some of us to look for a career similar to the ones at Wytham Woods.

 We particularly enjoyed the session at the end of Tuesday with the microscopes, Infra-red, and 3D scanners. Playing around with the new technology was incredible and a welcome change to our school’s tech which only works once a blue moon. We hope your research goes amazingly in the future and thank you so much for everything.

Lara, Flo, Archie, Stefan and Elliot”