In the past week there has been two open events where the college opened up for perspective student to look around the college and talk to teachers about the curriculum, entry requirements, career paths and support in the classroom. My class was asked for volunteers to help the teachers when the numbers were high and to provide insight into what its like on the course and in the college. I volunteered as I part of what I want to achieve in my life is to help people with issues similar to me. I saw a way to do this in helping with the open days as there would be young people looking round with extra needs and it was important to me that they knew I enjoyed learning in the environment.

On the first open event on Thursday evening, I got to the room where the digital department set up and helped fold tables and chairs away to create enough space for all the expected people, then I was asked to lay out posters and flyers detailing course progression and course details. I was told to not put out the flyers in a neat pile as that leads people to not want to disturb the pile, I was told to lay them out in a disorganised fashion in lots of places. At 15:30 when the event started there was a large number of young people and families that were interested in the digital courses. I had been told that those looking round this early in the academic year tended to be keen. I met a young man and his parents who was in year 11 who wanted to know about my course, I teamed up with the course lead John and gave him a rundown about the course and what learning was like on the course was like. It was clear from my brief conversation with him that this young man had special educational needs and provided him with some personal experiences that I believe helped put him at ease at the thought of going to a large college. John also told him about how classroom support is universal as that he has been found to give the best support for all without singling out an individual with extra needs and for helping those that slip through the cracks of the system. After this young man left a pair of young men in school uniform had come in a were looking at work that I had done in my previous year for Level 2. They spoke that they were interested in the level 1 course and I gave them information about that but when I was done I asked them what grades they were expecting and one said 6-8 in his chosen GCSEs and the other said he didn’t anticipate good grade, so I asked him if he did anything digitally creative or coding for fun and he said he made environments for Microsoft Flight Simulator. At this point I called John over to ensure I was giving them the correct information as I believed that even without good grades I felt this guy could get onto the level 2 if he showed off what he created for Microsoft Flight Simulator and John agreed that if he took screenshots and explained his process for designing the environments to be put into a portfolio to show off at his interview he stood a chance at getting onto the level 2. I had to leave the Thursday open event early due to prior commitments but promised to return to help on the Saturday morning open event.

I arrived early on Saturday to make sure everything was set up but arrived to a fully set up room as the teachers had set up the night before. I had noticed that the T-Level students all had t-shirts and asked one of the teachers Sylvianne where they had got them from. She told me she had made them herself using a heat press. She then very kindly offered to make me a Games Dev t-shirt which I wore for the Saturday morning open event. Saturday felt different to the Thursday as we had a couple more people coming in that had only minor interest in the digital department. There was a mother and son that came in asking if two courses could be done in parallel and I was saved by Will another teacher in the digital department. He explained in length that doing two courses in parallel would be too much as well as that due to both courses being full time the young person may have double booked lessons on his timetable. Eventually Will was able to get his point across but the mother wasn’t best pleased. Another mother and son came in later asking Will about the T-Levels and I recognised the mother and realised that she was a teacher that had taught be at my last placement before she had left. It turned out she had spotted me too and we had a quick catch up before she moved on. There was a father and son that came in that I greeted and was immediately told by the father that wanted his son on a level 3 course despite the fact that he wasn’t expecting to get the required grades. I tried to advise that his son might need to do the level 2 course first to get into the level 3 course but he wasn’t able to accept this coming from a student but fortunately I was rescued by John who manged to get the point across. I took a small break at this point and spoke to Adam a Level 1 student who was also helping. The amount of visitors was very low at this point allowing me a decent break. Eventually another teacher Kay called me over to talk to a young man about my experience as a learner with extra needs and I again was able to help him and told him a lot of useful information about learning at the college and told him that the college offered a lot of extra support and I guided him to where student support was set up and leave them with someone that could help him with the process of getting the support he would need. At 12:30 when the last visitors had gone we cleaned up and set the rooms back to how they were meant to be.

I was a very positive experience overall and was really rewarding to help people that were in my position two years ago