Our Year 7 Leadership Day plays an important role in our overall aim to develop the leadership skills of our children. From this fun event, not only do the children walk away with new found skills and a sense of achievement, but it also helps us track each child's progress, highlighting where we need to give support and encouragement to develop specific skills to the next level.
Year 7 were divided into a series of carefully crafted groups. They were set 6 different, fun yet demanding group activities that needed cooperation to succeed! To give you a flavour of the tasks, one team was faced with a 3D challenge to pick up a series of buckets from a small area using a grabber suspended from above. The group had to work together: participants on the various axes fed back information to the person controlling the grabber to ensure they could quickly collect all the buckets!
In another, pupils were human chess pieces and had to work out which squares on the board were ‘safe’. Via trial and error, they could find the answers, but this took a ‘can do’ attitude and resilience as one wrong step resulted in 2 minutes in the ‘sin bin’! During each activity, they did their best, planning and coordinating to bring success to the team. At the end of each activity, we gave them feedback and rewarded team members for brilliance in any aspect of leadership with a marble for their team pot, as well as marbles for completing the challenge in the shortest possible time.
In a last fun twist, the winning team’s marbles were sent down a pipe, tipping a bucket that set off a rocket! A fantastic end to the morning.
The afternoon’s challenge was to solve a 3D geometric puzzle. It took teams up to 30 minutes to work it out and finish building the shape. After dismantling it, they had 3 chances to practice and perfect building it. This again took skills in organising each other, coordinating themselves and their actions, and of course it challenged them to memorise the steps in the most efficient way. The winning team completed the puzzle in the final showdown in a stunning 30 seconds!
Every pupil learned new skills during the leadership day, including cooperation, communicating well, learning from mistakes, persevering and how to break down challenges into manageable chunks.
Leadership training sits within the framework of our sector-leading wellbeing programme.
