What can you offer them?
There are a number of routes by which business can help schools and colleges to their mutual benefit. The EBPs will be your guide through them, explaining how they work and what the opportunities are – and translating the schools’ needs to business and vice versa. They will help with the administrative difficulties such as police checks. They will have a range of explanatory material.
The keys to establishing a successful partnership are sponsorship, materials and people.
- Sponsorship is the simplest form of support for schools. In the right context companies can promote their name by sponsoring specific items, events or teams.
- Schools appreciate the provision of materials for classroom use, which might (again depending on context) include access to actual invoices, memos, and profit and loss accounts to support relevant curriculum work in, for example, business studies, science and maths.
- Involving people could be through work experience, mentoring, professional development placements (formerly teacher placements), school governorship and curriculum projects.
Whilst the National Curriculum itself does not include specific maritime sector aspects, a useful online database developed through SeaBritain 2005 is available at http://www.seabritain2005.com/curriculum/. This shows the areas of the national curriculum of most relevance to the maritime sector.
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