Admin, thinly veiled swipes at certain schools and jubilation.

Not a typical blog post in so much as it’s more an admin based update on what we’re up to rather than anything that will mean anything to anyone else. But – excited to once again be going into one of favourite schools to work with, Christleton High School, near Chester. When my business partner and I first set up Duart Consultants a few years back we thought we were responding to a loud call to arms by Ofsted, we genuinely believed that we were responding to a real and immediate need. We thought we had on our hands solutions to the problems that have plagued schools for too long. Little did we know we would be met with disappointing conversation after disappointing conversation, dismissed, ignored or lied to about what was happening in the schools.  Christleton though were one of our first paying school clients and we’ve been working with them ever since.

There a number of prestigious schools near them, including some very well regarded ones in Chester itself who wouldn’t even respond to phone calls or emails asking for a chat. I’ve lamented it before and will continue to do so – the institutional smugness of so many schools that feel that without even knowing what we offer aren’t prepared to even discuss it.

Which is what makes our now, and I think I can use the word unadvisedly, long standing relationship with Christleton so gratifying. We know and understand what they need and they have taken the time to know and understand what we can offer and even with the funding issues facing all schools, they have set aside what they can to import expertise for the areas they can’t do in house.

So we’re excited to be going in and spending the day with them workshopping how to sell yourself in person and on paper, covering every aspect of interviewing, the killer personal statement and CV writing.

We’ll be playing CV bingo using my metric of every lousy thing that people do in their CVs (https://edducan.blog/2017/04/25/all-filler-no-killer-the-top-5-mistakes-people-make-in-their-cvs/) and hopefully course correcting before they hand them to anyone that matters. We’ll be making self conscious adolescents practice hand-shaking and pitching themselves to others. It should be fun but more importantly precisely the kind of stuff they haven’t been told previously.

So why am I telling you this? Other than a thinly veiled swipe at all the other terrible schools who purport to teach this stuff but do it extremely badly due to a complete absence of expertise, I’m going to be pretty busy tomorrow so won’t be posting anything fresh. Not even a list.