The CareerStart programme was introduced to the Girls’ Day School Trust schools in September 2003 and has proved most successful.

CareerStart is offered as part of the larger Minerva “entitlement” to GDST students effectively “free at the point of delivery”, and remains the best programme of its kind in the UK independent or state sector.

In order to retain this competitive advantage and to respond to feedback, CareerStart has now been reviewed and updated. These web pages show you what has been done and what you need to do now to get the best out of the CareerStart programme for your school.

What we have done

The biggest change is to increase the flexibility available to schools. You can work with the GDST team to ensure you get the training you want by:

1. Delivery options:  Training can be now delivered at the beginning or end of the school day in blocks of two hours or combined into whole day CareerStart conference programmes;
2. Venue: You can continue to have your training on site at your school or at GDST office. We will be planning a series of special events to be held at both Trust Office and other London venues over the coming year and we will send you information on these separately.
3. Greater tailoring of the training to the audience: Different practical exercises can be used depending on whether the skills learned are to be used in school, work or university. In addition, workshops themselves can be changed to suit your needs by adding or removing the individual modules that make them up and combining modules from different workshops. To facilitate this customisation you will see that each workshop has been divided into modules with timings against each module.
4. Wider audiences: Much of the material on offer is available to pupils in Years 10 and 11 as well as Years 12 and 13;
5. Speaker bureau: We have now set up a dedicated CareerStart speaker bureau where we can call on successful women from GDST schools who have agreed to participate as speakers at our larger training events; they will be excellent role models for the students and will add a special dynamic to the CareerStart programmes.
6. Costs: The main core of the workshop programme will continue to be free of charge at school level. As a result of discussions with you we feel that a fee can be charged for workshops held at the GDST office and for some (optional) modules such as aptitude testing. The allocation to each school consists of 4 individual 2-hour workshops as before, or one tailored full-day CareerStart day delivered in conference format.  If you would like more programmes we are happy to tailor and deliver these at your own cost.

In addition, individual workshops have been updated in response to feedback from participants, teachers and trainers.

Three new workshops have been added:

• Independent Learning
• Self-confidence, Image and Impact
• Facilitation & Mentoring skills (for teaching staff)

 TRAINING WORKSHOP FOR STAFF >> Facilitation