In her eighth blog, Emily continues to write about her placement as she starts the new calendar year:
The run up to Christmas was exciting, hectic and a very interesting part of the academic year! We had many different things happening throughout our academies to mark the festive season. One thing I particularly enjoyed was creating Santa stockings for the Trust Student Leadership Group and seeing the look on the students faces when they were given these presents on the last day of term.
As you can imagine, closing the academies for 2 weeks over the Christmas period means it is extremely busy before breaking up, including ensuring all reports are done in time and all meetings for the first week back are planned correctly.
Prior to breaking up for the holidays, I was working on various projects including school improvement and the new Catering Procurement tender. As Project Manager for the Catering Provision tender, I have worked with an external Catering consultant to schedule and plan the presentations to the Trust from the companies who are at the final stages of their applications to provide this service to our academies.
The presentations are to be given to a panel which includes myself, the Academy Business Managers, Executive Principal, a member of the Board of Directors and the three Principals. Being such a big part of this process has been extremely interesting and beneficial for my education and growth - from originally starting with 11 companies who placed a bid to be considered and then shortlisting down to a final three companies who will be making presentations shortly.
I am enjoying my involvement in projects around the growth of our academies. The improvements which are taking place across all three of our schools are creating a much higher demand for places, especially at our Leeds East Academy. I am finding this extremely exciting to see the different ways in which the Academy and the Trust will work with various people to meet these demands for places.
It is currently the second week of 2019 and I am extremely excited to learn about lots of new projects which are being allocated to me, I will provide you with details of these in my next blog. I only have 4 and a half months left of my placement, 8 months has flown by! I am already feeling sad about coming closer to the end of my experience with the Trust.