Nneka: Hi my name is Nneka and I’m the Career Adviser in the Learning and Careers team and I’m joined here today by our accounts manager at Springpod to talk about the virtual work experience programme. would you like to introduce yourself please?
Calum: Yes, thanks Neka. Thanks for having me. My name is Calum Longshaw. I’m one of the strategic account managers here in Springpod and I’ve been working alongside Neka and the team in the creation of the UK Parliament virtual work experience which I’m really excited to go into more depth about what we do and the experience itself.
Nneka: Brilliant, thank you so much Calum for joining me. I’m going to be asking Calum a few questions just about who Springpod is, a bit about the programme, and where we’re at and what’s the progress of the programme so far. So my first question is and people might not know, who is Springpod so it’d be interesting to know a bit more about that and how do you guys help students?
Calum: Yeah of course. So we’re an experiential learning platform. What we do is bridge the gap between, students, employers like yourselves and universities. We ultimately want to try and connect students with industry professionals and educational institutions as well the virtual learning experiences, which can be complied of video led content. The webinars can be mentoring platforms all into one experience itself. I think the end goal , what we want students to get to is a point where they have a guide to successful through utilising the tools and connections that we have and provided that potentially they didn’t have previously.
Nneka: Thanks Calum. My second question is who is a part of the Springpod network?
Calum: Good. A really good question. I think over the last 2 years, we’ve grown a lot to a point now where we have over 600,000 students that are on our network. As well as students we also have thousands of teachers from partner schools and colleges. We also have young organisations like D-W-P youth hubs that we partner with. And this broad network ultimately, it’s going to allow us, and does allow us to reach a diverse group of students that you can see on the screen in front of you.
Nneka: for those who don’t know, would you mind just outlining what the programme is, please?
Calum: Definitely. The programme that we’ve created with UK Parliament, it’s called Pathway to Pathway and it’s an on-demand experience that we’ve made available for students aged 14 to 18 all across the UK. And the most important part about it being on demand, it allows them to participate at their own pace all the way up to October 6th which is really good in terms of accessibility and for different learning styles as well as, so that students that may need a bit longer can take longer go through the full programme. The programme itself covers a range of topics. So we look at topics obviously that are related to Parliament. Um these include looking at roles in House of Commons but also looking parliamentary digital service, for example.
Nneka: great thank you. And that’s why we were so keen on this programme because we wanted to make sure it was accessible to young people across the UK. So very excited about this. Next question is, what activities are included in the programme?
Calum: yeah, so we’ve got a number of activities in the programme we tend to, across all of our programmes try to flesh it out with as many immersive activities as possible. And that, as I said, is no different for UK Parliament. Um one of the activities for example is creating a social media post, for recruitment drive, which is to encourage young people to become parliamentary reporters, even on the flip side and something that’s quite far away from that. Students could also go and do a task and an activity around drafting an instant report. As a Parliamentary security officer, what we want to do is try and bring the learning to life and not have student just reading through text actually give them something tangible to go off and do this related to those career pathways that potentially they might, you know, see themselves in the future.
Nneka: Yeah most definitely. And I think it’s great that it’s able to stimulate the brains of young people as well and allow them to understand what it’s like working in the real world. So yeah really exciting. My next question is who’s been participating and what’s been the impact so far?
Calum: Yeah and I think this is the, I get asked this a lot from different partners and its always the part that I really enjoy talking about because we spent so long going through the programming, the creation process, but when we come to something like UK Parliament where we’ve been in it for two months and we’re at a stage now where amazingly we have 3,000 students that have taken part , I mean, it makes it all worth it in the end. And just to put that into perspective as well, like 3000 students is a hell of a lot and it’s actually the equivalent of 10 standard classroom. So I imagine for you Neka , if you were to try and organise some school visits, it’ll probably take a while to reach 100 standard classrooms and potentially of resources and time from an early careers department to maybe organise things like that. It’s really good to see. And then the make up of that as well, we’ve got 56% that are female, 60% of them come from minority ethnic backgrounds as well. We also do pre and post surveys in terms of a few different impact stats, one of them being students awareness and as you can see on the stats on the screen at the moment, 750% increase from students who rated their career awareness as excellent before to then excellent after the programme which shows the impact that it’s having on students that have already taken part.
Nneka: Amazing. And the numbers, as you said, speak for themselves , just how successful the programme’s been so far. So my last question to do is why should students get involved?
Calum: To be honest, think its probably the most important question. I think there’s a few different rungs to it as well. I think, you know, if you’re a student who obviously has an interest in potentially in politics or parliamentary careers definitely, you know, it’s an experience that you should be engaging with. But even if you’re a student who, you know, potentially doesn’t know what you want to do yet, I think there’s such variety within the programme in terms of different activities and career pathways that are discussed that I think it could be suitable for, for many students that are on our platform already. So I would encourage everybody, even if they’ve not necessarily considered politics or parliamentary careers to engage. I think as well it’s probably important to talk about the accessibility. The content is available in many different formats throughout, so whether that be written and video or interactive activities to try and match as many different learning styles as our students have. Its also compatible with all screen readers as well. You know the programme is fully accessible which I think is important to know. I think my last point on it would be and I think it’s something that, you know, if I wish I’d had access to at that age would be potential sort of stepping stone that it gives to students to in-person opportunities. That may not be, you know, specifically in UK Parliament, but in general. And also you know it’s giving it to people that may have not received those opportunities prior or maybe before. So keeping it equitable and making sure that those opportunities go to the right candidates. I think that’s everything from me.
Nneka: Great. Thank you Calum. I think it’s an amazing opportunity and for those who want to get into politics and those who want to know more about careers in Parliament, I think it’s an incredible opportunity. There are so many other things besides politics that we do here in House of commons and parliamentary digital services. So I would definitely recommend enrolling the programme on the 6th of October. so for those who know a 14 to 18 year old interested in this programme please reach out to me and I can show you how to enrol onto the programme. Thank you.
Calum: Thank you so much.