December 16th 2024
Back to Jurassic times for Reception
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Girls Futures start here
Preparing students for the future is a key priority at Blackheath High School. We strive to furnish every student, from Nursery to Sixth Form with the key skills, knowledge and confidence they need to flourish and succeed in the world. Our Futures programme has been designed to empower girls for life beyond education, equipping them with the skills and competencies predicted by the World Economic Forum as essential for success in an ever-evolving, digitally interconnected global landscape.
GDST CareerStart
Our Futures team, led by Ms Day, are experts in sourcing outstanding opportunities to help students develop intellectual curiosity and appreciation of different careers. In September, we were delighted to host the first GDST CareerStart webinar of the academic year, with a hugely engaging and informative talk from neuroscientist, Professor Sam Wass.
Sam studied at Oxford, London, and Cambridge, and currently runs the BabyDevLab, a group of 25 researchers studying early brain development, based at the University of East London. Sam's research explores how early life stress develops, and how it influences attention and learning in typical and atypically developing children (including ADHD, ASD, anxiety and others). He appears regularly on TV and radio as an expert in child development, including as an on-screen child psychologist in five series of the multi-award-winning Channel 4 show ‘The Secret Life of 4- and 5-Year-Olds'.
Professor Wass explored the different roles of a scientist in UK, the funding landscape, university teaching, and gave some interesting examples of his own work, including writing reports for NGOs, expert consultancy for corporates, policy work for government and his media appearances. Huge thanks for such an informative talk.
The GDST CareerStart programme runs throughout the year and has a whole host of fascinating careers talks in the agenda for this year, including dentistry, criminology, pilot training, veterinary medicine, careers of the future (data science, software engineering and cyber security) and apprenticeships. [Link?]
Wollstonecraft Speaker Series
Another feature of our Futures programme is the long-standing Wollstonecraft Speaker Series, in which we invite external speakers to talk to our Sixth Form students about their careers, the pathways and overcoming challenges along the way.
Our first speaker of the year was Sara Huxley, BIFA and BAFTA nominated film & TV producer and co-owner of Mini Productions, most recently responsible for the highly acclaimed ‘Mr Bates V The Post Office’. Sara delved into the role of a producer and what it takes to work in the industry - the glamour and the challenges!
Future Wollstonecraft Speaker events will include specialist speech and language therapist, Laura Collins, of the Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust; alumna Kenya Obeng on her pioneering apprenticeship at Warner Bros; and InvestIN’s Emily Laycock on polishing interview skills and confidence.
As a recap we had some fantastic speakers from a whole range of sectors in 2023 including:
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Brian Smith Walters – opera singer & recording artist
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Dr Chinedu Agwu – Lecturer in Biosciences & BHS alumna
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Luliana Ungureanu – VP Global lead of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Learning – Goldman Sachs
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Emerald McLaughlin – BHS alumna, Durham graduate, Charityworks Graduate Programme
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Emily Laycock - InvestIN
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Rhiannon Evans – London Air Ambulance
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Nicola Hill – Head of Regulatory Team – Lawyer
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Dr Svetlana Smirnova – UK Research Lead at JP Morgan
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Mr Delukshan Srikantharajah – Consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon
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Helen Brent Cooper – South African theatre maker, entrepreneur and artist
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Helen O’Hara – Empire film journalist and author
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Hannah Giles – BHS alumn – speaking about life at university
Supporting our expert careers talks...
If you would like to offer your expertise in either our GDST CareerStart programme or our Blackheath High Wollstonecraft Speaker Series please get in touch with our Head of Futures, Ms Day.
GDST Lead at the London School of Economics
GDST Lead is an innovative programme designed to allow young women to develop the transferable skills necessary to become future leaders and entrepreneurs. As Blackheath High takes part for the first time in 2024, Year 12 student Isabella tells us about the experience.
My group of six Year 12 students was really excited to be chosen to represent Blackheath High for the first time in the GDST Lead Programme.
The 2024/5 launch event was hosted at the London School of Economics and I found it very insightful to spend the day in a university environment, surrounded by undergrad students. We began the day by meeting girls from the 22 other GDST schools taking part in the programme and attending a welcome talk which outlined what the year ahead would look like. We heard from keynote speaker, Fleur Emery-Rice, a successful female entrepreneur and GDST alumna from Portsmouth High School. Fleur spoke about the importance of having ideas and always being curious, which resonated with us all.
This was followed by two workshops, the first of which was hosted by two women from the company ‘Hoopla!’, who showed us how to use improvisation exercises to practice actively listening to understand your peers, and to practice backing what we say and having confidence in our contributions to discussions. The second workshop was hosted by Nikita Khandwala – writer, entrepreneur & futureproofer - who led a conversation about social enterprises. Nikita introduced design thinking principles and encouraged us to think about the root of problems we want to solve - not just the surface level issue. 
At the end the day we met our mentor Dr Paroma Bhattacharya who is very experienced and a Doctor of Economics at the LSE. She will be giving us additional guidance throughout year. During our conversation with Dr Paroma, she helped us structure our thoughts and initial concepts and gave us advice on what our next steps should be. We really enjoyed the day and left the event feeling very positive and ready to develop our ideas even further.
Written by Isabella, Year 12, Sixth Form
More about our Futures programme
Find out more about our whole school Futures programme.
