As part of our community engagement initiative, we aim to support local communities which is why we took part in the Community and Work Experience week at The Riverside School in Bromley, an educational facility which helps provide specialist support to students with complex needs. The Community and Work Experience week enables students to develop their work-related skills and participate in a range of activities that will help them with their independent skills required for future training in a workplace and employment.
To show the students what employment options we have at Strata, we created a video that was shown to the students explaining what a job role at Strata entails. To do this we had Tracey, our Managing Director and Nathan, who is a painter and decorator and Project Supervisor for Strata explained what his job role was and set a challenge for the students showing the various painting techniques. The challenge set was a competition asking the students to put their painter and decorator caps on and create a piece of artwork with the winner’s artwork being put up in the Strata offices. The competition included the students creating a piece of artwork with canvases and stencils provided by us, with 6 students being picked for the winners and given prizes for all their hard work.
Once the students were shown the video, they were hard at work creating their pieces. Due to us providing some stencils, the students used them in various ways showing their individuality and their creativeness with some students doing their own research in the company and incorporating aspects of it in the artwork. Each individual piece was innovative and showed each of the pupil’s personality in them all. Once the Artwork was completed Tracey visited The Riverside School to see the artwork and to meet the students who created them. Tracey struggled to narrow it down just to 6 pieces as each and every one of the canvases was amazing in their own way. Once the 6 winners were chosen a member of staff went and got the students and brought them to get their prizes. The students were overjoyed once they were awarded with their prizes and congratulated by the staff at Riverside and Tracey.
The workshop was a success with the students enjoying learning about employment in Strata and participating in the competition. It was a pleasure being a part of The Riverside School’s Community and Work Experience week and we hope that the students learnt more about Strata and developed their work-related skills.
