Jul 15 - Bayside Students Learn Transferrable Skills With New CoPE Course
A growing number of students at Bayside Comprehensive are taking a course which includes practical skills like conducting a professional phone conversation and letter drafting. The Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE, for short) is offered by the ASDAN examining body and has already been taken by over fifty students in the past two years.
We spoke to Melba Noguera, Deputy Head (Academic) at Bayside, to find out more about it.
“It’s not necessarily a course for the less academic students; it’s a course that assesses things that might not traditionally be deemed academic like research skills, problem solving and an ability to work with others,” she explains.
In an increasingly competitive world, the CoPE course offers students the opportunity to develop a set of skills which can come in handy both during further studies and when entering the world of work.
Mrs Noguera continues: "Universities are saying that when they receive students who have gained a personal development qualification they see that the students are better equipped to deal with the various challenges of academic work."
The academic credentials of the certificate are clear: a level 1 certificate is equivalent to a D grade GCSE, a level 2 certificate is equivalent to a B, and a Level 3 gives the student 70 UCAS points.
One challenge for the team in Bayside, composed of Julian Guilliano (Special Educational Needs Coordinator: SENCo) Louise Linares, Chrissie Caetano and the Learning Support Assistants is to raise awareness within the business community of the value of the certificate.
Mr Guilliano explains: “We want this course to gain currency, to ensure that it has some credibility in the wider world otherwise its use ends when school ends. The skills the students are gaining are transferrable to the workplace.”
At the moment, the CoPE is available as an optional subject in Year 10 but is compulsory for those students repeating their GCSEs.
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