Another successful year, despite all the adversity presented by Covid. Our learners progressed into employment, social services and appointed their PAs to help them navigate life as an adult.

Since our last update on our paid outcomes, I am pleased to announce that Tom Hall gained a paid role at Ridgeway Arms at Mosborough.

Tom is now our fourth Intern who has achieved a paid outcome so far, this academic year.

Congratulations to Lys Watkins who this week started her Supported Internship in Paediatrics at Rotherham NHS Trust.

Lys is the third Intern to join the NHS team since we began our partnership in October. Two more will be commencing their internships there over the next couple of weeks.

We now have 21 Interns working with employers, with a further 4 to start by the end of January!

Congratulations to Liam Whitehead who on 28^th January commenced his SI at Rotherham United Football Club.

This is a dream role for Liam who is a lifelong supporter of the club. Good Luck Liam.

Although in the stages of initial talks and planning, we have agreed in principle to develop partnerships with South Yorkshire Police and McColl’s Retail Outlets. Both will provide numerous and varied work placement opportunities, with the Police potentially offering roles within grounds maintenance, estates and facilities, and business admin. McColl’s, who is a leading neighbourhood retailer with 1265 stores, will provide many retail and customer service roles.

Change of location – over the next couple of weeks the Wayfinder Office on Market Street, Eckington, will be moving across the road to number 6. This location has a lot more space, and there will be a dedicated area for learners to come and receive support with all things relating to work experience, supported internships, and preparing for the world of work, so please come and make use of this space!

Don’t forget that Wayfinder is now on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn so please give us a like and a share!

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WayFinderSpecialistEmployment
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wayfinder-specialist-employment
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wayfinder_ses/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/WayFinder_ses

Christmas Jumper Day

Thanks to everyone who helped to make our Christmas Jumper Day and Virtual Raffle a lot of fun.  

Together we raised £847 which will be spent on improving some of the social areas for learners. (Any other requests, please get in touch with Gail asap).

Amazon Smile

Amazon Smile – Raise money for Landmarks every time you shop. Just register and select Landmarks Specialist College as your charity and Amazon Smile will donate 0.5% of the purchase cost.

Please tell your family and friends as the more people who sign up, the more we will receive! https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/chpf/homepage?orig=%2F

Apperknowles New Cattle Crush

Apperknowle Farm has bought a new cattle crush, designed to reduce stress for animals and keep our learners and staff safe when they are working closely with individual cows.

We are grateful to The Percy Bilton Charity for the grant of £4,000.

Enterprise Update from Kyle Hudson:

“Our sessions lately have been introducing the learners to engineering and what makes a strong structure. The intention is to implement this into our future projects when we make items to sell that are more complicated to make, then the learners have some previous knowledge to draw from. We did an experiment on how much weight can one 5 gram sheet of paper hold. We managed to stack almost 5 Kg’s on top of it and it was no way near collapsing. During this session, we were experimenting with which shapes are the strongest and putting them to the test.

The second photo is the learners cutting and measuring materials using basic building techniques like measuring and drawing a straight line across two points. We’re aiming to make a strong structure that can support the weight of a large speaker all by using basic materials and focusing on the engineering of it.

In these sessions, the learners have to work together and communicate with each other to achieve the result as the success of the task depends on it.”

Rotherham

 Our Rotherham travel training group made the trip on the bus to a very chilly Sheffield this month. They looked around the Winter Gardens before heading back outside to the fountains. The learners enjoyed it so much that they have planned to return to Sheffield next month on the tram, to visit the Millennium Galleries.

The Archer

Elliott has been making really good progress in the kitchen at The Archer, moving from pot washing duties to cooking, where he has this week received high praise for his culinary skills after producing his first meal for a customer; the customer feedback was that the food was amazing and left saying that they would be returning soon. Well done Elliott.

We would like to congratulate Cheryl Barton, Learner Records Administrator for passing her probation. 

The Health and Wellbeing of our staff is important to us. We would love to invite you to complete the survey below:

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=51wgq6bXSU29iAu2RMJY6CEM9lmhEd9Ki8lxnrN9sWlUREJXODFCSDlBUTc5WU9PWkE0WVJHT0dBMi4u