What a fantastic day packed with enthusiastic, curious and confident Year 2 children from Mowden Primary School, all completely engaged with today’s KS1 Aspirations Day!

The day began with all 90 Year 2 children getting to know the Tees Valley Area on massive floor maps, learning the geographical locations of the five areas and also key landmarks. With this understanding in the bag, we linked this to the history of our area and achievements from our past before looking ahead to their future and opportunities available right on their doorsteps!

That was just the warm up! We then split into three main sectors Engineering, Medical and Digital with the children taking part in a practical, hands-on workshop for each. The children not only looked the part in their Hi Vis vests and yellow hard hats, but they also had the tools of the trade using nuts and bolts, and spanners in the engineering session. The medical sector involved these motivated and eager-to-learn Year 2s diving straight into a wide variety of activities that monitored their heart rate, temperature, grip strength, and ability to push breath from their lungs. As well as this, they became doctors and nurses themselves identifying broken bones from X-rays and listening to calls from patients before deciding what to do to help them. This left the digital sector, centering around learning to code their very own robot which the children showed real concentration and logical thinking skills along with bucket loads of excitement when they brought their code to life!

What an incredible day summed up in the final session by the children identifying all the new skills they had learned over the course of the day! Research tells us that this approach, incorporating careers related learning (CRL) into the curriculum, not only improves life chances and lifelong earnings but also has a measurable impact on attainment and achievement in school in the short term.

Mowden Year 2s we can’t wait to see what the future has in store for you, especially after today’s Aspirations Day!