Adviza is a charity inspiring people to make better decisions that help them progress in learning and work. Their goal is to support young people and others, at important times in their lives where key decisions need to be made.   They aim to raise people's aspirations and motivate them to achieve their full potential. Adviza is the external service we use to provide independent careers advice for our students.  They run group workshops as students approach key decisions, and also offer 1 to 1 personal guidance sessions.

The Careers and Enterprise Company work with schools to improve their careers offering and they allocate schools an Enterprise Adviser to give a business viewpoint.  Our Enterprise Adviser has helped students with mock interviews and run workshops for us. We have a new Enterprise Adviser and are hoping to develop the relationship further. 

KPMG have worked with the school for many years.  They are one of the leading accountancy firms providing business advice to many organisations. As well as running 'Work Ready' workshops, helping with careers activities and mock interviews, they also provide numeracy and finance workshops. For several years they have provided mentors for selected students to help them to prepare for the future. 

Every year, the army visit the school to run Elite Skills activities for the students to help them develop communication, team work, and problem solving. 

Thames Water provide STEM guest speakers and activities, and their volunteers also help with mock interviews

One of the leading providers of IT products and services, Ericsson have run STEM activities for our students.  

Rutherford Appleton Laboratory provide the school with very exciting STEM activities which are highly rated by our girls

A leading provider of IT, networking and cybersecurity solutions, CISCO offer insights into the world of work.

http://www.reading.ac.uk/

The University of Reading offer many outreach programmes. We are lucky to be strong partners in many of these already and hope to increase our participation going forward.

The Students in Schools project is a prominent part of Year 11 preparation in the lead up to their final exams, the university provide undergraduates studying a range disciplines to tutor our Year 11 girls on a small group basis, consisting of no more than 3 students. This has been highly commended by the Year 11s and they found the exposure to university students a further motivation for exams. 

The University Scholars Programme aims to target specific students who may not have considered attending university. It is a longitudinal exposure to many aspects of university and the benefits of going to university, and includes working with the University's student ambassadors and developing study skills. Every year a group of our Year 10 students engage in this project. The students say that it has given them an objective view on attending university and that they have learnt many things from the project.

Finally, the University outreach team run activities for Personal Development and STEM days, they provide speakers for subjects as part of our Deeper Applied Learning strategy, and arrange visits to the university for various year groups.

We also benefit from the support of many employers and organisations who visit on a more occasional basis, these include:

• STEM net and STEM providers such as Tomorrow's Engineers
• Royal Berkshire Hospital and the wider NHS
• VirginMedia
• FSP
• Sygenta
• AWE
• Balfour Beatty
• Thatcham Research