Employment

Buckie High School’s partnership project with local employer Associated Seafoods has been developed over a number of years. The first Seafood Project was a Dragons Den style competition for S3s to design a fish dish and presented the planning, packaging and concept to the panel. The winning group visited the factory. Pupils included the target language on their packaging. 

Subsequently, a member of staff from ASL has given 3 careers talks to S3s about the company, export links and benefit of learning a language, underlining the company’s strong support for languages in the workplace.

Since then, a second Dragons Den activity in involved designing packaging for salmon. S3s researched ASL as part of their Languages for Life and Work Award and ASF formally became Buckie High School’s Business Language Champion.

Having completed a third Seafood Project involving S2 classes designing and preparing a fish dish, this year the partnership continued with an S1 project. They have learnt about the company and have planned a salmon dish with regional flavours as part of their unit of work on Food from around the World. Classes were expected to include Modern Languages on their packaging. 

The school hopes to continue to develop the partnership and to restart careers talks again in order to build on the achievements of this and previous years.

Buckie High School’s submission demonstrates a meaningful and long-established relationship between departments within the school and between the school and a local business. This is evidenced in strong interdisciplinary working that is embedded in the departmental calendar, and the sponsorship of a languages award by the local company.

Taking the time to develop a close working partnership with one company has allowed the school to develop a range of high-quality employability-focused activities over multiple year groups such as career talks and design/international marketing tasks. The verification team was impressed by such a creative approach that supports the development of skills for life and work. We were also pleased to note that the school is aiming to develop the languages focus of the project further too, and we look forward to seeing this progress.

Two of the verification team had the opportunity to visit Buckie High School for the final showcase event. We were very impressed by the positive and encouraging ethos in the school and by the obvious warmth of the partnership working that is underway. It was good to see some examples of languages in use in the project alongside employability skills such as presentation, organisation and communication. Thank you for this opportunity!

We want to commend Buckie High School for their submission. The evidence submitted reflects work with a number of year groups over this and previous years, and we appreciate that circumstances over the last few years have made it challenging to say the least and so this cumulative evidence is perfectly acceptable.