Teacher Simon Wareham didn’t know what to expect when he took a group of year nine students on a day trip to PwC’s offices. “Newcastle is only about half an hour from our school in Sunderland but many of our students don’t venture out of their own city,” says Wareham, the assistant headteacher and careers leader at Southmoor Academy. “We walked through the doors and their jaws just dropped to the floor. A couple of the kids asked: ‘Do people actually work in offices like this?’ They couldn’t believe it.”
The visit is one part of PwC’s New World New Skills schools initiative, which aims to empower young people with opportunities to learn, work and gain employability and digital skills. As well as an office tour and lunch, Southmoor students took part in team building activities, gave presentations, and worked on solutions for the type of problems tackled by PwC’s teams.
