Offaly students attend outreach day in UCD

STUDENTS from Tullamore College and Ard Scoil Chiarain Naofa, Clara attended an outreach day on Monday last for the Power2Progress project.

Funded by Zurich, the Zurich Foundation and Rethink Ireland, Power2Progress is an educational project in schools nationally which is designed to build educational resilience in 5th  and 6th  year students in 21 selected post-primary schools over the next two years. 

The programme allows each of the 21 schools to ask their senior cycle pupils to select subject areas in which they would benefit from additional tuition. This tuition is provided by UCD student teachers, on-site, in schools, after school hours. The student teacher works with the classroom teacher with a view to establishing the focus of these sessions.

The programme also involves a career guidance/mentoring dimension which builds a foundation and support network to empower students to think about and apply for further and higher education and apprenticeship pathways.

Participating schools are partnered with a Zurich employee who works with the guidance department on the delivery of career talks, many of which have been recorded and are available to all participating schools. The programme includes outreach days to UCD and to Zurich Offices in order to de-mystify higher education, apprenticeships and career paths.  Each of the schools signed up to the programme is provided with sets of laptops and there is a PhD aligned to the project with a view to gathering data on the initiative and informing education policy in the future. 

The schools participating in the project, which is funded by both Zurich and Rethink Ireland, are listed in the website link

https://power2progress.ie/

On Monday, students and their teachers from each of the 21 participating schools attended an  outreach  day organised by the project lead Professor Judith Harford assisted by Dr Rachel Farrell and PHD candidate Amalia Fenwick.   

Students were given a campus tour and a wide range of taster lectures from the spectrum of courses on offer in UCD.  The acting UCD President, Professor Mark Rogers and the Principal of the College of Social Science and Law, Professor Colin Scott opened the event that was also attended by the Minister for  Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Simon Harris.