Sutton Trust Summer School applications are open for Year 12 students!

Participants on the Classics & Ancient History, Film & TV Studies, History of Art stream at the Sutton Trust Summer School have the opportunity to make short video essays for their group project.

The academic team who lead this stream are always impressed with the quality of work the participants produce, given the short timeframe they have in which to produce them.

The Sutton Trust, along with the University of Warwick and London School of Economics ran a weeklong summer conference for Pathways to Banking and Finance students from 3^rd – 7^th August. Students from both universities had a week of online activities including academic lectures, employment engagement, personal development sessions which were led by student ambassadors and social activities in the evening.   

The conference began with an inspirational talk from public speaker Kamel Hayman, which really set the tone for the week ahead. Despite being online, the number of students that attended the conference was really impressive with around 25 students from the University of Warwick cohort attending sessions throughout the week.

As the conference was online, this allowed for more of a variety of employees able to support. This year for the first time students had a session from Bloomberg, and got to see their stock a share platform which was really impressive.  

At the end of the conference, students had a virtual celebration event, and finally a reflective session, to go through everything that had been covered throughout the week. Below is a word cloud for words that students used to summarise how they felt their week had gone.

During the last week of July, we welcomed approximately 270 students from across the country to the Pathways to Law Digital Conference, hosted by the Sutton Trust using their unique online platform. During the conference, students had the chance to find out about university life, experience online academic lectures and meet with lots of legal professionals. This conference gave students the opportunity to find out what it is like to study law at university and whether a career in law is right for them. Throughout the week, there were 207 volunteers from the legal profession, across 56 firms, chambers or courts. In total this amounted to over 300 hours of volunteering from industry professionals. The online platform also had 113 pieces of employer created content and content created by our student ambassadors. Built into the platform, there was also a speed mentoring platform where students were able to speak to student ambassadors, staff across 13 universities and industry professionals. Despite not being able to hold a face to face conference, the level of engagement and enthusiasm was fantastic throughout the week. At the celebration event, it was clear how valuable and beneficial students had found the opportunity and it was clear to see how they had grown in confidence compared to the start of the week!

Since 2016, Warwick has been one of 13 partner universities in the Sutton Trust's UK Summer School Programme, which has involved running a summer school for approximately 120 students from under-represented groups in higher education.

The participants are from all over the UK and stay on our campus for 5 days to experience what being a student at Warwick is like. They attend taster lectures in a subject of their choice and learn about the UCAS process. They meet our students and take part in a variety of fun activities, which has included an It's a Knockout afternoon and society tasters.

This year, due to the lockdown and social distancing rules, the Sutton Trust gave us the opportunity to join them in a new venture, meaning we would still be able to host our summer school but in a virtual environment, via the Sutton Trust Online Platform.

The Outreach and Widening Participation team works with schools and students from under-represented groups in higher education from primary age to Year 13 and onwards. Since the school closures, our team has explored new ways to carry out our crucial work for the community and the university. Here is a snapshot of what we have been up to with our Year 12 and Year 10 students.