I hope that you all had a wonderful half term! I spent mine in work preparing to open our brand new café over at The Guinness Partnership in Hollinwood and on Friday morning at 7.30am, we opened our doors for the first time!

Firstly I would like to welcome our new chef manager Lotfi to the team. Thank you Lotfi for all of your hard work over the past week! You have done a fantastic job and have worked very hard to get us up and running!

This week really has been a team effort and I want to thank a few people individually for their hard work! We are currently running a pop up café at Guinness, as we wait for the main café to be renovated. That means that we can’t prepare any food on site but we still have 800 staff to feed, so what do we do?! We get a little help from our friends at The Atrium! That’s right, on top of preparing food daily for Springboard, Medtia and First Choice Homes, our incredible team at The Atrium have all extended their hours and are in at 6am every day to prepare grab and go food and jacket potatoes that we then ship down to Guinness each morning! Becki, Sammy and Toni, on behalf of the 500+ people who have eaten your amazing food this week, THANK YOU! You have done the most incredible job!

Also a huge thank you to our team of job coaches who have covered at the café this week! Maria, Anne-Marie, Nicola, Colin and Diane! Again, we couldn’t have got through this week without you all! We’ve all had some very early starts but what an incredible week! AND we also had two students working all week too! Thank you to Zanub and Jason! You worked so hard and the staff at Guinness loved you both! Outstanding work! My personal highlight was making 147 slices of toast this morning on my shift! It is VERY busy!

But of course, life at Medtia continues, as our job coach Anne-Marie explains..

Well that’s the first week of the new half term over, and what a week it has been! Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are placement days and we have all been working hard.

More and more of our young people are accessing their placements directly from home and it is becoming more and more obvious that their confidence and independence are just continuing to grow – this is just amazing!

There has only been Joshua at the library this week but he is doing an amazing job. Joshua is continuing to complete the online basic training requirements set by the library and is working on the advanced levels now – well done Joshua, you are doing a fantastic job!

Matthew is loving his time at the Clean Plate Kitchen. He feels confident there and has built some great relationships with the staff that work there! Matthew enjoys going independently and they have said that we can start to reduce our time there supporting him which is just amazing!! Well done Matthew!

Reece is still at dsgnuk where he is working on coding and he is loving every minute of it! I called in on him this week to check on how he was getting on and he explained to me a bit about what he was doing, looking for faults in websites. He has been working on typing, websites and some tasks related to deadlines that are needed to be completed for customers’ orders.

The feedback from dsgnuk is that “he is doing a really good job and is completing the work that we ask him to!” Reece also got some recognition for some work that he completed a while ago, outside of college, meaning the work he did has ensured that a popular game was actually able to be developed!! Well done Reece – keep up the good work!

Lewis will be working across 2 placements from next week. He will continue with his placement at New Bridge School as a Teaching Assistant and he will also be heading back down to Manchester Metropolitan University (where he completed last year with Bridging the Gap) for a couple of days a week. The possibilities are endless and we have our fingers crossed for a positive outcome – watch this space!

Last but certainly not least, Jason. You will remember how Daniel announced in our last blog that we have joined up with the Guinness Partnership to run the café for their offices! Jason came in on Monday morning and we discussed him helping out at the new café. We didn’t know what to expect or how busy it was going to be but he jumped at the opportunity and he has been an absolute star! He has worked hard, in what is a very busy environment, carrying out stock takes and replenishing stock as necessary. He has kept everything clean and tidy, ensuring that it is nice, clean place to eat. Not only that, this placement has also enabled Jason to travel independently, to and from the café, which is another amazing achievement!!! Well done Jason!!!

What a busy first week back! Sometimes you don’t realise just how busy you have been until you put ‘pen to paper’ to write what you have achieved – time certainly flies when you’re having fun! Have a fab, restful weekend everyone!!

To finish, you may have seen in Graham’s blog this week that we are continuing to explore opportunities to expand our provision within Oldham town centre. We would very much like to find a building specifically for our pathways students and Future Finders students that will remain in the heart of Oldham, allowing our students to continue to access the town centre and all that it has to offer in the way of community facilities and work placements! More news on that very soon! Don’t forget that Parents’ Evening is a week on Tuesday! We hope to see you all then.

Have a great weekend,

Daniel
Head of College

Click here for this week’s news from Graham

You can view our previous blog entries here