The Aiming Higher in Halton Higher Education Conference is aimed at pupils who are already considering staying on in education post 16, but are not yet clear of their intentions post 18 years old. The conference will also be beneficial to pupils who are uncertain about what types of subjects they could study at university. This is the criteria the Aimhigher coordinators within schools have used to select the pupils who will be attending.

We are running the conference on two days, Thursday 29th September 2005 for 120 pupils from the 4 Widnes schools and Friday 30th September for 120 pupils from the 4 Runcorn schools. The programme for both days will be the same. There will be 12 different workshops repeating 4 times throughout the day.

In planning for the conference we have selected a number of workshops that we want to run:

Subject based workshops - for these workshops we would like students to have experience of what type of work they would be involved in on the course and an idea of any qualification requirements. The subjects we have selected are:

• Media
• Law
• Veterinary Science
• Sport Science
• Design (e.g. graphics/car design/game design/web design)
• Medicine (e.g. doctor/nurse/physiotherapist/radiologist)
• Psychology/Sociology
• Teacher Training

We will also be running four further workshops, which are:

• Finance
• Subject choice - giving pupils an opportunity to see the vast range of subjects that can be studied
• Day in the life of a student
• Work based learning

In addition to the workshops we have some students who have previously studied within Halton schools and have since progressed to university speaking to the whole group about their own experiences.

In order to make this conference a success we very much need your help. We would like you to deliver a subject workshop. This would be a 40-minute workshop within which we hope you would be able to incorporate an activity for the pupils to engage in as well as presenting information to them.

The workshops are to be repeated throughout the day and ideally we would like you to stay for the whole day so different pupils experience the same session. We have left room on the booking form for you to indicate if you can only do some of the sessions during either day.