Virtual School Series: Students aged 11-14 - video transcripts

Session 1 - Introduction | Year 7-9

Hi everyone, and a very warm welcome to the first session of PwC’s virtual school series. My name is Khadija and I am a first year Management Consultant Apprentice here at PwC, and I will be taking you through today’s Virtual School Series Session.

Today we are planning to cover the following; we are first going to off start with an introduction to the programme, then we are going to go through who are PwC, what are the essential skills and how are they relevant to you? We are going to be a challenge, and ending with a reflection. There will be discussion points or short activities at various points in this session which I would really encourage you to take part in. We will make it clear when it is time to complete these activities during this session.

So, let’s start off with a little introduction of myself. As mentioned, my name is Kadhija and I am a first year Management Consultant Apprentice here at PwC. I am based in the More London office which is located near London Bridge. Prior to joining PwC as an apprentice, I went to school and sixth form for seven years between 2016-2023, which is fairly recent. I gained 9 GCSE’s and I gained A levels in Psychology, Economics and Geography. It is important to note that before joining as an apprentice at PwC, throughout my time at secondary school and sixth form, I had no idea what I wanted to do in my future. I did have a keen interest for Geography and wanted to pursue a university degree in Geography and so when I got to Year 12 I looked more into Geography. I completed extracurricular activities to help me stand out more, for example gaining essential skills, doing work experience and so on. After completing work experience with PwC in the summer of Year 12 I realised that I also wanted to pursue an apprenticeship. So fast forward to Year 13, A levels were around the corner and it was really stressful balancing A levels, applying to apprenticeships and university.

So, after sitting my A Levels and applying to apprenticeships and university I got offers at both. On result’s day, I decided to pursue the apprenticeship instead of university due to the immense benefits it had.

I am now working in consulting, so I work internally in financial services so I have no clients at the moment. Financial services being the banks and insurance companies which I update data weekly on. I analyse data and I ensure that projects within financial services are running smoothly. I also attend meetings with partners, partners being the highest rank in the firm, which I discuss this data. Alongside working, I am also studying for the CIMA qualification which is a business accounting qualification and it is fully funded for. It is important to note, that although I am working and studying I do get granted study leave for my exams and I get that support needed. Alongside studying and working I also attend many social events and I network. For example, in December I went to Winter Wonderland which was fully funded for, with my Relationship Lead Team. My Relationship Lead Team is not my main team, however it is my Social Team.

Looking forward, in the next six months of my first year at pwc, I hope to do another internal rotation where I will be working in artificial intelligence or AI, so I will be working in the tech sector.

Next year, meaning September, I will be doing client work which means I will be working directly with businesses and companies and helping to solve their problems. And, in two years I hope to finish my apprenticeship, pass all my exams and hopefully get offered to join the graduate programme. I will be fast tracked onto the graduate programme, which means instead of completing three years of university and going into a job straight after, I will be doing two years of an apprenticeship and then go into a job straight after.

Now, enough talk about me and let’s go into a brief introduction to our programme. So PwC’s Virtual School Series Programme aims to help you develop your confidence and key skills for a successful future in whatever you choose to do. This programme is made up of a combination of short skills and sessions delivered by PwC volunteers like myself, and we have activities in the classroom and independent learning.

Each of the eight sessions have been designed around a different essential skill or pair of skills, with activities to put your learning into practice and get feedback from PwC volunteers.

Your teacher will be able to submit questions to PwC volunteers throughout the programme. So, please do get involved throughout the programme, and be respectful of your classmates’ chance to learn too.

So, what topics will be covered? Throughout this session we will be going through eight main themes so we will start off with an introduction to PwC and the Essential Skills. Then, for the four other sessions, you will have a session on aiming high and setting goals, a session on teamwork, a session on leadership, a session on speaking and listening, a session on problem solving, a session on creativity and your final session will be on staying positive. These are the 8 essential skills you will need to use in your day to day lives.

So let’s start off with, who are PwC? “Our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems.” This is our global shared articulation of why we do what we do.We embody this in the work we do and how we operate. But what exactly does this mean?

We are a professional services firm, this means that we offer a range of support to our clients by solving problems and offering advice to organisations of all sizes and in all sectors. We help to improve productivity and growth across the economy.

We are not a business where you can go into a shop and buy a PwC product; our “product” is our people, who are experts in all sorts of areas of our business. Other businesses or companies will come to us and get expert advice from our people on how to improve or change their business. The situations and issues we tackle are very varied but they can include instances of financial crime, mergers and acquisitions, cyber security breaches, striving to meet a net zero target, or transforming a supply chain to be more efficient.

We have over 22,000 employees in the UK, and 328,000 around the world in over 150 different countries. We also have 19 offices in the UK meaning no matter where you want to start your career, PwC is a good place to be. We have 25,300 clients across all corners of the UK, who often have offices internationally. And, we sometimes work with other PwC territories across the world to solve cross-border problems so there is endless opportunity for you to expand your horizons. Not to mention we are one of the UK’s largest recruiters of school leavers, undergraduates and graduates.

As professional advisers we help our clients solve complex business problems. What this means is that our people at PwC work in a huge amount of different roles across our lines of service (or business areas). This ranges from Audit, to Consulting, to Tax - and we use all these skills to help our clients solve their business challenges.

For example, within Consulting, we work closely with clients to understand their unique challenges and goals. We provide expert advice, strategic insight and practical solutions to help clients make informed decisions and achieve the desired outcomes. So in a way you could say we are “people focussed.”

Whereas, in Audit, they tend to play a crucial role in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of financial information provided by organisations. They examine financial statements, records, and internal controls to provide an independent opinion on the fairness and transparency of the financial statements of that organisation.

Now that you know a bit about us, let's move onto exploring the essential skills; what they are, why they are important and how they relate to you. So what are the essential skills? We are focussing tightly on those skills which nearly everybody needs to do in nearly any job - and which are often less clearly defined.

As you can see on the screen, there is a pyramid. This pyramid contains the base, which is the basic skills. They are critical for individuals on a day to day basis, they provide the foundations for success. For example literacy, numeracy and digital skills

Whereas, at the top of the pyramid are technical skills. These are incredibly valuable and enable us to complete the tasks we’re responsible for in our role, for example accounting, data analysis, video creation, programming or copy writing.

However, while technical skills are crucial, they lack transferability between roles or industries which leaves a gap for the essential skills which are part of almost any job role. For example, skills like teamwork, problem solving and listening

Essential skills are critical for the day-to-day of a job, however how to approach developing them can be challenging. By clearly defining the essential skills, we can equip you with the tools you need to develop these and improve.

Essential skills are highly transferable and essential in education and almost any job.

So, there are 8 essential skills which are mainly broken down into four main areas as shown on the screen. These four main areas are communication, creative problem solving, self management, collaboration and interpersonal skills.

So, let’s start off with communication. Communication can be broken down into listening which is the receiving, retaining and processing of information or ideas, and speaking, which is the oral transmission of information or ideas

On the other hand, there is creative problem solving which is the ability to find a solution to a situation or challenge, and then you have creativity - the use of imagination and the generation of new ideas.

Then you have self management and staying positive – for example the ability to use tactics and strategies to overcome setbacks and achieve goals and also aiming high - the ability to set clear, tangible goals and devise a robust route to achieving them.

Lastly we have collaboration and interpersonal skills. For example, leadership which is supporting, encouraging and developing others to achieve a shared goal. And then you also have teamwork, which is working cooperatively with others towards achieving a shared goal.

These definitions were developed alongside experts and sector bodies to ensure they are representative of the skill and the wide range of ways they can be applied in education and employment.

The essential skills are so important due to their transferability, meaning you can use them in a wide range of different settings. The Skills Builder Universal Framework, which is shown on the screen, helps to break down each of these skills into progressive stages and steps so that we can all understand exactly what they mean and how to build them.

For example, the skill of listening can be broken down into four main levels. The first level being listening to others (which is getting started), the second level being demonstrating listening (which is the intermediate level), the third level being recognising influence (which is the advanced level) and the final level which is listening critically (which is a mastery level).

Your teacher may now choose to pause the video to explore the framework together as a class.

Moving on, why are the essential skills important? We are now going to take some time to reflect on the following questions.

Where have you demonstrated one of these skills before?

How might developing these essential skills benefit you now?

How might they benefit you in the future?

For example, I tend to use the skill teamwork a lot in the workplace as I have to attend team meetings, work and collaborate with the team to create ideas or provide solutions to problems. We are now going to pause to reflect and facilitate group discussion around these questions, and you should be thinking about how to use these skills in your learning and how they might be useful for your future. Please now pause the video and discuss the following questions.

Now it is your turn, we are going to be doing a challenge which builds on the eight essential skills and gives you the opportunity to reflect on your skills, strengths and areas for development. Reflecting on the 8 essential skills below, identify one skill you feel confident in and one skill you feel you need to develop.

For example, you might be really confident in speaking as you regularly attend an after school club where you practise presenting but you find it really difficult to stay positive when faced with a setback or challenge. Try to give an example or scenario that supports each of your reflections as shown above.

For example, for myself, I am good at teamwork as I collaborate effectively within the team and ensure that everyone feels included during group tasks. However, I am not so good at speaking as I do tend to get nervous or shy when I talk on stage. I am now going to ask your teachers to pause so you can now have time to reflect.

Now, it is time to reflect on everything you have learnt in this session. Thinking about the skill you identified as an area for development, write down three ways you could practise this skill within your learning. For example, if I am finding something new to be difficult, I will think about the potential positives in the situation.

I am now going to ask your teacher to pause to allow you to write down your reflections. However, prior to writing down your reflection you might find it useful to discuss with a peer or as a class to gain some ideas before identifying some areas you would like to practise.

Thank you for taking part in this week’s introductory session. We hope you enjoyed it and hope to see you soon in our next session, which is all around the skill of aiming high. Thank you yet again.

Session 3 - Teamwork | Year 7-9

Hi everyone, and a very warm welcome to the next session of PWC's Virtual School Series focusing on the skill of teamwork. My name is Alexa and I work in audit in Bristol. Hi there, my name's Ant, and I work in tax in Manchester. In this session, we're going to talk about teamwork. We're going to answer the questions, what is teamwork? What makes a good team? How to build an effective team? And then we're going to have a challenge. And then after the challenge, we're going to reflect upon that challenge. There are eight essential skills which are key to ensure everyone is successful in their education, careers, and wider life. They are so important due to the transferability, meaning you can use them in a wide range of different settings. The skills builder a universal framework helps to break down each of these skills into progressive stages and steps so that we can all understand exactly what they mean and how to build them. In this session, we are going to focus on teamwork. Teamwork can be also broken down into four stages of development. Working well with others, contributing to the group, Improving a team and influencing a team. What is teamwork? What do we mean when we talk about teamwork? What is your understanding of teamwork? Think about the following questions to help formulate your answer. What does it mean to work well with others? How can you contribute to the group decision making? And why is conflict unhelpful when working as a team? Please feel free to pause the video while she discussed this. Now that you've had time to think about what teamwork is, let's take a look at how we can define it. Teamwork is defined by the universal framework as working cooperatively with others towards achieving a shared goal. During my role in audit, I work on teams of between 3-16 people on projects that are too large to manage for one person. We have regular meetings to work towards a shared goal of signing an audit opinion. How confident do you feel in this skill? Rate your confidence on a scale of one to five where one is not at all confident and five is very confident. Make sure you're being reflective about times you have used this skill, so your rating is accurate. Remember, we all have skills that we feel less confident with using and would like to get better at. What makes a good team? Now we're going to explore the qualities of a successful team. Have a think about teams that you've been in before, in school, in clubs, or with friends. When did the team work really well? What made the team work well? How did you ensure everyone was involved, come up with a list of things which make a successful team? Please pause the video now whilst you discuss it. Communication, there are a lot of different ways to communicate in a team, meeting as a group, and catch ups or online group chats and email. Creative communication is always good. For example, using documents that everyone has access to and can change or update when needed, and having regular catch ups. In every team, It's important to communicate so everyone is clear on their role and responsibilities. It's a personal responsibility for your tasks to ensure that the team is aware of your progress. Check in on other team members regularly and make sure that everyone is doing okay. Communicate any problems as soon as possible. In professional rugby teams, the team will have regular catch ups to track the progress of the match. So trust. Think of a time when you were in a team. Did all the other members of the team trust you to play your part? How did that affect the way that the team worked? How would the team work if the leader didn't trust anyone? How would you feel being part of that team? Pause the video while you discuss. Each team member should have trust in each other. But that doesn't just mean leaving everyone to it. Extra support should be offered to anyone who needs it. Trust goes hand in hand with communication. It's easier to trust people when everyone is clearly communicating progress and obstacles. It can be hard to build trust on a team of people that you don't know. However, it is important to put that effort in, and soon everyone will trust each other. It's important to set clear goals when you're working in a team. Everyone in the team should know what you're trying to do. It's important to set your goals at the beginning of a project. Have you ever been confused about what you're trying to achieve in a group project or online game? Not having a clear goal, like not knowing what a science experiment is trying to prove, can mean that some people are confused. It can be helpful to revisit the goals throughout your work to ensure that the whole team remains focused. Different skills and ideas. Have you ever played or watched a sport? If everyone in a sports team played the same position, it would be in trouble. If all players were shooters, no one would be able to defend the goal. If all players were defenders, no one would score the goals. That is why it's good to have lots of different people with lots of different skills and ideas in a team. This helps you divide up tasks in order to achieve your intended goal. Diversity, a variety of different ages, personality types, and cultures will lead to a well rounded diverse team. Why do teams fail? Teams can fail for so many reasons. In the same way a good team has many strengths, a failing team will also have a number of weaknesses. If a team fails, it's useful to stop and reflect on what has gone wrong and how this can be addressed in the future. Take a few minutes to think about why a team you have been in failed. What was the reason? Pause the video now. Some reasons why teams fail. Were any of these your answers? Lack of trust, poor communication, everyone having the same skills or ideas, Lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities, poor leadership, or unclear goals. There are only a few answers as to why teams may fail, but there are lots of reasons why a team fails. These ideas directly link to the previous what makes a team successful slide? What are some of the ways we can build an effective team? What do you think it's important to have in a team? What are the different ways to celebrate successes? Balance of skills, people having skills in different areas relating to the project, like numeracy, communication, technical or essential skills. Working towards a common purpose. Everyone is clear on the final goal and outcome being worked towards, having shared responsibilities, so everyone understands their role and tasks they need to complete, celebrate successes, to build team morale. How can you show teamwork now? The perfect time to start building teamwork skills is now, and you might already have some: group projects, clubs and societies. Duke of Edinburgh award, Saturday jobs, or sports team. All these are fantastic examples of where you might use teamwork. Now it's your turn. This challenge builds on the teamwork session. For this challenge, you will need five paper or plastic cups, string and one elastic band per group. Your teacher has all the instructions and they will explain the exercise. Pause the video now to take part in the exercise. Now that you've finished the group activity, here are a few questions you can discuss with your classmates. What was your common goal? Did you achieve this? How did you decide who would do what? How did you play to people's strengths in your team? When you succeeded with stacking a cup? How did you celebrate that success? Feedback your thoughts to the class and have a think about what you've learned from this exercise about teamwork. Is there anything you have learned that you can take forward? Please pause the video now. It's time to reflect on everything you've learned during this session. Use the reflection questions below to think about how you reuse the skill of teamwork. Pick a question from the list to answer. What are the positive effects of taking responsibility for a task? Why is it important to have trust in other people in your team? Why do teams sometimes fail? Pause the video now to answer your selected question. How confident do you feel? Revisit the confidence scale rating from the beginning of the session. Ask students to re rate their confidence in teamwork. Let's revisit our confident rating in the skill of listening from the beginning of the session Re rate your confidence on a scale of one to five where one is not at all confident and five is very confident. How confident do you now feel? Has this changed at all? Can you explain why you feel this might have changed? Feel free to pause the video now. We hope you've enjoyed this session on the skill of teamwork. Are you keen to find more ways to practise this skill? Here is a task that you can take away and try outside the classroom. We would love to hear your reflections and see your learning following this session. To share this with us, your teacher can submit your ideas via email. We look forward to reading all your submissions. Thanks very much for today. We've really enjoyed it. We look forward to seeing you again at the next session, which is all around the skill of leadership. Thanks again. Bye.

Session 5 - Speaking and listening | Year 7-9

Hi everyone. And a very warm welcome to the next session of PWC's Virtual School series focusing on the skills of speaking and listening. My name is Ellen McIlwaine and I work in Operate, in particular customer management. I'm also an HLA, which is a higher level apprentice in business management within our Belfast office. I'm going to hand over to Jessica to introduce herself. Hi all. I am Jessica Dervishi. I am a Manager at the PWC UK Chief Data Office. This is an internal role that is responsible for the firm's data strategy. I particularly look at data ethics which entails what we should or shouldn't do with our data. I will now run us through the agenda. In this session, we're going to cover both listening and speaking skills. We'll discuss why they matter, look at some examples of speaking and listening skills, as well as discuss the impression they create. We'll also cover some practical tips on how to improve your speaking and listening skills. A bit about essential skills. There are eight essential skills which we are key to ensuring everyone is successful in their education, careers and wider life. They are so important due to their transferability, meaning you can use them in a wide range of different settings. The skills builder universal framework helps to break down each of these skills into progressive stages and steps so that we can all understand exactly what they mean and how to build them. In this session, we're going to focus on listening and speaking. Listening can be broken down into four stages, which are, listening to others, demonstrating listening, recognising influence, and listening critically. Speaking can also be broken down into four stages of development, which are, speaking clearly, speaking engagingly, speaking adaptively, and also speaking influentially. I use my listening and speaking skills every day in my role and in my daily life. This ranges from when I'm collaborating with my team on projects, all the way to agreeing on our team strategy. I will now hand over to Ellen to go through the next few sections. Thank you, Jessica. Section one, what does it mean to listen? What do we mean when we talk about listening in class? I want you as a class or in groups, or with your teacher, discuss what it means to listen effectively. How can you demonstrate active listening to others? How might we find out more about something we are listening to? Pause the video to carry out this exercise and unpause when you're ready for the next session. Listening is defined as a universal framework as the receiving, retaining, and processing of information or ideas. In my role, I listen to my colleagues on what they are doing for their day in their team huddles. I also listen and effectively listen to my managers on what is expected of me each and every day, and I listen to my clients on what expectations they have on me and how I can carry out the best for them. I want you now to rate your confidence on a scale of one to five of this skill where one is not effective or not confident at all, and five is very confident. Make sure you're being reflective about times you have used this skill, so rating yourself is accurate. Remember, we all have skills that we feel less confident with using and would like to get better at. Section two. Why are listening skills so important? Before we answer that question, let's have a think about how we communicate. On an average day, do you communicate to your teacher or your classmates or even your sports coach? As you can see, we use the skill of listening most of the time. It's a huge part of our every day life that we communicate. It's exactly 45% of what we communicate each and every day. This is why the saying goes, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Let's look at the other types of communication. Reading 16%, writing 9%, speaking 30% and listening 45%. Why are listening skills so important? We can all learn skills to help us become a better listener. This can help us in all aspects of our daily life, building relationships, avoiding conflict, and improving our understanding and communication skills. Think of different settings where listening is important. Here are a few of them. Can you think of any more? How about with our parents at college, at school, with our friends whilst shopping, with our siblings, at home or even with our teachers. I'm going to hand over to Jessica now for section three. Thank you. Now let's look at some strategies to develop our listening skills and what makes a good listener have a look at these two images. Let's think about which one has the most interested and engaged audience. If we look closer in the left hand photo, the audience are looking at their phones and a laptop. Their facial expressions are very neutral. They are not smiling or looking at the speaker. This clearly gives the impression that they are not really paying attention and suggests disengagement from the speaker. On the other hand, we have a very different image. The right hand photo, the audience are either looking directly at the speaker or their body language suggests they are interested in what the speaker is saying. The audience are not looking at papers or their phone. This gives the impression that the speaker has their full attention. They're conveying a strong message through their non verbal communication, smiling in recognition of what the speaker is saying. We'll take a look at some of these in the next slide. Non verbal communication will show the speaker you are paying attention and are interested in what they are saying. Let's look at some forms of non verbal communication. Thinking about what makes an attentive listener and what makes an inattentive listener. As we go through each bullet in class, please do a thumbs up if it's an attentive listener and thumbs down if its an inattentive listener. Making eye contact with the speaker, is that an attentive or an inattentive? Looking at your phones? we have chewing gum? Turning off your phone or placing it face down? We have smiling in acknowledgement? Yawning? Nodding your head in recognition? Shrugging your shoulders? Leaning towards the speaker? And then looking out of the window? Occasionally making notes? These were all the bullet points, and as you can see, we've categorised them into a non attentive listener and an attentive listener. Do you agree with the different categories? When you are speaking which audience would you prefer to have? The left hand group or the right hand group? I know very clearly which group I'd rather be in. Active listening skills. Active listening means making a conscious effort to listen to the whole message that is being communicated, not just the words. It means understanding the non verbal cues being communicated by a speaker, which can help you fully understand what they are saying and enable you to build a strong relationship with the speaker. Some key points to take into consideration are: Don't interrupt the speaker other than to make any brief comments or to encourage them to continue. For example, I see or sure. You should use non verbal techniques to show the speaker you are engaged with what they are saying. As a speaker, pay attention to the non verbal responses from your audience. Do they look amused, concerned, disengaged? Acknowledge those emotions in the moment. For example, you can do this by saying, I'm getting the feeling that you have a concern about this. Could you tell me a bit more about that? Another point is to ask questions at the appropriate time when prompted. Questions can be an important way of demonstrating what you are interested in and that you care about the subject. For example, questions that you might ask at the end of the job interview or college or university application. These are questions that show the user that you are interested in what is being said. Last but not least, look to summarise or paraphrase. Demonstrate your understanding by summarising what you have heard. For example, what I hear you saying is, is that accurate? This will help you consolidate your understanding and demonstrate to the speaker that you truly want to understand what they have said. Practise your active listening skills. You will look to work in groups of three. One of you will be the speaker, another, the listener, and the third, the observer. The speaker will talk for 30 seconds about what they did at the weekend. A very interesting topic I hope. The listener will try to use some active listening skills below. For example, using facial expressions to show the speaker they're being attentive. Making brief comments while they are speaking, but not too much where it becomes interrupting, Ask questions when there is a pause to show the speaker you have understood what they are saying. Now the observer's job is to look out for these skills and report back to the group afterwards. You will swap roles until everyone has done at least one of the roles. Please pause the video here to carry out this exercise with your teachers and come back when you are ready. What do we mean by speaking skills? What is your understanding of the skill speaking? In your class with your teachers discuss how you would answer this. Think about the following questions to help formulate your answer. Why is it helpful to know what your listeners already know before you speak? What role does expression, tone, and gesture play in effective speech? And what are some techniques you can use to engage others while you're speaking? Please pause and come back when you are ready. Now let's look at how confident you feel. Speaking is defined by the universal framework as the oral transmission of information and ideas. I will now pass over to Ellen to tell us about how she used speaking in her role. Thank you, Jessica. I use speaking in my role just as I use listening as they correlate hand in hand. So speaking, I may speak on the phone with my clients or my customers. I may speak with my manager on a day to day basis on what I should be doing. I also speak to my career coach one on one on targets that I should be hitting. I mainly look on projects about strategic plans within my team and try to meet my targets each and every day. Thank you, Jessica. Handing back to you. Thank you, Ellen. Now it's your turn to rate your confidence on a scale of one to five, where one is not confident at all and five is very confident. Make sure you're being reflected about times where you've used this skill so your rating is accurate. Remember, we all have skills where we feel less confident in and using and would like to get better at. Remember to take time to reflect on your speaking skills. I will now pass over to Ellen to go through the next sections. Thank you, Jessica. So, why are speaking skills so important? Although we're talking about speaking skills, this isn't just about the words you say. Over 50% of what we communicate is conveyed through our body language. It's about what way you present yourself through your posture, your expression, what you're wearing, the way in which you speak, as well as what you're saying. It takes 7 seconds to make a first impression. It's really important to think about the impact you create as soon as you walk into the room. Whether that be in an interview, a presentation just before you start speaking. As a class, talk with your teacher and have a brief discussion about this topic. As speaking skills can help you make an impact, demonstrate your knowledge and passion, and ensure you're understood in a learning environment, at an interview, in the workplace, and with family and friends. Unpause the video when you are ready. Section six. What makes a good presenter? There may be times at school when you're asked to give a presentation or speak on a particular topic. This may be an assembly or even in class. We are going to focus here on some verbal and non verbal speaking skills. The way you say your words can be as important as the words themselves. It's important that the two go hand in hand and match up. For example, someone could be delivering the most amazing speech, but if they did so in a monotone way with no variation in how the words are delivered, it could sound very boring. The three P's. The three P's can be the way in which you use to help speaking in the way you interact with your audience, pace, pitch, and projection. Pace is the speed at which you speak. Try not to rush. This can convey nervousness and make it hard for the audience to digest what you're saying. You can also vary your pace to hold your audience attention and create different effects. Speed up for excitement and slow down for emphasis and pause so participants can digest what you've said. Number two, pitch, how high or how low are you speaking? As with pace, bearing this can help maintain your audience's attention. It is also useful to consider your intonation where the emphasis is placed on different words. This helps to highlight key points and conveys enthusiasm. When you practise, try pitching your voice downward to emphasise an important statement. And pitching your voice upward for a question. Number three, projection. The energy and volume of your voice when presenting, project your voice and speak more loudly than you usually would to ensure everyone in the room can hear you. Next time you hear someone speak, who you think is a good speaker, E.g a teacher or a politician, listen out for the changes in their pitch. And number four, there's another word starting with P, which is important to remember. That is preparation. Think about your objectives beforehand. For example, your objectives might include importing certain information to your audience, coming across as knowledgeable and professional, or coming across as passionate about a certain topic. Prepare your words carefully and think about your audience and what your goal is presenting or speaking to them. Have a look at the images below and think about what impression the presenters are creating through their non verbal communication. Pause the video and as a class or in groups, have a discussion about what you think. Unpause when you are ready. Did you think about hand gestures, facial expressions, leaning towards the audience, smiling and looking animated and interested by what they are saying? Non verbal communication. When presenting your non verbal communication will make as much as an impression on your audience as the words you say. Think about a time when you saw a presenter who came across as confident. What did they do and how did they make you feel? Here are a few tips. Posture. To engage your audience and convey confidence. Relax. Lean slightly towards your audience. Number two, gestures. Use your hands to support what you're trying to say. For example, on the one hand and on the other hand, avoid folding your arms and putting them in your pockets or behind your back. Facial expressions, remember to smile. It makes people feel welcome and demonstrates your passion for what you're speaking about. Number four, eye contact for a small group. I make eye contact with each participant for a large group, divide the room into small groups and divide your focus between them. I'm now going to hand over to Jessica for section number seven. Thank you. Now it's your turn. This challenge builds on the speaking and listening sessions that you have completed in class. What is the challenge? Think of someone who you're being taught about at school. Maybe a king you're learning about in history, or a character from a book you're reading for English classes. Here are some suggestions. King Henry VIII, Romeo Montague, and many other characters that may come to mind. From this, you will choose someone, the person or the character. You'll record and submit a short 30 second presentation in the first person to summarise who you are and why it is important that you are being taught about them. Remember, you're pretending to be that person. You might want to start off by introducing who you are. For example, I am King Henry VIII. Think about what you've learned about in this session. Use the speaking techniques. Remember the three P's that Ellen went through? We also suggest you use ChatterPix to make your recordings. We're looking forward to hearing all of your recordings. Please pause and come back when you're ready. Now we're going to reflect on everything that we've been through today. How have you demonstrated your listening and speaking? Use the reflection questions below to think about how you have used the skill of listening and speaking. Pick from the list to answer. Why do you think eye contact is important to show you are listening? Why is tone an important part of speaking? What is the effect of positive body language both when speaking and listening? Now it's time to look back on how confident you feel. Let's revisit our confidence ratings in the skills of both speaking and listening from the beginning of the session. Re rate you're confidence on a scale of one to five where one is not at all confident and five is very confident. How confident do you feel now? Has this changed at all? Can you explain why you feel that this has changed? We really hope you enjoyed this session on the skills of speaking and listening. If you are keen to find out more ways to practise this skill, here is the task you can take away and try outside the classroom. We would love to hear your reflections and see your learning following this section. To share this with us, your teacher can submit your ideas via email and we look at all submissions that we get. So I just wanted to say thank you all for joining this session and we really enjoyed going through this session with you. Thank you again from Jessica and I, and on behalf of PWC.

Session 7 - Creativity | Year 7-9

Hi everyone, and a very warm welcome to this week's session of PWC's Virtual School Series focusing on the skill of creativity. My name is George and I work in the PWC Public Sector Enterprise Transformation Team, aligned to our consulting line of service. That means I work with a range of clients across both central and local government, helping them solve some of the complex problems that they face in today's society. My name is Sophie. I work in the marketing department at PWC aligned to the tax line of service. This means that I work with our partners and directors in this part of the business to develop content and strategies to promote and sell our products and services to current and prospective clients. As I've already mentioned in today's session, we're going to cover the creativity skill. But here's just a quick run through of the agenda for today. Firstly, we're going to be looking at what is creativity? Why is creativity important? Developing ideas, using a mind map. Then we're going to launch into a group challenge. Then we're finally just going to spend a bit of time reflecting on the session and thinking about what we've learned. The only thing you'll need for this session is a piece of paper and a pen to jot down your thoughts. Teachers, you may want to provide some bigger sheets of paper, maybe A3 size and some colour pens just for pupils when they're doing the mind map. Firstly, before we get into anything else, we want to give you an introduction to focus on the skill for the session. There are eight essential skills which are key to ensuring everyone is successful in their education, careers, and wider life. They are so important due to their transferability, meaning that you can use them in a wide range of different settings. The skills builder universal framework helps to break down each of these skills into progressive stages and steps so that we can all understand exactly what they mean and how to build them. In this session, we're going to focus on creativity. And this can be broken down into four stages, generating ideas, developing ideas, innovating effectively, and supporting others to innovate. What do we mean when we talk about creativity. Teachers, If you could now pause the video and ask those in your classroom to discuss what they think they understand creativity as. You can use the prompts on screen to get things going. I hope that conversation and discussion was useful. Creativity is defined by the universal framework as the use of imagination and the generation of new ideas. Sophie is now going to give us an example of how they use creativity in their job. I use creativity a lot in my role in marketing. Sometimes it's in a very traditional sense. So it might be helping to make videos or adverts, or editing social media content so that it's engaging and interesting. But other times, it might be that my stakeholders at PWC have come to me with a problem or a challenge. And there's not a straightforward solution. So I need to think creatively about how I help them to meet their objectives. So that might be being creative with how we use our budget. It might be the process we follow doing things a bit differently. Or it might be engaging people differently to get the end result we want. But all of those things show creativity. How confident do you feel with the creativity skill? I'd like you to rate your confidence on a scale of one to five, where one is not confident at all and five is very confident. Make sure you are being reflective about times you have used this skill, so your rating is accurate. Remember, we all have skills that we feel less confident with and would like to get better at. This is completely normal and this session is designed to help you improve your creativity skill. Now, why is creativity important? George has just told us about what creativity is, but now we need to think about why it is so important, especially in our day to day lives. Creativity isn't just about art, or music, or performance, or the things you traditionally associate with the word creative. It can be found anywhere in life, from school to our personal lives to the workplace. Creativity is important because we need it every time we want to do something new or to make something better. Or to imagine something that someone is telling us that we can't directly see for ourselves. As I mentioned before, for my role in marketing, creativity is really important and it's a skill I use a lot. A few examples of times that you might use creativity could be when you plan on going somewhere, you might imagine what it would be like to go there and how you might feel when you get there and whether you'd enjoy it or not. You might think about something you want to make. You might think about what the end result might look like and the steps you might take to get there. Or perhaps you've got a routine at home or at school that you want to change. By doing this, you're being creative because you're generating new ideas and working towards ways to make it better. All of these are examples of creativity and creative thinking. Using the skill of creativity has so many benefits. It's helpful for us to know and recognise when we're being creative, so that we can make links between different areas of our work and our lives. We can all be guilty of treating school or work as completely separate to our wider lives as if there's no overlap at all. But if you're thinking about this from a creative point of view, it can be very wasteful. There's often inspiration cutting across both areas. We just have to look for it. Here's an example for you to think about. Imagine you come up with a new way to organise your timetable at school. Colour coding your subjects, so you can see what you've got coming up on a certain day just by glancing at it. Could you think of a way that you might be able to use this same approach at home. Teachers, can I ask you now to pause the video for a sec so that students can discuss how they might implement a similar system to this in their personal lives. It might be around managing household chores, social events, sports events, or something else. Over to you. We're now going to look at developing ideas using a mind map. As we develop our creativity, we want to be able to not only generate lots of ideas, but to start to link them and expand on our thinking. Creative tools are methods that support creativity. That is, they support you to use your imagination, generate something new, and work towards an outcome. A mind map is a simple creative tool to explore a particular idea. It starts with a single theme or question in the middle of the page called the stimulus. Initial ideas then fan out from that stimulus. Lines are drawn between the ideas and the stimulus to show that they are linked. There might also be further ideas or connections that come from those ideas. And links between them can also be linked with arrows. Why are mind maps useful? Mind maps come with several key benefits, and they are extremely flexible and can be used in a wide range of different scenarios. The first is that they're speedy, They are quick to create and can be made using a pen and paper or using mind mapping software to organise your thought. They're adaptable, unlike writing in sentences, they allow for more flexible thinking. Because ideas can be arranged and linked in different ways, it's easy to add more thought later and come back to it. They're sharable, so because mind maps are widely used, they can be easily communicated, and it's possible to use a mind map as a visual to support an explanation to someone else. Finally, they support working together. Since mind maps are not linear, there are a great collaboration tool as several people working together can all write their ideas onto a single mind map. This can be a great way of getting a lot of different ideas quickly, clearly and easily. As we've just seen, mind maps are very useful tools. But like everything, they have their limitations. This is because they only focus on one stimulus or idea and work out from there. It's important to be aware of other creative tools too. You can see a few examples on screen. Now we have concept maps, which take different ideas and then look at the connections between them. Rather than starting with a central stimulus, like a mind map. Concept maps have a hierarchical structure which means different levels that cover different concepts. It might include labels on their linking lines to explain what the connection is between those ideas. We also have diagrams or charts which help us to explore ideas further and dig into data and fuller explanations. We also have flow charts which help us consider how ideas might link together. Again, these help to add clarity about what the connection is between different ideas. It can sometimes be tricky deciding which visual tool to use, but often you'll find that one tool better suits a creative process than another. From the four visual creative tools we've discussed in this session, we'd like you to decide which best might suit each of the following. Generating ideas to improve the classroom environment in school. Designing a process to complete your homework on time. Analysing which year group has had the best attendance this term. Or exploring the relationship between animals in an ecosystem in a science lesson. Teachers, could I ask you to pause the video, please, so that students have two or three minutes to discuss in a group, all of these ideas and feedback their ideas to each other. How is that discussion. Now, lots of this is personal preference. It's important to remember there's no one correct answer here. But we would suggest trying the following options first. If you're trying to generate ideas to improve the classroom environment in school, given that you're coming up with ideas based around one single stimulus, a mind map might be the best option. If you were designing a process to complete your homework on time. Given that's process driven, a flow chart would probably make sense here. Analysing which year group has had the best attendance is all about finding out more using data. In this instance, we'd suggest a diagram to help explore this information. Finally, exploring the relationship between animals in an ecosystem. Given that ecosystems are based on connections, and links between organisms, a concept map would work really well here. We're now going to go into the challenge section of the session. Mind maps are extremely useful when we are considering an expansive question with lots of different avenues to explore. In groups of three, you are going to create a mind map to explore the question, how can we combat climate change? I'd like you to start by coming up with some different idea categories, such as actions a individual can do, an organisation can do, and a large corporation can do. Or you could look at factors that affect the oceans, forests, and cities. Then generate some further ideas branching off of these categories. Make sure you are thinking about how these ideas link together and you're representing this on your mind map. Teachers, I would now ask you to pause the video to allow students to create their mind map. I hope you found that challenge fun and enjoyed creating your mind maps. We've covered a lot in this session and it's now time to reflect on everything that we've learned. You can see a list on screen here. Please take a moment to reflect on one of the questions on the list. To reflect on the skill of creativity from thinking about these things today. What have you now learned? Do you remember the confidence scale we spoke about at the start of the session? Let's revisit that. Following our discussion today, can you re rate your confidence in creativity? Think about where you are on a scale of one to five where one is not at all confident and five is very confident. How confident you now feel? Has this changed at all? Can you explain why this might have changed since the start of the session? If you pause for a few moments to think about that. That's us coming to an end. We hope you have enjoyed this session on the skill of creativity. If you are keen to find more ways to practise these skills, here is a paper clip related task on screen that you can take away and try outside of the classroom. We would love to hear your reflections and see your learning following this session. To share this with us, your teacher can submit your ideas via email. We do look at all of these submissions. Please try and submit as many as possible. This is the submission criteria that we'll be judging all of the entries on. Has the student generated a range of different ideas for how they could use a paper clip? Has the student represented these ideas using a mind map? Has the student made links between the ideas on their mind map and explained how this helped them develop ideas further? Once again, thank you for taking part in this week's session and we hope you've enjoyed it. Join us for our final session in the series, which is all around the skill of staying positive. Thank you from us here at PwC.