By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
STUDENTS at Fountain Gate Secondary College are no strangers to problem solving.
Mere months since the school’s EPIC team placed second in the International Future Problem Solving world championships in America, another of the school’s teams is proposing significant changes to how soon students are able to access careers guidance.
The new future problem solving team is being overseen by teacher Stephen Hughes and consists of seven Year 8 students who are planning to give their peers access to careers information at a much earlier age.
Mr Hughes said one of the main tasks was to move the office of the school’s career advisor out of the VCE centre and into a more accessible location for younger students.
“The student are looking at how to engage their peers as they found they were not being exposed to career information at a young enough age,” Mr Hughes said.
“These are high achieving kids and they really felt they had a fair idea of what they wanted to do.
“What drives them is the relevance of what’s going on in the classroom.
“Their next idea was to make careers advice and information more accessible to their peers, to Year 8s.
“They’re looking at getting the careers advisor out of the VCE centre and making a new careers centre at the school.
“Other Year 8s can be intimidated by the big kids, so they wanted to move our advisor to a different part of the school.
“They also plan to share this idea with other schools and the broader community.”
Mr Hughes said the Year 8 problem solvers, who had found a source of inspiration in their older peers from the EPIC group, had showed great compassion in investigating their project.
“They are concerned for their peers, and they want them to be engaged,” he said.
Mr Hughes said the plans to move the careers office will hopefully get underway over the Christmas break.
