That’s it, she’s all done! Rubi has completed school. She took her final GCSE on 16th June and left school.
What a milestone. Now we just have to think about next steps. I’ve always said that making this choice at 16 years old seems ridiculous. HOW is a 16-year old meant to know what career they would like when they have barely lived?
We’ve had many conversations with Rubi about what she would like to do. Rubi made the decision that she would like an apprenticeship. She decided on Sports Coaching, however, not many places offer an apprenticeship in Sports. She attended two interviews for WBA foundation to see if she could join their apprenticeship program. Unfortunately, they only had 2 spots available and over 40 people applied. Rubi was not selected. She was gutted. They gave excellent feedback on what she could work on if she wanted to apply in the future.
We then had to have a think about what pathway she would want to take next. I asked her what kind of role she would want, office, accounts, retail, hospitality, construction, engineering. She immediately ruled out anything to do with office and accounts as these were not her strong points. She wanted a physical job. With her uncles and Gramps working in the construction industry, we may have been able to get her in as a carpenter or brick layer. I was honest with her and said there may have been a possibility it wouldn’t work for her, due to the hours and she said maybe not then.
We went and saw Grandma and she told Rubi all about her being a Mechanical Engineer. We know all about mechanical engineering as this is what Troy does. Grandma was so happy when Rubi said she would look into it. “I knew one of you would follow in my footsteps”. We got home and spoke to Troy about it. We then looked at apprenticeships within the area.
A company called MGTS offer help with obtaining an apprenticeship in engineering. While helping her fill out the application she said “don’t know why we are doing this, I’ll probably fail anyway” which prompted me to ask why she was saying that. It turns out that a few teachers at her school had been telling year 11 students (midway through taking their GCSE’s) that they were going to fail their GSCE’s and fail at life. I BEG YOU’RE PARDON? I was absolutely livid! (This resulted in me writing a rather lengthy email to the head teacher!). We convinced Rubi to continue with the application.
The next day she gets an email to take their aptitude test! She didn’t have a clue what this was, and we explained its to show you understand what work you will be doing. So, that night we sat down with the laptop and loaded it up. She needed to score above 70% to be considered for the apprenticeship. No pressure! There were 62 questions, and you had 60 minutes to answer them. We started going through them and gave her a little help with words she might not have got and managed to get it done with 8 minutes to spare. The results were instantaneous… she PASSED with 79%. Absolutely brilliant! Super proud of her!
Now she’s looking for jobs in our local area and will hopefully be set up with an apprenticeship before the end of summer. She’s currently enjoying the nice weather and topping up her tan.