A Love Letter to Reach Out by Nottingham Girls’ High School

Nottingham Girls’ High School has always championed outreach as a way of supporting and collaborating with local city and county schools to share resources, teaching and learning expertise, and provide extraordinary opportunities to children and young people.

Since 2011, Reach Out has engaged with more than 7,000 children from 100 primary schools across academic and enrichment subjects such as Maths, Science, Outdoor Learning, Business and Enterprise, Drama and the Arts, Sport, SEND support workshops, STEM, Computing, DT and Key Skills in Reading and Writing. Reach Out has also enabled more than 800 local children to experience theatre for the first time, both at Nottingham’s Albert Hall and our onsite theatre, The Squire Performing Arts Centre; we’ve sponsored three follow-on projects that include a Culture and Cookery Club, a Diversity and Inclusion Library, and a specialist table top board game project to inspire girls to be leaders in an industry dominated by boys.

During the pandemic, Reach Out continued to engage with its community through the online platform Reach Out Resource Room (RORR) – a specially designed library of resources that included past Reach Out event resources, and wider public accessible resources from HSBC, The Wildlife Trust, BBC and more. This centralised library featured interactive rooms with rotating monthly themes such as Black History Month and Alice in Wonderland Maths.

We are really proud of our contribution to our local Nottinghamshire community and have dedicated more than 3,000 hours combined across staff, student and governors on our outreach events. In particular, our students have had excellent leadership opportunities as Outreach Prefects and Subject Scholars, taking on mentorship roles, social media content creation and takeovers, researching and creating teaching resources, delivering presentations and taking the lead on workshops, visiting schools to support staff with end of year productions, and volunteering on external community events.

Nottingham Girls’ High School is now moving into the next phase of its outreach work, dedicating more time to working with a smaller network of schools on girls-only based STEM. The new project, Bright Girls Bright Futures is a long-term sustainable partnership that will enable schools involved to measure the impact of its work and we are really excited to take this next step which will support girls to succeed.

Bright Girls Bright Futures

BGBF is a STEM focused partnership with two local state-maintained schools with an aim to inspire gifted and talented girls with an interest in STEM to succeed. The partnership is fundamentally about academic excellence but also about fostering inclusion as it offers girls a nurtured journey towards secondary education as well as giving Nottingham Girls’ High School students fantastic leadership opportunities as BGBF Mentors.

Bright Girls Bright Futures will work with the same group of girls from two schools over three years with a new cohort signed up every September. Our NGHS BGBF Mentors will be hand selected by staff based on their progress and attitude to learning. We will specifically select girls who we feel are lacking motivation, self-efficacy, and belonging in their school community as a way of re-energising them and giving them opportunities beyond the classroom environment.

Nurturing the next generation of female leaders and industry experts is part of Nottingham Girls’ High School’s vision of being a progressive, creative and different school. We want to inspire and nurture girls of all ages, and our long-term goal is to provide a full Bright Girls Bright Futures bursary for girls completing the programme and aspiring to be an NGHS student.

Susie Bulling

Partnership Coordinator at Nottingham Girls High School

Trust Consultant (Partnership & Outreach)