By Francesca Cullen

The year 12 sixth form went to Ashburnham Place from Wednesday 13 to Friday 15 July for a TOK and UCAS event including self reflection tasks. We stayed at a Christian retreat centre with green surroundings, no technology (apart from the devices we brought) and great weather.

On our first day, we focused on self reflection; we saw that many of us didn’t know exactly what we wanted to do in the future and if we did know what we wanted to do - we were not sure how to reach our goals.

The sixth form students performed several tasks to understand where we want to go in our future, one useful task was to go and have a walk around our beautiful scenery and think carefully to ourselves with no distractions. This was amazing as getting out of the city and having no distractions around you got us all to think cautiously which is something a lot of us cannot do back home because of all the disruptions that constantly surround us.

On the second day, turned out into an entertaining and fantastic day for us all focusing on UCAS. With beautiful weather, we were paired with somebody in our year who is not a close friend or someone who we do not speak to as much, this was because for UCAS it is seen that we have to “sell ourselves” on our personal statements, however, this task was to sell the person you were with. We got an hour to know each other and two minutes each to present our partners to the rest of the year and teachers.

This was a great task because it helped us get close to the person we had to spend our time with. We learnt to acknowledge amazing characteristics about them that you unfortunately previously knew nothing about and were able to speak about these features to everybody else.

During the afternoon, we were then introduced to two of Saint Mary Magdalene Academy’s governors: Rhian Roberts and Kathyrn Davies. Rhian is a manager at BBC Radio Five live and focused her presentation on primary and secondary sources that occur in media and on the radio.

We had a group discussion about the current controversies of ‘The News of the World’ and had the delight to listen to sources that were played on BBC Radio Five. This was a great presentation as we met somebody very experienced in media and changed a few students’ minds in wanting to work for the radio.

We then met Kathyrn, who is a director at Proctor and Gamble, one of the world’s largest corporations, she deals with marketing. Her presentation was based on vocabulary and she engaged the students by assigning each of us with a word from different time eras and we then linked these into groups. Some of these words were a hundred years old that we did not know what they were, an example of this is the word “inebriated” which was the word for drunk! This presentation was very useful as it taught us the effect of language and how we should perceive advertising from how the vocabulary is used.

The third day was our last day at Ashburnham and in the morning we had the pleasure of meeting another one of our governors named Martin Wroe who is a freelance journalist and has worked for the Guardian and the Independent. His presentation was very different to the others; he sat there and explained his point about charity through an ingenious story based through his idea of “Google Existence”. The students were very impressed and were flabbergasted by his creativity; this also made our students perceive writing in a different way and to use similar techniques in the future.

We then had a TOK discussion with all three governors on the question “what makes something convincing” were each governor expressed their thoughts and so did the students, this was useful for our TOK essays which are soon to be written up.

It was then time to have some last minute discussions and head back to London. In conclusion, this trip answered some questions that we were unable to answer in the beginning and brought us closer together whether with students in our years or our teachers and governors.

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