It's a new school year with a new educational program for Cobram Anglican Grammar students to take up, as the school begins its inaugural Project Ready program.
Open to Year 10 students, the program is a full-year work readiness and personal development program that gives participants a Certificate II in Active Volunteering.
The program allows students to build confidence, learn and develop new skills.
CAGS Project Ready facilitator Sharon Lee Parker said the program was aimed to help CAGS students become job-ready once leaving secondary education.
“The students learn about themselves a lot,” she said.
“They go out into the community; they have workplace visits. They also have guest speakers that come in and talk about their journeys... and different career paths.”
The completely voluntary program is designed to cater to students who may struggle in traditional classroom settings and, as such, isn’t run like a regular class, with students sitting in circles in an open space and facilitators being referred to by their first names.
Many tasks involve team building and the students have to complete a community project, which will involve the program participants contacting stakeholders.
Project Ready students will also be visiting various workplaces.
“The students will be going to different workplaces to see what that feels and looks like and meeting different people in different fields of work that they may not have thought of before,” Ms Parker said.
“It's a completely flexible, different way of learning."
The program is capped to only 15 students in order to give participants the best opportunity to thrive and is run for the whole day on Fridays instead of regular lessons.
Savannah Kernaghan is one of the students involved in the program.
She chose Project Ready to help direct her into a path post-secondary school and said she was most looking forward to visiting different workplaces.
“I got told that (Project Ready) would help me choose what I want to do when I’m older... I really needed that support in my life,” she said.