WPR Puts PR on the Curriculum

A team of PR, social media and design experts from Birmingham-based PR and social media agency WPR returned to the classroom this week to give Year 8 pupils at Alderbrook School an insight into future career paths.

The visit, ahead of National Careers Week, saw the team run a careers day to help students understand the many facets to a career in PR. Tasked with responding to a brief for a fictional client, pupils were asked to identify a target audience, recommend a celebrity or influencer to work with, and devise a PR stunt, event idea and social media content, to create an integrated campaign.

Now into its second year, WPR’s collaboration with Alderbrook School is the first employer partnership of its kind in the region.

Rebecca Williams, director of people and planning, said: “There are many benefits to forging practical, meaningful partnerships between business and education. We often hear it said by business leaders that there’s a disconnect between the skills taught in the classroom and what’s needed in the workplace. And we know from the CIPR’s Levelling Up the Public Relations Profession report that most PR professionals only learn about PR careers at university or when entering the working world. In an industry that also needs to increase diversity, there’s a real necessity to reach a wider group of people earlier in their lives.

“Our employer partnership with Alderbrook School puts information about communications careers directly in front of secondary school-age pupils at least once a year, every year. We’re introducing a range of career paths to young people who might never have considered our industry, and equipping them with transferable skills for whatever their future holds.”

In addition to annual careers days, WPR has delivered workshops, mentored sixth-formers, hosted mock interviews and devised projects to equip students with valuable skills, including a design challenge for GCSE iMedia students and creative writing tasks for the Year 7 English curriculum.

Tom Coggan, assistant head at Alderbrook School, said: “The WPR team is so engaging and refreshing. We can feel how invested they are in the partnership, and the students love them. They have a way of communicating with our young people that delivers real impact.”

Following the recent careers day, 76% of pupils said it had made them think about their career choices, 100% said the day made them understand careers in PR and 93% thought it had helped them understand different types of job roles within any business.

The Alderbrook School partnership is just one strand of WPR’s outreach activity, which in the past year has seen the team give more than 25 talks to schools, colleges and universities around the West Midlands, reaching more than 2,000 young people.