Overview

Comprehensive Life Planning Education (LPE) in the school curriculum plays a significant role in fostering students' whole-person development and lifelong learning capacity. Taking advantage of the opportunities offered by LPE, the Language Learning Support Section (LLSS) has been collaborating with different secondary schools to implement the "Secondary School Student Attachment Programme" since 2014/15.
The programme aims to:

• consolidate and extend students' language learning beyond the classroom;
• equip students with basic work-related skills and instil in them positive work attitudes; and
• foster students' understanding of their own interests and abilities, goal setting and personal planning for further studies and career development.

To deliver LPE within and beyond the language classroom at the senior secondary levels, an integrated approach is adopted in the programme. The LPE core elements (self-understanding, career exploration, career planning and management) have also been realised in the two components of the programme: Classroom learning and workplace learning.

Programmme Highlights

To extend students' learning from the work-related thematic units in the classroom learning component which prepared them for further studies or career development in accordance with their interests, abilities, and orientations, an experiential life-wide learning (LWL) activity, i.e. the workplace learning component, was conducted in an authentic work setting. Selected students from the collaborating schools were enrolled as interns to provide them with authentic career-related experiences. Below shows the details of the LWL activity:

Attachment period: 26-29 June 2023 (4 days)

Internship workplace (Venue): Language Learning Support Section, Education Bureau (Kowloon Tong Education Services Centre)

Interns: Four S4-5 students

Collaborating schools: (in alphabetical order)

• Buddhist Fat Ho Memorial College
• Confucian Tai Shing Ho Kwok Pui Chun College
• Chinese YMCA Secondary School
• Chiu Chow Association Secondary School

Major job tasks:

• Designed online questionnaires and processed relevant data collected
• Drew up and presented an LWL activity proposal
• Conducted career interviews and produced video clips of the interviews
• Wrote photo captions for an event record

Student learning outcomes:

• Improved confidence in using English in real-life work situations
• Enriched English language skills (e.g. oral presentation skills, increased awareness of language accuracy)
• Enhanced self-understanding (e.g. awareness of own strengths, areas for improvement and work preferences)
• Work-related generic skills (e.g. collaboration skills, communication skills, problem solving skills, analytical skills, information technology skills) developed
• Technical skills (e.g. video-editing skills) developed
• Positive work-related values and attitudes (e.g. responsibility, commitment, perseverance, modesty) learnt and demonstrated

Follow-up activity: After completing the job attachment, the student interns would share their workplace learning at school. Such a sharing session would encourage the interns to reflect on the learning process and review their personal development plans/goals, fostering the development of learning and/or career aspiration. In addition, other students may learn from the student interns' experiences and reflect on their own career planning.