iDEA is a fantastic opportunity for students to really engage in their skills and we decided to have it as an enrichment opportunity for all students to gain access to. We then worked with the council to promote it to a wider range of students. I heard about it through assembly. We were being introduced to digital skills and I thought that would be a great idea to keep up-to-date with my skills. It shows you internet skills and things on the computer that you don’t usually get taught. My friend was doing it while I was studying, and I asked what she was doing. She said It’s just a fun way to spend your time if you didn’t have any revision to do. We promoted it through assemblies, and the library teams they supported it their e-ambassadors, students who wanted to develop digital skills specifically. The students come in and they have to login to the idea award if they’ve not done that before and we indicate the e-safety badges for them to do. Obviously, it’s really important that the students have some sort of grounding in the importance of e-safety. Perhaps in the early days it was a bit more kind of like tell them about the dangers whereas now it’s kind of showing them the positive side, of developing their digital literacy. I work with lots of the students that have got needs like dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism, things like that. They can find it quite difficult to move at pace in a classroom. It allows them to work through things more slowly, there’s no real time pressures for a lot of the things. They can read at the rate that they read at and feel a lot more comfortable with the situation. The hope is that once they get a taste of it they will want to go on and do more. I completed all the badges on the bronze so I decided I might as well finish the silver. I’ve done a few of the badges just so that I know what I’m talking about… I’ve done the Bronze. I have started the silver. I’ve got my silver award. It actually showed me a lot of things that I didn’t know which surprised me because I guess you have a preconception about your own technology skills and things, but I learnt quite a few things that I didn’t know. From a careers perspective, final year students apply for university and they look for apprenticeship opportunities and what the iDEA award can do is they can enhance their digital skills and evidence them quite well through their badges and certificates if they achieve either bronze or silver. It also provides such very important skills which are required in the workplace such as communication and teamwork. Nowadays teamwork is probably vital for most jobs. I hope that they are skills that I will use in my later life. It’s definitely improved my confidence. I even added that to my personal statement and that really gave me a huge edge over other students as well. It’s fantastic.