For the first time ever, the Corpus Admissions team has headed up to the North-East to deliver a Teacher Conference to two dozen local teachers from 20 different schools and other organisations at Harton Academy in South Shields, Tyne and Wear.

Admissions Tutor Dr Jo Willmott, Undergraduate Admissions Manager Naomi Walker-Pearl, Fellow and Director of Recruitment, Admissions and Participation Mike Nicholson joined Elaine Effard, the College's Access and Outreach Coordinator based in the North-East for a day-long conference with local teachers. They were joined by Matthew Harper and Christopher Burlinson, Admissions Tutors from Jesus College. 

Mike Nicholson spoke with the teachers about the admissions process at Cambridge, and there were specialist sessions on STEM and Arts & Humanities Admissions Assessment and Interviews. Elaine spoke about academic advice for younger students (many outreach programmes focus only on Year 12 students, which can be a missed opportunity for earlier preparation). A further session on super-curricular activity, such as our own Pelican Programme was delivered by Elaine and Christopher.

Naomi said of the day, "Elaine did a fantastic job organising a really comprehensive programme for the network she has been building in the year since she took on the role. The teachers were really engaged, asked great questions and we got the impression that they will have gone away with more confidence to advise their students about applying to Cambridge. It was also really great to collaborate with our colleagues from Jesus College for this conference."

Photo at right: Elaine points to a photo of her younger self, a former student at Harton Academy.