School should be the ‘best days of your life’ and in many cases that is true. Every year, our Year 11 and Year 13 leavers look back on amazing experiences and wonderful trips, whether that be holding a giant millipede in a Year 7 Zoolabs experience or memories of the annual Year 9 Newquay trip.

Everything we do in school, is preparing you for life after Myton, helping you develop the skills and attributes that will ensure you are ready for the next stage of your life in modern Britain, whether that be ongoing education, apprenticeships or the world of work. Our core values of understand, value and respect go a long way to prepare you for the wider world, but you will also need many other characteristics, including resilience, ambition and tolerance, and our ’50 Things’ challenge is designed to suggest ways you can develop and refine these characteristics during your time with us, whilst having fun along the way.

The activities suggested are intentionally challenging; to complete them will require courage, teamwork, planning and tenacity. In undertaking them, you will have to try things that are new, you will learn things about yourself and your friends and you will gain invaluable experiences that will persuade others of your potential. For our part, we promise to provide experiences throughout your time at Myton that will enable you to meet these challenges.

As you reach the end of your time with us, we will work with you to write a personal statement and CV, ready for the next phase of your life. Completing elements of the ‘50 things’ challenge will ensure you are able to write about the core values that employers and university admissions tutors are looking for and will provide you with concrete examples of when you have demonstrated key competencies like resilience, team-working, independence, innovation, creativity, leadership and problem solving.

50 Things website

Students can use the website: www.mystickers.co.uk to log all the challenges they complete.

How to log into 50 Things website

Themes

Our ‘50 Things’ challenge has four themes, each of which will ensure you learn something new and different:

Challenge yourself/Be resilient

It is good to take yourself out of your comfort zone, always doing things you know you can do might make things feel easy, but you miss out on so much. Challenging yourself means you learn a lot about yourself; it might take determination to overcome some physical difficulties or psychological barriers, but pushing yourself to the edge and doing it provides a real sense of achievement AND helps you grow as a person.

1. Swim in a lake, river or the sea
2. Climb a mountain
3. Walk more than 30,000 steps in one day
4. Learn to navigate: complete an orienteering course or Bronze Duke of Edinburgh
5. Learn a new skill: e.g. to play chess or complete a Rubik’s Cube
6. Visit a foreign city and speak the language
7. Hold an animal that really scares you
8. Complete an escape room challenge
9. Play a musical instrument to at least grade 3
10. Learn to say hello and count to ten in 10 other languages
11. Walk or cycle to school every day for a half term
12. Plant it, grow it, eat it – grow your own food
13. Go 48 hours without a screen
14. Crack a code, or write your own
15. Complete a bike/road safety course
16. Try an extreme sport

Modern British Values/Citizenship

British Values are the values that underpin our society. Understanding these allows us all to function together and work co-operatively and recognise the value of others within our diverse society.

1. Take part in National Citizen Service
2. Go to the theatre, a place of worship, an art gallery, a museum AND a public library
3. Meet, question and shake hands with a famous poet or author or a member of the armed or emergency services
4. Visit a Holocaust Memorial or site, e.g. Auschwitz
5. Listen to and question an elected official/minister
6. Visit the Houses of Parliament
7. Vote: in a school election/for an MYP
8. Pay your respects: Visit and reflect at a War Memorial site, eg the National Arboretum

Be selfless – charity, community and the environment

An essential quality of any good citizen and human being is to consider the needs of others, especially those less fortunate than ourselves. Another essential quality is to reflect and act on the way we use the natural world and the resources around us, preserving the world for future generations.

1. Get a first aid qualification
2. Send a letter or postcard to a prisoner of conscience through Amnesty International
3. Help the homeless: Choose to give 10% of your monthly income to a homeless charity or go without your lunch and use the money to buy a homeless person food/drink
4. Complete 50 hours volunteering at a charity shop/hospice/food bank/homeless shelter/soup kitchen
5. Cook a 3-course meal for your parents/carers on a special occasion
6. Support your Primary School for 5 days
7. Help at home: Tidy the kitchen & load the dishwasher/wash up every day for a month
8. Be a vegetarian or vegan for a week
9. Avoid using plastic for a week
10. Join and support a community clean-up campaign
11. Act as an official buddy/coach/mentor for a younger student
12. Devise and lead a sponsorship campaign
13. Represent the school: in an external event, as a student guide, on open day, transition day or evening event

Learn and develop work skills/Be innovative and creative

When you leave Myton, you will sooner or later need to join the world of work. Employers look for students with academic qualifications as part of their selection process, but they are most crucially interested in the characteristics, personality and ‘soft skills’ that you have that mean you are able to work alongside others.

1. Cook on a camp fire
2. Visit a University and attend a lecture
3. Visit a local business/employer
4. Complete at least five days of work experience
5. Speak in public/give a presentation
6. Get a part time job
7. Be an entrepreneur: Turn £10 into £100
8. Have an awesome story or poem you’ve written published
9. Plan, shoot and edit a short film
10. Write a budget for your monthly income/expenditure and stick to it!
11. Make a discovery: geocache, fossil, planet, something in a rock pool
12. Be creative in public: build a snow or sand/beach sculpture or perform a piece of drama/music on stage
13. Get technical: build and race a rocket car, write your own app or computer program, build a computer or robot