OSFC hosts OxNet Study Skills Day

On Thursday 8 February, Oldham Sixth Form College was delighted to play host to Pembroke College, Oxford University, for their OxNet English Study Skills Day for 15 talented students selected from the North West and London.

OxNet is a prestigious, well-established and ‘unashamedly academic’ outreach programme organised by Pembroke College with a number of subject strands - in English, Humanities and Social Sciences, Philosophy and World Religions, Languages, and Science. Students have to apply for places on these highly competitive programmes and this year over 800 students submitted applications for the 80 places.

The Study Skills Days are the first major event in the OxNet programme calendar and, for the first time ever, these were hosted outside of Oxford. Oldham Sixth Form College was selected for the English event, as the English OxNet Course Leader is Dr Richard Lee, Assistant Principal at OSFC. The Study Skills Day gave the 15 students an opportunity to meet in-person, to develop their skills of literary analysis, and to discuss new ideas. The students enjoyed 2 interactive lectures. The first was delivered by the Director of OxNet, Dr Peter Claus, who had travelled up from Oxford for the event, and focussed on preparing students for the academic demands of the programme and of university. The second lecture came from Dr Lee and concerned ‘Poetry at the abolition of the British slave trade’, connecting with the postcolonial themes of the English seminar series.

Dr Lee declared the day a great success:

It was a privilege for OSFC to host this event for the first time and it was a big vote of confidence that Oxford University came to us. The day itself was fantastic, with the new cohort of students getting fully involved in all the activities. I am greatly looking forward to working with them in the forthcoming seminars.

3 of the 15 English students are current OSFC Year 12s. Daisy Greenwood (formerly of The Radclyffe School), Miranda Lowe (Saddleworth School) and Niamh Roberts (Waterhead Academy) thought it was ‘great to meet everyone’, while the lectures were ‘very interesting and informative’, and the day overall was ‘lots of fun’.