Independent university workshops for schools and colleges
Inspiring, informative, and interactive delivery by university experts
Inspiring, informative, and interactive delivery by university experts
Would you like to raise the aspirations of your school and college students? Perhaps they would like more information about the university application process, writing a strong personal statement, or even just university life itself?
UniTasterDays provides inspiring, informative, and interactive workshops for school and college students. These are independent sessions, designed to share insights and advice about higher education, without any bias towards a particular university.
Our aspirational workshops are delivered by university experts. Each practitioner has an enhanced DBS disclosure, and a wealth of experience working at UK universities, supporting students with the university decisions ahead of them.
Our workshops are available for groups of up to 40 students, ranging from Year 7 to Year 13. They can be delivered as one-off interventions, or as part of a year-long school aspiration-raising programme. We can also deliver to full year groups, but smaller sessions are recommended to maximise interactivity and impact.
Our workshops have an aspirational and motivational structure. This ensures students leave the session knowing why university might be a great future choice for them, and how they can prepare for their future university decisions right away.
They are designed to engage students. Each workshop includes hands-on activities and group exercises throughout, using interactive technology where possible. The content is created bespoke for each year group, and your own needs. Popular topics include:
Founder and Director, UniTasterDays
Jon has built a career in higher education, with over 10 years of experience at three universities and working with thousands of students across the UK. In 2012, he founded UniTasterDays to enhance school and college engagement with universities.
A strong advocate for university guidance, Jon has been featured by Which? University, the CDI, and National Careers Week. He frequently speaks at teacher and adviser conferences and has extensive experience delivering independent university workshops. Jon also hosts two university podcasts: The Uni Guide Podcast and The One in Five Podcast.
UniTasterDays is a member of Careers England, an affiliate member of the Career Development Institute, and a collaborative partner of HELOA.
Head of Community Engagement, UniTasterDays
Simon Fairbanks has almost 20 years of experience in the higher education sector. This includes student recruitment roles at four different universities in the UK. Simon has also worked for Pickle Jar Communications, an education sector consultancy. He helped schools, colleges, and universities share their stories through digital communications.
Simon is an international speaker. He has delivered engaging talks and workshops at a variety of education sector conferences, including CASE, ContentEd, EFMD, IDPE, FindAUniversity, HELOA, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, and UniTasterDays. He was Chair of the Newcomers Track at CASE Europe Annual Conference from 2020 to 2023.
Simon is passionate about supporting and engaging young people. He was a school governor for four years, a regular volunteer with Go Beyond, and has recently started volunteering with a local cub scout group. As a published author, Simon is particularly interested in using storytelling to inspire a love for education.
The fully inclusive general charges for each school or college are outlined below:
Sessions delivered on the same day (exc VAT):
UniTasterDays are also happy to discuss potential funding applications and funding sources to allow activity to be funded as part of a year-long aspiration raising programme.
If you don't have any budget for independent UniTasterDays workshops, please do remember that universities offer great events too, the vast majority of which will be free of charge. You can browse these on the UniTasterDays website.
Please contact [email protected] if you would like to find out more about our workshops and make a booking. Please also familiarise yourself with our booking and cancellation policy prior to making a booking.
A selection of our popular workshops for students, parents, and school staff are listed below. We also welcome requests for topics not currently listed.
These workshops are flexible to meet your timetable, and can be anywhere between 45 minutes and 90 minutes in length to suit your timetable.
This session can range from 30 minutes to half a day depending on your required level of detail.
This session lasts for 30 minutes.
A successful and very informative presentation to our Year 11 students, with lots of useful advice for them to act on now and going forward.
An informative and provoking workshop which motivated the students to really think about the possibility of going to university in the future.
An engaging session which kept the students interested and increased awareness of a number of issues. Well organised and thoroughly professional.
The interactive presentation helped to inspire our young people and helped them to understand the importance of choosing the right GCSE's and introduced the idea of university afterwards. Highly recommended.
They are still talking about how useful the talks were, and I am delighted that they got the chance to actually begin some work on a personal statement - marvellous.
I would not change a thing. It was brilliant.