TOP Link Conference

On the 12^th February, 23 year 12 CSLA and 3 year 11 JSLA leaders travelled to Benham Sports Centre to host the TOPLink conference 2010. Roade School was chosen to run the event by the Youth Sport Trust, after successfully running the event last year. 73 year 9 and 10 young leaders attended from 17 of schools across the county to improve their leadership skills and to the day also helped the leaders of Roade school to complete the CSLA course.

The leaders from our school were split into three groups who organised and ran the event themselves. The Overall Management Team arranged the welcoming reception, opening and closing ceremony and the teacher’s session. They encouraged and helped the teachers with ideas of how to promote the Olympics in their school, then used these ideas and participated in a TOPLink version of the Dragon’s Den; presenting to the ‘Dragon’s’ i.e. the overall management team with prizes of signed tennis balls by Mike Mullen.

The Event management team helped to organise the equipment and ran the administration for the day holding the whole event together and making sure it ran smoothly.

Finally, the Activities Team were working with Step In leaders aged 13 – 15 to help, advise and train them on how to be an excellent leader and take these skills back to their schools. Roade Leaders led them in a wide variety of fun activities to make them aware of fair play, safety, organisation and games that can be made accessible to everyone in order to improve their general leading skills.

The TOPLink Conference welcomed the Athlete Role Model (A.R.M) Mike Mullen, a world champion BMX Rider who described the event as having, “A positive atmosphere. They are very organised, enthusiastic and confident leaders.” He gave an inspiring speech to open the conference and spent time with both leaders and teachers on the day.

The young leaders also had help from the Roade School teachers. This years event was Mrs Lee’s second TOPLink conference and she said, “What I have been impressed about is the in which I have had so little to do. The TOPLink leaders have done all the work before they had to be asked and coming up so many of the ideas we have used today. Well done to everybody, I’m so proud of them.” We were also joined by Mrs England and Mrs Tuplin who commented saying, “I didn’t think it was possible, but this year has been bigger and better than before. This is down to the quality of the leaders we had this year running the event.”

Overall, the second TOPLink conference that Roade School Sports College has run was a success. In order to celebrate this achievement, awards were given out for The Best Leading Group which were presented to Group 4, lead by Beth Goodburn and Bethan Halder, and for The Outstanding Leaders which were awarded to Becci Wade and Pippa Cairns. The ‘Step In Leaders’ were also presented with The Best Boy and The Best Girl Leader awards.  The CSLA leaders did a brilliant job of running and organising the event as well as teaching the younger leaders how to make the most their leading opportunities which certainly led to a lot of fun along the way.