Our year in review – the winter edition

27th December 2019

It’s been a busy year for us at Celtic, with lots to celebrate as we reach our 15th Anniversary. It’s important for us to reflect on what we’ve achieved and how we can make further improvements to our services. Here’s a quick timeline of our year in review – the winter edition.

We are taking time to look back at our year in review, for now, we leave you with the winter edition and everything we achieved between January and March 2019.

January

January saw a fantastic start to the year:

• Student numbers were higher than 2018 and we welcomed a great mix of nationalities from Paraguay and Argentina, Saudi Arabia and Brazil to Colombia
• Celtic started to work with the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs. Our combined efforts help unemployed Swiss Nationals to better their English language skills and upskill, helping them back into work.
• We are an ever-growing team and were pleased to welcome Phil as Housekeeper/Handyman and Claire as our HR officer.
• We started recruiting for additional Homestay providers to provide more accommodation for our students across Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan – above all this recruitment drive was a great success with 28 new Homestay families joining us throughout the year.

February

After this, through the cold month of February:

• Celtic worked hard behind the scenes to design a new website for our students. This new website is more accessible, and not to mention more colourful, to help welcome our students to Celtic – we want you to feel welcome from the moment you make contact with us.
• Lena, our Academic intern, joined us from Germany to work with us for 6 weeks; this is a great opportunity for European students to gain experience in a working office environment and enhance their language skills at the same time!
• Our former student support officer, Glesni Jones, welcomed her daughter Cali to the world, extending the Celtic family further.

March

We started to see glimpses of Spring and:

• Teacher Katy gave birth to her baby boy, Noah, in March
• We hosted three student groups in March, these were from Chile, Italy and Japan. Alan worked hard to put together full programmes for each group and we had some exciting feedback about the opportunities we provided.
• Celtic continued to fundraise for charities; for Comic Relief students raised £63.40, and Teacher Clare Jenkins competed in a swimathon for Cancer Research. For this Celtic raised £79.46 – thank you to everyone who donated their time and money to these fantastic causes.
• Students visited Cardiff University for an Open Day to find out what opportunities they might have to study here in the UK.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this short snippet of our year in review – the Winter Edition. Keep your eyes peeled for the next edition that will show you our Spring achievements!