Close links with employers can pay dividends for schools and colleges in terms of introducing young people to the working world and to the skills and qualities that will make them employable in the future, as Karleeen Dowden explains.

Inspiring their future

The Department for Education (DfE) has finally published its long-awaited fresh guidance on careers for young people.

Now titled Careers Guidance and Inspiration in Schools (www.gov.uk/government/publications/careers-guidance-for-young-peoplein-schools) it replaces The Duty to Secure Independent and Impartial Careers Guidance for Young People in Schools issued in March 2013.

The new version has a smaller and catchier title but is much larger in content and detail and, at first glance, seems to have addressed the recommendation made by Ofsted’s Going in the Right Direction report (September 2013) that the DfE should provide clear and more explicit guidance to schools on what constitutes a comprehensive guidance strategy; how to secure independent, external careers guidance; and how to monitor the impact of the provision effectively.

Disappointingly, it does not meet the expectations of many schools in terms of what they had hoped the guidance would include. It also makes very little reference to face-to-face careers advice for young people by professional careers advisers.

But the guidance is very strong in relation to employer engagement – rightly so, given that youth unemployment remains a national concern and many business organisations, including the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), continue to voice their concerns over the lack of work-readiness of young people. 

The UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) stated in their Business and Schools: Building the world of work together report in April 2012 that “[a]wareness and understanding of the world of work is integral to the delivery of education and is best achieved through business and schools working in partnership”.

Engagement strategies

At the Sirius Academy in Hull, for example, Principal Cathy Taylor has been a champion of closer education– employer working from the beginning. She views these links as crucial in an area that has one of the largest youth unemployment rates in the country.

“As an ‘outstanding’ academy we support our students in every way we can with present activities and, as importantly, future prospects,” Cathy says. “Working closely with employers is a crucial element in this process.”

The academy has employer links on a number of projects. They include a partnership with BP Orange Project, which highlights the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers for students on the Humber estuary, as well as one-off projects providing interviews and mentors for Year 11s.

“We have had expert advice to help set up the ‘Sirius Radio Station’ and assistance with the wider range of enterprise activities which take place in the academy,” Cathy adds. “Local employers have brought in a power-boat and their new range of motor cars to stimulate cross-curricular activities.

“We are one of the first academies in Hull to be involved in the Business in the Community (BITC) programme and work very closely with KCom, the national communications company of KC Stadium fame, who have been involved in promoting employability skills to our Year 9 and 10 students. They in turn have helped the company with advice in reaching new young customers in the fast-changing world of social media.”

The academy has welcomed the new DfE guidelines on the basis that employer links are ‘good’ per se but Cathy emphasises that the work is time-consuming and has implications in terms of staff and financial resources.

That view is shared by many school leaders who point to the challenges of developing and implementing employer engagement, including the amount of time it takes to generate employer links.

The charity Inspiring the Future (www.inspiringthefuture.org) helps schools to develop employer links, offering a free, easy-to-use service for recruiting volunteers from all professions, jobs and sectors to give students first-hand career insights. It currently has more than 15,000 registered volunteers from businesses and whom schools can link to via an online portal and invite in to school to deliver a range of activities.

‘Big picture’

Another organisation committed to careers education is Fareham Academy in Hampshire where Principal Nadine Powrie believes that “students value careers education because it supports them in making informed decisions about their future”. Fareham has a strong working relationship with the Education Business Partnership (EBP), which they use to deliver one-to-one and group careers advice. But they also reach out to students as young as Year 7, providing careers information through detailed schemes of work in each department that are embedded into lesson plans.

Teaching staff encourage students to talk about the ‘big picture’ and how each lesson will add to their employability skills. The strength of the careers information and guidance has helped to give the academy an outstanding track record with 100 per cent of their students leaving for full-time education, employment or training.

At the end of Year 10, each student completes one week’s quality work experience, preparing for it with a mock interview day, led by the EBP who bring professionals into school. It is followed up with an evaluation of their performance and the skills that they have learned. “Our tutors play a pivotal role in this. We also have an ‘enterprise week’ in each academic year where each tutor group has two weeks to raise as much money as possible with a starting fund of a £20 note. It is no surprise that some of our more kinaesthetic learners excel at this,” says Nadine.

Research by the Education and Employers Taskforce has explored the strategic uses of employer engagement to support pupils’ learning and progression. In a survey, the taskforce asked nearly a thousand 19 to 24 year-olds on how many different occasions they remembered employer involvement when they were at school. The responses showed a strong correlation between the number of occasions a young person had been exposed to employer activities and the likelihood of them becoming NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). Of the young people who did not remember any involvement with employers, 26 per cent were NEET, compared with just 4 per cent of those who could remember being involved with employers on more than four occasions.

It offers further evidence that school-meditated employer engagement is important and, in particular, can enhance the school-to-work transition for young people.

Changing labour market

As the labour market continues to change at a rapid pace, where there are jobs out there that did not exist five years ago, and where there will be jobs in two years that we have not heard of today, employers play a crucial role in providing first-hand, up-to-date labour market information. Young people need to be aware of the growth areas in the labour market to help them make informed choices when looking at future careers options.

Unfortunately, too many young people want to be what they can see and since many young people, in particular the most disadvantaged, are not exposed to a wide range of careers through their family networks, they tend to be heavily influenced by external sources, such as the media. Research shows a significant mismatch between the aspirations of young people and the jobs available. As illustrated in the chart (above), more than 20 per cent of 15-16 year olds aspire to work in culture, media and sport, sectors that feature heavily on the TV. Yet there are just over 2 per cent of projected jobs in these areas.

These worrying statistics not only have implications for the future prospects of young people but also for the UK economy as a whole, where many STEM industries are struggling to recruit individuals with the right qualifications and skills to fill positions crucial for the growth and international competitiveness of the UK economy.

In future, we have to look further than careers guidance and employer engagement as a cause or solution to these problems and encourage policy makers to have more joined-up thinking about the world of education and employment. After all they are intrinsically linked!

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Karleen Dowden is ASCL Apprenticeship, Employability and Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) Specialist.

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Find out more:

• Careers Engagement: A good practice brief for leaders of schools and colleges (www.ascl.org.uk/careersengagement)
• Your Guide to Apprenticeships (www.ascl.org.uk/apprenticeship)
• ASCL Guidance Paper: Implications and Implementation of DfE Careers Guidance and Inspiration (www.ascl.org.uk/careersguide)

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