The Careers Lab experiment. Did it work?
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Britain is facing a skills crisis that will prevent economic growth and limit the prospects of young people. The government believes that education has for far too long been ‘divorced from the reality of real work’. Introducing a more careers-focused education into schools may help to avoid such a crisis. Careers Lab is a growing structured collaboration between schools and businesses that builds on the concept of businesses going into schools, using a simple framework around four themes, bringing interactive content to support businesses of all sizes to provide an enhanced careers offering to schools. Following a successful pilot, National Grid is supporting the scaling up of Careers Lab into schools. More at http://www.careerslab.org.uk
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The Careers Lab experiment. Did it work?
- 3. 1 Bring together those who need to get this right. Business, teachers, careers advisers, policy makers and others need to talk – so we’ll get them together to do just that 2 Research – let’s find out what young people, their parents and their teachers think about careers advice at the moment, and what we need to do to make it better 4 Social and digital media. As a business group, let’s look at what works through channels that young people are drawn too…and let’s do more and do it better, by giving the right information through digital platforms. 3 Careers advice MUST be part of the curriculum – a bolt on or an afterthought is not good enough…comprehensive careers advice can help us guide people to develop the right skills, so we will campaign to get it integrated into lessons planning, working closely with teachers and others, reinstate a coordination body
- 7. Learn more about Careers Lab at http://www.careerslab.org.uk Download the Careers Lab report
Editor's Notes
- I feel pretty confident that, most of us in the room know, that there’s a particular paradox. UK industry has skills gaps that we cannot fill. In engineering we need to train 87,000 new engineers each year, but the current rate is around 51,000. Similarly nearly half of IT and Telecoms firms – a big growth area in employment – struggle to fill their vacancies. Unemployment figures are dropping, but we still have nearly a million young unemployed people in this country. That’s the absurdity, jobs we can’t fill and hundreds of thousands of young people who want work, but don’t have the skills to match the jobs. Yet in other areas there’s massive over demand. Research by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills showed that one job in culture, media and sport, there’s 10 young people looking for work in that field. Where are all those people going to go? I suspect here the ‘market’ will work in that some of them will retrain or enter employment and work their way up. Too many, unfortunately, will remain unemployed. Now this isn’t the fault of the schools, they’re not, and nor should they be, experts about the world of employment and the local job market – and if they tried I don’t think they could ever keep up as things move so fast these days. Schools have an enormously important role but they can’t do it alone. Government, Business, schools, parents and careers professionals all have responsibilities in supporting schools in careers education. So last year I stood here in this very same room and made a commitment to set out to do something about widening skills gap in UK industry and the unpalatably high levels of youth unemployment.
- We had a four point plan for the role business could play which included researching the current state of careers education, looking at the need for that advice, raising awareness of this paradox generally among schools, parents and business and then increasing the relationship between business, government and schools. When we left here last year we set to work. We created a steering group to shape our direction with representatives from schools businesses and professional organisations with relevant expertise – a full list can be found at the back of the report, if you’re interested – and you’ll see we tried to cover off all angles.
- Through this past year there have been a number of reports that have reinforced the notion that the answer to these challenges lies in careers education. Reports by the Department for Education, Ofsted, The National Careers Council, the Gatsby Foundation, the CBI, City and Guilds, all pointed to greater linkages between school and business and a need to inspire young people about the world of work. And here’s the killer statistic, from a report by the Education and Employers Task Force: Students receiving four or more employer contacts during school will be five times less likely to be NEET (that’s not in employment, education or training), they will receive an 18 per cent wage premium in work (who here wouldn’t want that?) and will be two-and-a-half times more likely to be confident about finding a job A year on, what did these reports and and our own research tell us? Well, encouragingly, it told us that things were moving in the right direction, but there was still a problem. It told us that there was an emerging consensus. People agreed with the conclusion we made last year - that Careers Education in schools IS key to trying to resolve this problem. It also told us that early intervention in schools is really important. Most careers initiatives start, at the very earliest, age 13, but our research told us that 13 was not early enough. It was also clear that there is no single one intervention that would solve the problem. I went to a school in Ward End in Birmingham, Washwood Heath Academy, some of the teachers and pupils are here today. It’s an inner City school, probably typical of a lot of our inner city schools. And what a fantastic school, with some really brilliant pupils. A school with some really engaging teachers doing some pretty amazing things in an area of Birmingham that has real challenges. And as I was sitting in the classroom talking to some of the kids about their lives, I was thinking, this is tricky actually. How do you inspire a kid from a family with generations of long-term unemployment that they could achieve great things? How do you ask a child, for whom just getting to school is a challenge, with everything else that is going on in their life, to aspire to becoming an engineer? And we also piloted it in areas where aspiration isn’t necessarily a problem, but even there we found that there were gaps in children’s understanding of exactly what careers are out there, where the growth areas for well paid, well respected jobs will be and crucially, the steps it takes to get there. It’s tough, and it’s going to take more than one intervention to turn that around. And that brought with it one of the biggest learning points from this process, if it’s going to take a variety of careers inputs – and there are lots of excellent careers programmes already in existence – how do the schools know which is the best, how do they know what to choose? How do businesses who are willing and able to feed into this process link up with schools? Presently there’s a little bit of pot luck. Some schools were getting lots of approaches with initiatives and ideas, some were getting nothing. There’s no framework Also, where’s the journey, where’s the progression, where’s the consistency? The teachers in this room will tell you, that’s critical to learning, but very few careers education programmes have the scope to be delivered and developed over time. So with all that in mind, we engaged nearly 30 stakeholders from the world of business education and careers. Together we co-created a solution focussed on student need that involved schools and worked for business. The National Schools Partnership created professional educational materials to use in the classroom – and we set out to pilot them. Careers Lab was born.
- This, in very simple terms, is Careers Lab. It’s a framework that both schools and businesses can slot into, it’s a progressive four-module programme designed to be delivered over the course four years, from year 7 to 11. It provides educational resources that are designed to be a progression, but are flexible enough to bring in existing sector programmes or be tailored to the schools’ needs. Importantly these are co-delivered by Business Ambassadors and teachers. The materials are not sector or organisation specific but can be brought to life by the Business Ambassador using real-life examples from their careers and the companies they work for. It provides a brokerage between business and schools , so that there’s no reason why all schools and businesses can’t have equal access to each other and it provides local support to get those partnerships off the ground – because let’s face it, education and business are very different. We piloted it with over 1400 students across five schools across the West Midlands, deliberately chosen to ensure we had a good socio-economic mix.
- This works. It absolutely works. Some of the results are in the report you have in front of you today. Nearly 4 in 5 students said that it taught them more about the jobs and opportunities available to them, nearly 80 per cent said they had a better understanding of how their education linked to their career. The youngsters, the teachers and the ambassadors all agreed this is a programme that worked for them. The results we were getting back post pilot affirmed what we were experiencing in the classrooms this was having a positive impact. Careers Lab is not a new careers initiative, it’s not another one in the mix, it’s the framework that binds all these other initiatives together. We did it, we tested it, we tweaked it, we measured it we learned from it. We evolved Careers Lab and we got a clear sense of how to take it forwards. One thing that was reinforced was there is no silver bullet and so we are announcing today a number of recommendations for key stakeholders that we believe, if implemented, will make the biggest difference to enabling a step change in careers education in our schools. Firstly, for Business Every business in the UK should encourage their most engaging and inspiring employees to take part in careers education, to share their own career journey. The ask is a minimum of one hour per year, either through Careers Lab or a similar programme. That’s not going to have a huge impact on any business, it’s a small commitment, but when added up across all businesses it will have a big impact on the youngsters they reach and the employees that deliver it. Those businesses like National Grid, Costain, Capgemini, HS2, Whitbread - who can commit a bit more time - we’d ask you to take on a role as a co-ordinator for your location or your sector, be an ‘anchor company’ to mobilise business to participate in the classroom. For Schools, leadership is critical here If you haven’t done so already, we’re asking you to appoint a senior member of your team to lead and be responsible for careers, give it priority, make space for it on the timetable and ensure you have a joined up programme of careers education across all schools. Reports like the Gatsby international benchmark and The Department for Education’s statutory guidance have provided more clarity on what a programme should include and what good looks like… this is not a bolt on Please don’t narrow your scope. Don’t partner with just one employer. Our pilot showed that a wide variety of businesses provided the most enriching experience for pupils, use a framework like Careers Lab to get a wealth of experience into your classrooms. And Government We have the Minister for Skills and Enterprise here with us today, so I can make a direct ask to him and colleagues in the Department for Education. I am sure he will be pleased to hear that I am not asking for millions of pounds, however I am asking for important support. We all know what gets measured… gets done… It has been very clear thoughout this programme that in order for schools to give careers education the importance it deserves, you have to follow through on your commitment to include student destination measures in school league tables. But crucially, to make the difference you need to give it weight. Destination measures should make up 50 per cent of league tables with attainment and progress indicators making the other 50-per-cent. The 20 per cent that has been proposed - but not yet committed to - just isn’t enough. Why do I think it’s so important? Lots of reasons. Firstly, I’m a parent, there are parents in the room, all we want for our kids is happiness and security. I want to know that my children’s school isn’t just preparing them for their exams, but preparing them for the rest of their lives. Of course exam results are important – don’t me wrong, I want this country’s elite to be joining my company, some of these young people in the room could be doing my job one day – and it’s a great job by the way, I’d recommend it. So yes, good grades are important, progress is important, but it means nothing if can’t be translated into a career. Not every child can be an A-grade student, but every child could be an A-grade employee, they could have an A-class career. They won’t do that if they’re in a cycle of unemployment. You can’t separate the needs of our young people from the needs of UK business. They’re inextricably linked. Our economy, our national prosperity depends on filling those gaps. We’re a long time in our working lives. Those children in the audience today won’t think that – when even the end of a school day seems a long way away. If we know one thing about league tables, it’s that schools do respond to measures, the ability to attract pupils depends on where they are placed. But schools need to know they’re being measured on the value they give to their pupils, they won’t have the freedom to prepare our young people for working life, unless the government starts to place a value on that effort. So I think that is a good point for me to bring my comments to a close. When we came together a year ago we agreed that we needed action not just another report. I am delighted that a year on we can say we have taken action, but importantly this has been a collaborative effort,… We couldn’t have done what we achieved without fantastic support from the schools we have worked with or the wide range of businesses and other organisations that have supported and many of whom are represented here. We have an excellent agenda this morning to collectively develop our thinking and I would encourage you to engage, share your views and ask questions – It has been constructive challenge all that has got us this far. I will then come back at the end of the morning and talk about where we go from here