FST BLOG

Building bridges between schools and employers

• 24 September 2024
• Education
• Christina Astin

This is the story of a smart 15-year-old girl who used to want to be a scientist. Let’s call her Amra. Her science lessons tend to be full of facts to memorise without time to understand and few opportunities to do hands-on experiments. She has never visited a workplace and the engineer who visited the school two years ago switched her off because he pitched his talk too high.

There’s a local STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) company keen to recruit young people like Amra. They offer apprenticeships and graduate jobs but say it is hard to find suitable applicants and they’re worried about their future talent pipeline. They have emailed the school office about coming in to give a talk to sixth formers but didn’t get a reply.

What can be done to build bridges between the school and employers to help unlock the potential of students like Amra and plug the skills gap?

Organisations that engage with schools do so in myriad ways, from delivering careers talks or science workshops in schools, to arranging work experience or teacher externships in the workplace. Remote methods include competitions, online resources, videos and more. And it’s not just employers looking at future recruitment. Charities work with students or reach out to raise awareness and often have ambitious KPIs (key performance indicators) to fulfil. Higher education institutions are also chasing student applications, and their widening participation agendas mean they must work hard to reach certain demographics in schools and colleges.

We know the power of these experiences in broadening young people’s horizons, improving skills, and building social capital. This is backed by research such as “Understanding Employer Engagement in Education” from Education and Employers.

And the benefit for the employers is clear too. According to The Careers & Enterprise Company these include:

• Lower recruitment costs
• More job and apprenticeship applications
• Better career readiness in recruits

So why are thousands of schoolchildren leaving school without having experienced any direct engagement with an employer? And why is the skills gap still widening?

Firstly, schools have diminishing capacity to engage with external providers as budgets have tightened and teacher workload has increased. Even if a resource or activity is offered for ‘free’ it still requires input from teachers – booking a room, reorganising timetables, sending out parental consent letters, liaising over access and other requirements, possibly funding transport or cover. Being mindful of these burdens and alleviating them as far as possible is a good first step.

Secondly, the science curriculum in schools is huge and there is barely time to race through topics, let alone enjoy competitions, careers resources or visits from external speakers. To be helpful, support needs to be curriculum-aligned, age-appropriate and inclusive.

Bridge-building with schools can succeed with a few simple steps: thinking about the intended outcomes for the students. Emailing a named contact rather than a generic inbox. Looking up the school dates to avoid half term. Getting some feedback to improve each iteration of your interaction.

Our Engaging with Schools course is a one-day workshop designed to tackle these challenges head-on and highlight strategies for successful engagement. It helps organisations clarify their outreach objectives, deliver effective, impactful engagement and evaluate their success in making a difference.

The STEM Ambassadors programme also supports volunteers going into schools and helps match requests with opportunities.

The work of the Careers and Enterprise Company has been a big step forward in coordinating careers hubs across the country, including kitemarking Employer Standards for engaging with schools which are already having an impact.
Of course, until we manage to reach a more diverse demographic, recruitment into shortage areas will remain challenging. Many have written on the issue of underrepresentation in STEM, including my own contribution for TeachWire on gender balance in STEM when I was chair of Planet Possibility. And this article in The Manufacturer makes clear the correlation between lack of diversity and low uptake in the STEM industries. Young people need to be able to see more ‘people like them’ in jobs they aspire to. The fantastic ASPIRES research by Professor Louise Archer and others has highlighted the need for us to distribute science capital more equitably.

It's clear that a longer-term view of education, such as espoused by the Foundation for Education Development, and the Chartered College of Teaching (of which I am proud to be Fellow) is vital. I fervently believe that a cross-sector approach helps everyone, whether partnerships between industry and education, state and independent schools, schools and universities.

The educational landscape has changed immeasurably since I entered the teaching profession over 30 years ago. A new approach to collaboration is essential if we are to support young people like Amra into jobs they enjoy and which meet the needs of our increasingly technological society.

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