All Nathan Berger wanted to be when he grew up was Thomas the Tank Engine. At four years old, nothing seemed better than following in the path of the smiling, bright blue engine.

Fast-forward a couple of decades or so, and Berger is not, as he had once hoped, a steam-powered locomotive. Instead, he is working in the field of the social psychology of education. But Thomas has left an imprint: Berger’s current topic of interest is the “lie” of aspiration. Or rather, how simply pushing for kids to have higher, or different, aspirations is not good enough; more needs to be done.

“We were once at the stage where people said ‘if someone aspires highly, they’ll be OK; if we boost aspirations, then we will improve outcomes’,” he explains. “And yes, aspirations are important. No matter what kids do in life, they need something to aim for. But aspirations by themselves are not the be-all and end-all. They have to be reasonable and, more importantly, supported.”

Berger has done his homework in this regard. In his PhD work at the University of Newcastle in Australia, he was part of a research team led by Jenny Gore that surveyed thousands of students about their aspirations and the future. What he found was that nowhere near enough scaffolds were in place to help students fulfil aspirations or indeed form them.

As many teachers will tell you, the expectations of family and friends greatly influence what a child aspires to.

Sometimes this can be a good thing, but in other situations, it can be severely limiting. More often than not, at both ends of the socio-economic scale, children will simply reach for the jobs they know, says Berger.

“For some kids, going to university or thinking about going down that path is actively discouraged. It’s a mentality of ‘our people don’t do that’, and that option not even being considered,” he says.

“Speaking to some students at a prestigious school, they pointed out that they couldn’t do anything other than go to uni.”

It’s important that aspiration is linked to genuine interest, with the full breadth of possibilities made clear, argues Berger.

Cameron’s ‘aspiration nation’

“We don’t want generation after generation being the same, funneled simply into one job because of where they were born and who they were born to,” he says. “It’s so important for students to be exposed to all sorts of options, and particularly for those in low socio-economic status areas.”

At the higher end of the economic scale, this issue is rarely spoken of or addressed. At the lower end of the economic spectrum, it is a key policy, with the belief that you simply have to ‘raise’ aspirations. Berger points to the rhetoric of Britain’s former prime minister, David Cameron, who once claimed the UK was the “aspiration nation” - where privilege and opportunity would not be kept among the higher classes.

But Berger sees this talk alone as largely pointless: it’s all very well to tell kids to have high aspirations, but they can’t achieve them alone. Instead, they need support and the right pathways to get where they want to go. They need scaffolds.

Schools attempt to provide some of these through trips, visiting speakers and guidance. But Berger says teachers need help - not only to expand the jobs that students know about, but also to help these students to better understand what getting a chosen job entails.

With the right assistance in place, he argues, the effect can be enormous.

Berger uses the example of a student from a school in regional New South Wales, once destined to work at the family’s farm, despite harbouring ambitions to sing. Thanks to a mentoring programme, the teen was recently able to travel to work with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to train to become a tenor.

“Without this mentoring programme, designed for students from non-traditional backgrounds, it would have always have been a pipe dream,” he says. “Schools, universities, cultural institutions - they need to have a range of services that expose kids to the possibilities.”

Improve careers services

Having the right guidance and programmes in place really matters, he says: “What we need to hammer home is that there are all sorts of opportunities, always new pathways to follow new aspirations.”

Before teachers start listing all the various responsibilities foisted upon them by society, Berger is not expecting schools to do this alone. For starters, a better careers service would be a high-impact first step.

“We need to see more careers education to help students explore their desires and interests; we want them to be able to make informed decisions in line with their developing identities,” he says. “Equipping students with the skills and dispositions to become information gatherers would particularly benefit their career aspirations.”

But he does think that a more structured approach to raising aspirations in schools and in families would be beneficial, too.

“If anything, it’s about those informal conversations that might be happening in or outside the classroom,” he explains, “ascertaining loose aspirations, helping to formalise and direct them, seeking out ways of scaffolding them.

“It’s about opening up that door - it’s a society-wide effort.”

Brittany Vonow is a freelance writer based in London. She tweets @bvonow