The government’s new careers strategy and its adoption of the Gatsby benchmarks has triggered a deluge of promotional material from commercial companies offering careers advice and support. A notable feature of much of this material is the prominent use of sports personalities exhorting youngsters to live their dreams, aim for greatness, reach for the stars and so on.

Of course, the use of sport to encourage ambition is nothing new. Indeed, in many ways, it is a key feature of our national educational culture. The promotion of sport to encourage fitness and healthy lifestyles is to be applauded; the link with careers education, however, is highly questionable.

Sport is held in such high regard in contemporary society that its value is rarely questioned. There are times, nevertheless, when we ought to stand back and consider whether its constant promotion is really helping our students. Its role in careers education is a case in point.

The use of famous sport stars is undoubtedly inspiring for young people, as well as being a reliable way of attracting their attention. The glossy promotional material, however, rarely suggests just how difficult it is to make a career out of professional sport. The inspiration provided by the beaming athlete or Premier League footballer doesn’t necessarily translate to a general sense of ambition. For most pupils, the tabloid glamour of highly paid professional sport is all that they see. Very few of them are able to apply the grand motto of the Olympic movement - Faster, Higher, Stronger - to a career in accountancy, for example.

Unattainable goals

Reliable data on the number of pupils who move on to become professional sportsmen and women is hard to find. A study conducted by the National Collegiate Athletics Association in 2010 in the US, however, makes the point, stressing that despite the dreams of many high school athletes and their parents, a lucrative career in the world of first-class sport is incredibly unlikely.

The study looked at a range of sports played regularly in US high schools and the results offer something of a warning to all those pupils dreaming of sporting glory. In men’s basketball, for example, there is only a 0.03 per cent chance of a pro career. This means that of the 156,000 male basketball players in high school, only 44 will be drafted to play in the national league, and only 32 women (0.02 per cent) of more than 127,000 female players will eventually be signed up. Even in baseball, the sport with the most professional opportunities, there is only a 0.04 per cent chance of becoming professional.

These figures relate to the US, but are the percentages likely to be any different when applied to professional sport in the UK?

An increasing number of students are attracted to sports-based post-16 courses, and more and more go on to study sports science, or related degrees, at university. The employment rate for sports-science graduates is surprisingly high, but just how many of them end up in the sporting careers that prompted their subject choices?

Hail the polymaths

It is perhaps time for the material used in careers education to offer a more realistic view of the world of work.

There is no need for these to lack ambition, as there are hundreds of incredibly valuable career opportunities available to young people in a wide variety of professions. Society does not tend to portray doctors, scientists, architects, engineers and designers as heroes, and it rarely presents them as glamorous jobs. Yet, in reality, these are the jobs that will offer real prospects of high incomes and professional status in society.

The sport stars may be inspirational, but as career role models, they are wildly unsuitable. Since so few of our students will become professional sportsmen and women, we are surely guilty of deluding them by using sporting heroes so prominently in schools. We rarely point out that even if they do achieve athletic greatness, such careers are incredibly short. How often do we get them to think about the athletes who have trained for years and years, only to come fourth or fifth in the vital races?

The single-minded dedication of the sport star is precisely the kind of career directory we do not need nowadays. Children born today are growing up in a world where career-switching will be the norm, where they will be doing jobs that haven’t even been invented yet. They will need a wide range of skills: the most successful will be the most adaptable. The monomania of the sport star is, sadly, a redundant model in today’s society.

Perhaps it is time to turn to new models, or more correctly, ancient models: renaissance men and women. Instead of encouraging students to admire the single skill sets of sporting heroes, we should surely be offering them role models whose success depends upon expertise across a wide range of subject disciplines.

This is, of course, a much more appropriate vision for 14-year-olds embarking on nine or 10 GCSE courses, and it would surely prepare them for their future careers much more effectively. The obvious renaissance candidates are not perhaps the most attractive to young people - Leonardo da Vinci, Aristotle, Galileo, Goethe, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill - but we could surely find bright, shiny stars whose careers have encompassed a wide range of disciplines, and who are much more likely to inspire young people with realistic goals and encourage them towards professional positions that are actually attainable. Rachel Riley? Brian May? Clint Eastwood?

It’s time to bring careers education into the 21st century by offering new role models: glamorous, well-paid and attractive, but multiskilled, highly intelligent and very adaptable. But above all, role models involved in careers that young people can actually access and in which they could realistically succeed.

Richard Steward is the headteacher at The Woodroffe School