If two recipients of “careers advice” crossed each other’s paths at my old school, like Cold War spies, they would take part in a terse exchange.

“Procter and Gamble?”, the incoming pupil would mumble with a slight smile. The pupil coming out of the library - where the peripatetic careers adviser worked - would raise their eyebrows a little and give a nod of agreement: “Procter and Gamble.”

This was not some obscure code but rather a running joke among our year group back in the early 1990s. If you went in to see the careers adviser and wanted to do law or medicine, that was fine - she was replete with information for you. Suggest anything else, however, and she would furrow her brow and suggest: “What about Procter and Gamble?”

Was she on commission? Did she really consider the consumer-goods giant to be at the zenith of career aspirations? Probably not. Like all of us, she was no doubt just the victim of a laughably poor careers advice service, having been given a few leaflets, told to pass on the requisite info and then move on to the next school.

The world of work was arcane and distant for pupils in our time, and careers advice rarely shed much new light. When I had a one-to-one session with an adviser, I falteringly said I was into cinema. “Might there be many careers in that?” I asked.

The careers adviser frowned, flicked through a few pages of a ring-binder, before settling upon a familiar page.

“Have you ever heard of Procter and Gamble?” she said.

To this day, pupils’ perception of work and certain careers is often far detached from reality. And this is understandable: schools, traditionally, have been mostly self-contained entities, focused on drilling pupils to pass exams rather than drilling down into why they might need qualifications in the wider world; little wonder, then, that “careers advice” often seemed an afterthought.

Emphasis on “positive destinations” in Scotland, however, shows that times are changing: schools and local authorities are being judged not just on the qualifications their pupils rack up but also on what they do with them afterwards.

The proportion reaching positive destinations three months after they have left school has been going steadily upwards, rising from 87 per cent for 2009-10 leavers to 94.4 per cent of 2017-18 leavers (positive destinations are also recorded after nine months). These figures have caused some controversy, however, with critics suggesting that the term “positive destinations” is vague and elastic (see box, opposite), allowing destinations that not everyone would define as positive to be included in the tallies. In 2017, Tes Scotland revealed that jobs with zero-hours contracts could be counted.

Nevertheless, there is no shortage of headteachers proudly telling the world about their positive destination statistics. There are plenty of signs, too, of cultural change in Scottish schools: university admissions alone are not the defining marker of school prestige and leavers’ success that they used to be.

Joining the dots

Currie Community High School is one such example - indeed, it has done so well that its achievement has had to be effaced from a Scottish government report.

In the latest round of three-month positive destinations figures, published in February, Currie High recorded 99.2 per cent - the highest figure in Edinburgh, well above the national average of 94.4 per cent, mentioned above, and bettered by only a small handful of schools in the rest of Scotland.

Yet, headteacher Doreen MacKinnon, in the school’s spring newsletter, had to explain why that figure did not appear in the national positive destinations report: the government had decided that, because so few pupils (fewer than five) failed to reach a positive destination, publishing Currie High’s figures risked identifying those pupils. “Basically, Currie was missing from the published tables because our positive destinations are so high!” MacKinnon told parents.

Currie High sits beyond the Edinburgh bypass but just inside city boundaries, in an area that is not particularly deprived or affluent - it is “truly comprehensive”, as one school leader tells me. So, what is happening here that translates into such a remarkably high positive destinations figure?

Pupils say they’re constantly encouraged to join the dots between work in the classroom and where skills might come in useful later in life; the dozen or so I speak to - from S2-6 - say they get the same support whatever their life ambitions.

And this work starts even before pupils arrive at Currie High: P7s are encouraged to get used to the Currie way in their current schools, by talking about skills, ambitions and the jobs of people they know. When pupils arrive at the high school, in S1, sessions can include thinking about the top 10 skills that employers might look for.

Much of the work around employability is overseen by John Schmidt, the faculty head of technologies, who now also has the roles of 16-plus lead and lead for Developing the Young Workforce - the national policy on vocational education usually shortened to DYW.

“We do have a lot more of a focus now within classes on trying to link career awareness of individual subjects,” Schmidt says. “In business, for example, they can see where business leads to - it’s not just entrepreneurialism, it can be Stem-related [science, technology engineering and maths], it can be law, it can be marketing, HR. And we’re doing the same thing in other subjects.”

The school wants pupils to be as clued-up as possible about what work entails and the often little-known possibilities it offers to teenagers, using a wide array of techniques and schemes to make that happen. These include, to highlight just a few:

• A skills-review process that started last year and will eventually involve every pupil in the school, in which young people examine their skills three times a year and think about how these could be applied in the workplace.
• Leadership training for S4s, who then help S2s - in personal and social education lessons - to navigate Skills Development Scotland’s My World of Work system, as well as taking an S2 assembly where younger pupils have to figure out how they would run a bookshop.
• Tailored work placements for S5s - the sort of move that curriculum development and inspection body Education Scotland strongly recommends - so, even if a pupil mentions an unusual aspiration that the school hasn’t thought about before, staff will endeavour to find an opportunity in that area.
• Freeing up senior pupils to go to college on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to study courses that the school does not offer. And, similarly, joining forces with Balerno High School to offer a greater range of qualifications.
• A system of four “road trips” - in Stem; retail and hospitality; health, social care and life sciences; and design, engineering and construction - in which groups of pupils go behind the scenes at relevant workplaces around the country.

Staff are acutely aware of the narrow and stereotypical view of certain careers and subjects that can harden at an early age - such as the idea of scientists as frizzy-haired boffins haphazardly juggling beakers of volatile chemicals - and see it as a mission to challenge these perceptions at every turn. Such misconceptions can lead to missed opportunities and divert pupils from careers in which they might excel. How, the staff say, can you aspire to a job that you haven’t even heard of?

Interestingly - if worryingly for the legal profession - a high number of Currie High pupils seem to have ditched the idea of becoming solicitors since hearing about an array of other potential careers. S6 pupil Roksana, for example, has shifted her sights to artificial intelligence rather than law. “Wherever you choose to go, [staff] would help you follow that path,” she says.

Roksana adds that, when she was younger, her subject choices were heavily influenced by the school’s focus on possible pathways into work, which persuaded her to take a broader range of subjects than she might otherwise have considered.

Similarly, Adam, an S5 pupil, is taking a foundation apprenticeship in engineering. But for the school’s advice, he would probably have embarked on a more traditional university route, he says: “I didn’t really know [the apprenticeship] was an option.”

A new focus for aspiration

MacKinnon has been headteacher since 2011, when Currie High was “very focused on university” and staff had a strong perception of it as an “academic” school. Now, staff are “trying to move away from the idea that we are just trying to feed universities”, towards “whatever a young person’s priorities or interests” may consist of, she says.

The idea of “aspiration” - often a loaded term that venerated certain post-school destinations, such as university - has now taken on the different meaning of simply “having a good future”, whatever that represents to each pupil, she adds.

By 2016, the school’s most recent inspection report was highlighting that its “improved careers education, mentoring and work experience is supporting young people to be better prepared for the world of work and improving post-school transitions”.

Roksana has a Polish background and wanted to take a Higher in the subject, only to find that it wasn’t offered by the Scottish Qualifications Authority. Instead, the school helped her to find an evening class in A-level Polish. She believes that this flexibility in the acquisition of qualifications and experiences - allied to the wide vista of career opportunities pupils learn about - is what marks out her school.

When I ask Roksana what the best thing about her school is, she replies: “I’d just say the opportunities - there’s so many that you can choose from.”

By and large, Scottish schools these days are far more keen than they have ever been for their pupils to stay on until the end of S6. If, however, another route seems preferable, Currie High will not hang on to pupils unnecessarily. Cyanne, for example, was an S4 pupil at the start of the year and another of those who had targeted the legal profession. She had always loved music, however, without it really crossing her mind that this might lead to a career. After work experience at Edinburgh’s Banana Row Studios, she realised it could be more than just a hobby, and has now left to do a college course in sound production.

Cyanne says she is grateful both for the school always trying to expand pupils’ views of potential careers and for its help in setting up bespoke work placements.

Another senior girl tells me: “I think the school is really good at making sure pupils know who they can talk to if they’ve got a career that’s not very popular but [that] they want to pursue.”

Concerns have been raised repeatedly in the Scottish Parliament that S4 pupils in Scotland are, for the most part, unable to choose as many subjects to study as they would have done under the old Standard Grade system. Setting aside the counterargument that a pupil’s qualifications should now be considered at the end of S6, some feel the focus on subject options has obscured one of the main advances in Scottish schools in recent times.

In an Education and Skills Committee debate last month, Jenny Gilruth - an SNP MSP and former modern studies teacher - said: “I think that, in fact, our schools are working really hard to give all pupils an opportunity to succeed in a way that they just did not 10 or 20 years ago.”

Writing for Tes Scotland in April, education consultant Isabelle Boyd expressed a similar view (bit.ly/Tes_Boyd). “Schools should be congratulated for their ambitions and in making the best use of resources to provide an appropriate curriculum for everyone,” she argued. “This is not simply about the number of subjects on offer but about how they are configured to provide pathways and progressions in learning.”

Boyd, a former secondary headteacher and local authority assistant chief executive, added: “It would serve us all better if we devoted energy in promoting a better understanding of the senior-phase curriculum as the totality of learner experiences, and not just the subjects studied.”

Walking around Currie High, it almost feels as though different subjects and faculties are in competition with one another to show who can offer up the broadest range of careers. A computing science display notes that the subject is obviously useful to an IT consultant or systems developer but could also help pupils to become an animator or secondary teacher.

Meanwhile, the flourishing careers of former pupils are displayed in the corridors, alongside the subjects that they studied while at school. Even an art and design display box - containing ornate jackets of lush green with an eye-catching leaf motif - lists careers that the subject connects to, including millinery, film production and beauty therapy.

Still work to do

Staff stress that pupils are still not as worldly as they might be: some seem to think that if they submit a CV to an employer, it will automatically be read to the end, and refuse to believe that poor grammar could lead to it being binned. Employability skills, then, are a critical part of what Currie High offers.

An even bigger battle, however, might be with parents, who sometimes hold an old-fashioned view of desirable careers and may not be jumping with joy about their son or daughter’s ambition. A parliamentary report in May 2018, based on a survey of 900 people, suggested that many felt under pressure from teachers to apply to university; a subsequent report by the Scottish Guidance Association, however, insisted that parents were more to blame for putting this pressure on pupils.

Currie High parents’ evenings, therefore, are being reshaped, with employers being invited in to highlight alternatives to higher education and so that families can hear about the jobs landscape from those who know it best. And things are changing: last year, for example, two pupils applied for foundation apprenticeships - which provide work-based learning for senior pupils - but this year, 12 have done so.

Barry McGuigan is an activity agreements adviser - he helps pupils to devise a personal learning plan to smooth the process of moving on from school - who has worked with many schools. He feels that Currie High is further down the line than most in recalibrating its priorities.

“I always wonder about the political pressure on schools to get that university place, to be that prestigious school, but I think the mark of a true quality school is to deliver what’s right for pupils - and that’s what’s happening here.”

Currie High also keeps up with former pupils. Ruth Addo, a Skills Development Scotland careers adviser, works with leavers over the summer to prepare them for wherever they are heading next. Over the course of the next year, school staff will check up on former pupils and if, for example, someone is thinking about dropping out of university, the school will contact Addo and a support system will kick in.

While Currie High is undoubtedly doing some remarkable work, is there any danger, with such a heavy focus on skills and jobs, that the domains of school and work will be elided too much? That the school will be reduced to an incubator of future employees, a utilitarian place where the joy of learning for learning’s sake is a thing of the past?

Far from it, insists MacKinnon, pointing to a thriving extracurricular scene of school shows, sports clubs, fundraising and celebrations of reading. Getting pupils to think carefully about their career aspirations is critical to what Currie High does, “but it’s not the sole purpose of school”.

The most important thing, she says, is that they emerge as “rounded human beings - whatever jobs they go into”.

Henry Hepburn is news editor of Tes Scotland. He tweets at @Henry_Hepburn

This article originally appeared in the 24 May 2019 issue under the headline “On the road to somewhere”