Bryan Maguire’s path to success was not a linear one. He messed up at university and then his girlfriend - now his wife of almost 40 years - became pregnant, which meant he dropped out in his first year.

Maguire, who was born and bred in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, did go back and get his qualifications, fitting in study alongside work. But this took him over a decade and meant that he didn’t see much of his children when they were small, he says. Now, he is the chief operating officer of iQor, a multimillion-pound technology business based in Florida, with a presence in 18 countries. The company employs about 140,000 staff and makes products for the likes of Apple and electronics giant Philips.

Mahyar Mortazavi, meanwhile, is chief executive of the Wee Gems chain of nurseries in West Lothian, and has been self-employed since the age of 18, doing everything from translation to running a coffee shop and garages.

And then there is Stewart Darling, chief executive of the Vianet Group, who counts household names such as Coca-Cola and Costa Coffee among his clients. His company connects the vending machines and coffee machines you find in petrol stations or hospitals to the internet, so that they can be monitored via online platforms.

Today, these three men from very different businesses have taken time out to talk to S2s at Royal High School in Edinburgh about what they do and the importance of maths.

This is the kind of thing that the Scottish government is keen to see more of: schools linking up with business so that their pupils can build up a better understanding of their options when they leave - especially when it comes to the roughly 50 per cent who won’t go on to university. However, the Scottish Parliament’s Education and Skills Committee recently expressed concerns that the government’s Developing the Young Workforce (DYW) scheme was not progressing fast enough (see box, opposite).

A report published in November warned that, four years into the seven-year initiative, “the pace of progress in implementing DYW is not presently sufficient to ensure the programme will be fully embedded by 2021”.

The committee wanted to see more one-on-one careers advice; more work experience opportunities, especially for those leaving school at around 16; and more support for businesses seeking to engage with schools and provide apprenticeships.

Parents, it said, needed to be better informed about post-school options other than university, and there should be more vocational routes for school pupils. According to the committee, not enough data was being collected on the vocational pathways being provided at secondary, making it nigh on impossible to measure progress.

The committee also wanted the resource implications of DYW for schools to be re-examined, and questioned whether the scheme could be implemented by 2021 if it had to be paid for out of schools’ core budgets. Extra funding was provided over two years to support the introduction of DYW, but that ended in 2015-16 (see figures, opposite).

Organisations featured in the report’s recommendations - including the government, Skills Development Scotland and Education Scotland - are expected to respond to it imminently.

However, in the latest annual progress report on DYW, published in December, the Scottish government said it was “well placed to respond to the Education and Skills Committee’s challenge on the pace of change”. It added that the headline target of reducing youth unemployment in Scotland by 40 per cent by 2021 had been achieved - four years ahead of schedule.

Unlocking key targets

Nevertheless, Stephen McCabe, the children and young people spokesman for local authorities’ body Cosla, who wrote a foreword to the report, acknowledged that “a number of key targets” were “still to be achieved, with only a couple of years of the programme remaining”. DYW still had to make sufficient progress in relation to “addressing equalities issues relating to gender, disability and care experience young people”, he said.

Michelle Fenwick, DYW programme director for Edinburgh, Midlothian and East Lothian, admits that she found it hard not to be “slightly personally offended” by the report’s findings. Her take is that - while there might have been slow progress on some aspects - the past few years have been about putting strong foundations in place.

DYW, she believes, is about a cultural shift: educating parents as to the variety of qualifications and routes into work, and convincing teachers that part of their remit is to show students how classroom learning relates to the outside world.

“If we had gone out at the start and said that it was every teacher’s responsibility to bring business partners on board, what we would have got was employer exhaustion,” says Fenwick. “If you have 60 teachers in a school and 43 high schools, like we do in this region, then you’ve got a ton of teachers calling all the businesses they are aware of, that are visible to them and that they know.

“So whether they are the big businesses in the city centre or the ones on their doorstep, businesses get multiple asks and start to get frustrated. But I truly believe, now that the foundations are set, the pace of change will be much faster.”

One key foundation is the mentoring programme for care-experienced pupils created by MCR Pathways in Glasgow (see box, page 19). Another is the online tool Marketplace, which helps schools to tap into opportunities offered by employers - for instance, taking pupils to visit a quarry in East Lothian or inviting representatives from law firm Anderson Strathern to speak.

If schools cannot find the kind of business expert they are looking for, they can make a request for speakers via Founders4Schools, a charity that has existed in England since 2011 and launched in Scotland in summer 2017.

It is through this connection that Royal High School maths curriculum leader Alison Underwood organised today’s event. She believes that highlighting the exciting careers maths can lead to will encourage more pupils to pursue the subject.

The Holyrood government has recognised that maths has an image problem. In a 2016 survey of Scottish pupils by Making Maths Count, many used words such as “boring”, “hard” and “hell” to describe the subject.

A key way to win over the doubters, Underwood believes, is to make them see the myriad ways that maths is used in the wider world - but she has found it tough to convince speakers to come in. “Mathematicians are often not all that talkative,” she says. “They don’t think they can speak to school kids; they consider that to be a bit of a nightmare. So this [new scheme] is fantastic. These people are happy to speak about what they do.”

Underwood adds: “We want S2 to realise we are not just forcing them to sit and learn stuff they will never, ever need - it’s actually going to be useful for them. When it comes to maths and English, in particular, parents are always telling them they have ‘got to get it’ but they don’t always see why.”

In the Marketplace for speakers

This is Underwood’s first time using Founders4Schools, and this week the charity will bring 15 businesspeople in to talk to S2s. However, only 11 of the 21 DYW regions are using Marketplace, and one of the education committee’s recommendations was that the national agency Skills Development Scotland should assess whether implementation was far enough forward “at this stage of DYW”.

Skills Development Scotland says that it is working with government officials to “ensure that Marketplace meets the needs of groups”.

Stirling Council was one of the early adopters of Founders4Schools and Stirling High School has been using it for over a year, organising 16 different events to date.

Alan Hamilton, the depute head responsible for DYW, says it takes only five minutes to make a request. When he was looking for four speakers to attend a university admissions event, it took just a week to find employers who could come along. However, a more left-field request for a dyslexic business leader went unmet.

But Rosalind Stuart a former teacher responsible for the rollout of Founders4Schools in the east of Scotland, is clear that it can help to implement only some aspects of DYW.

“We don’t offer long-term relationships,” she says. “They may grow out of some of the engagements we do organise, though, and these encounters enable teachers to see what’s going on in the world of work and to take that first step and invite someone in.

“Getting different people to talk from different sectors requires quite a lot of spadework for teachers. So, while we don’t do everything, we make one of the more difficult things to organise a lot easier.”

One of the biggest challenges identified by almost all parties is persuading parents that university is not always the gold standard. The education committee said in its report that “it is apparent that most [parents] do not have sufficient information on post-school options other than university”.

“The main challenge is perceptions and parents and family history, and the idea you must go to university to be a success,” says Hamilton. “It’s still the assumption that if you are clever enough, you go to university, and if not, you go another route.”

He adds: “Parents have a huge influence over what young people do with their future.”

A new TV advert promoting Foundation Apprenticeships - which allow pupils to complete the first year of an apprenticeship while still in school - is very clearly aimed at parents. If you want your child to stand out from the crowd and have the best possible start, it proclaims, this route is the way to go.

However, some problems have been identified with the two-year qualifications. Stirling High has 12 pupils taking Foundation Apprenticeships this year and hopes to have 40 next year, but Hamilton points to an issue with the name. Under the old Standard Grade - which was replaced by the Nationals in 2013-14 - “foundation” was the lowest possible grading. It is not a word associated with success in Scottish education, he says. Meanwhile, education directors’ body ADES believes that SCQF level 6 - the equivalent of a Higher - is too high a starting point for Foundation Apprenticeships, a view shared by the National Parent Forum of Scotland.

Tempted by ‘taster courses’

Ollie Bray, former head of Kingussie High in Highland, has argued that school leaders are not familiar enough with the array of qualifications already out there. He said in October that a large percentage of education professionals - headteachers included - did not know, for example, the difference between an SVQ (Scottish Vocational Qualification), an NPA (National Progression Award) or an NC (National Certificate).

Bray doubled the number of subjects on offer at Kingussie and took attainment from below the national average to above it.

On DYW, he says it is not enough to introduce vocational courses in the senior phase and expect parents and pupils to sign up. At Kingussie, which he recently left to take up a job at the Lego Foundation, taster courses mean that all S2 and S3 pupils get experience of subjects such as rural skills or engineering science and construction before being expected to commit to qualifications.

Headteachers need support, Bray says, to understand what is possible when it comes to curricular design. The Scottish Qualifications Authority, he points out, knows the schools delivering a wider range of qualifications. With the help of the government and Education Scotland, it could create a resource to enable schools to learn from each other.

Hamilton is clear that schools “need to do something different”. He thinks it is right that schools are now judged on not only on the qualifications their pupils attain but also where they end up. “It shouldn’t just be about getting them through school,” he says. “It has to be about making sure they are ready for the next step, whatever that might be.”

However, there are still doubts that what is officially counted as a “positive destination” is rigorous enough. Last year, Tes Scotland revealed that school-leavers on zero-hours contracts would be counted as a success and in employment.

Labour MSP Johann Lamont, deputy convener of the education committee and a former teacher, questions whether DYW can achieve its aims, given reductions in support staff, cuts and the teacher shortage. “There is a lot of enthusiasm for the approach. But, like everything else, it has to be funded, and as core budgets diminish, it seems unlikely it will be implemented by 2021,” she says.

A report by Education Scotland in December acknowledged that the teacher shortage was a national issue that was impacting on “the provision of flexible pathways in the curriculum”. It added that heads in “almost all local authorities are empowered to design and deliver a curriculum which meets their own school’s local needs” - but the full benefits had “yet to be realised in practice”.

Emma Seith is a reporter for Tes Scotland. She tweets @Emma_Seith

Developing the Young Workforce: the background

More than 50 per cent of students do not go to university but “we are simply not preparing or equipping these young people for the world of work”, warned the final report of the Commission for Developing Scotland’s Young Workforce, published in 2014.

The commission was led by oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood, who wanted to call the report “The Neglected 50 Per Cent” - in the end it was titled Education Working for All. The document recommended better relationships between schools, colleges and business, and more work experience opportunities and careers guidance for pupils.

The report called for employers to get back into the habit of employing young people and envisaged the introduction of Foundation Apprenticeships, which would allow pupils to complete the first year of an apprenticeship while still at school.

Developing the Young Workforce is the government’s seven-year strategy for implementing the commission’s recommendations, and includes the aim of reducing youth unemployment by 40 per cent by 2021.

However, according to a report published in November by the Education and Skills Committee, performance indicators show too little or no improvement in a number of areas.

Mentoring should be ‘the norm’

Entrepreneur Iain MacRitchie wants mentoring to become “just the norm of what happens in schools”.

MacRitchie’s MCR Pathways mentoring programme is up and running in all of Glasgow’s 30 secondaries. Every week, care-experienced young people, or pupils from S3-6 who are deemed to be in need of support by their school, spend an hour talking one-to-one with a trained volunteer mentor.

The latest figures show that, of the 76 young people enrolled in the mentoring programme who left Glasgow schools in 2017, 86 per cent were in jobs, college or university. This was slightly up from the previous year, and the equivalent figure for care-experienced school-leavers who had not been mentored was 50 per cent.

Now the programme has got underway in Dundee, having been funded by the family behind the publisher DC Thomson. It is also established in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. Over the next two years, the goal is to roll the scheme out to 10 local authorities.

It may seem surprising that one hour per week of talking one-to-one with an adult can make such a difference. But as MacRitchie told Tes Scotland in 2017, he believes we grossly underestimate the impact that a lack of supportive adult relationships has on young people.

State-private divide in careers support

Private school pupils are more likely than those at state schools to say they receive help deciding what to do when they leave.

The Education and Skills Committee surveyed young people to ascertain how much support they received with filling out application forms, interviews, work experience and accessing mentors or counsellors.

The survey, which received almost 900 responses from 15- to 24-year-olds, showed that pupils from the independent sector were more likely to say they had been given support than those in state schools. It also showed that young people were more likely to receive information about how to get into university than how to find a job, get into college or access a training programme.