The secondary school curriculum is “broken” and needs to be reformed so that careers education becomes a formal element, a panel of experts has told the House of Lords.
The House of Lords Education for 11- to 16-Year-Olds Committee was told that careers lead teachers need more time on the curriculum, more training and more opportunities to offer students stimulating work experience in industry. Careers education should become the “inspiration piece” of the curriculum, peers heard.
The committee is due to make recommendations by the end of the year to improve the quality of secondary education and was taking evidence from experts about access to work experience and schools’ engagement with industry.
Claire Thorne, CEO of TechSheCan, a charity that works with industry, government and schools to improve the ratio of women working in the technology sector, told the committee: “The inspiration needs to go back into the curriculum and careers education needs to be part of the curriculum.
“For teachers it needs to be technology-focused, industry-relevant continuing professional development experiences and resources. We cannot expect teachers to understand what it looks like to work in Deutsche Bank or Google when they are vocationally led and have gone into [teaching] for their life.
“We need to start thinking of careers education as education that is preparing [students] for the future. The inspiration piece is missing from the curriculum and, therefore, what leads from the inspiration piece is where [students] see their place in the world - what can they be?”
Careers education ‘should be the inspiration piece’
Ms Thorne called for a computer science curriculum and other curricula to be revised so they are “fit for the future, perhaps working with industry to design what that might look like”.
But she said the review needs to be happen in “an agile way so that it doesn’t take decades to introduce new content when the pace of technology and the pace of change in the workplace doesn’t align with the pace of development of the curriculum”.
Ms Thorne called for computer science to be offered “perhaps as a mandatory” subject in all UK schools up to GCSE level, and for more engagement and leadership from the Department for Education.
Ms Thorne was most damning about the impact that the existing system was having on girls. “We see with the children we work with that the curriculum is broken; the curriculum is failing them. We see with the cohorts of girls who we bring into industry workday experiences, they are so disengaged at 13 to 14 years old. They do not feel able to contribute, there is no confidence, they cannot participate, and they don’t see that Stem [science, technology, engineering and maths] is important for their future in any sense. We have totally lost them and we totally lost them much earlier on from, say, age 8.”
Nick Brook, CEO of Speakers for Schools and a former deputy general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “There is considerable evidence that the current system does not prepare young people well enough for future careers.
“Our own research complements the work of the Sutton Trust, which shows that half of all secondary school pupils do not have access to work experience in their time. Contrast that with the experience within private schools; there are multiple opportunities for high-quality, meaningful work experience. So there is a major deficit here.”
He said many careers leads juggle other roles, such as assistant headteacher, student wellbeing coach, equality and diversity lead and Stem coordinator, “which means there is very little capacity to do what’s needed in terms of the quality of the experience - the personalised support young people need to make the most of those experiences, and also building connections with employers”.
Oli de Botton, chief executive of The Careers and Enterprise Company, told the committee that careers education should be a mainstream part of school and college life, “not at the margins”. He added that “the relationship between schools and business needs to be better. At the moment they are talking past each other. We need to bring them together in creative ways”.
