Ask any sixth-form student and they’ll tell you just how quickly the final two years of compulsory education fly past. They’ve only just worked out how to use the coffee machine in the common room before they’re being turfed out with a handful of exam certificates and a shirt covered in their friends’ signatures.
All colleges have some provision for helping students prepare for life in the real world, but the reality is that programmes of work experience or life skills are frequently subordinated to the demands of exams.
How then should we ensure the next generation are adequately prepared for the harsh realities that lie beyond the school gates, and what vital skills do we need to equip them with to keep them out of jail, rehab and the sexual health clinic?
Sex, drugs and rock n’roll
One area of post-16 education that’s been a victim of both education cuts and the relentless drive to boost results, is the PSHE curriculum. Once upon a better funded time, sixth form was a place for students to get to grips with the issues that they actually care about at that age: going to parties and having sex. These days every minute of the day is dedicated to catch-up sessions and revision camps. It’s not uncommon for PSHE to be entirely absent from the sixth-form curriculum.
When you bear in mind that education in itself is often the cause of so much anxiety, surely it’s obvious that we should be giving students all the guidance we can for when they go off the rails and try to combat their exam stress with three bottles of Echo Falls and an ill-advised hook up.
The least we can do as we push kids towards nervous breakdowns is help them to navigate the drug use and risky behaviour that may occur as a result. It’s no use producing a generation of academic geniuses if they all implode by the age of 25 because they don’t have the skills to cope when things go sideways.
Shared living
Most students will find themselves in a shared house or hall of residence with other young adults at some point. While some young people will make considerate housemates, most are not necessarily well-versed in communal living. Over-indulgent parents must shoulder some of the blame for this, and assuming that someone else is going to continue to pick up all your laundry and ferry your dirty plates from your bedroom to the kitchen after you leave home just isn’t going to fly.
In colleges, we could offer young people more opportunities to learn to manage simple things like clearing up their own mess. Giving groups of students responsibility for keeping one small area of the school clean is a simple idea. See how they like it when someone drops a crisp packet on the carpet they’ve just swept.
Independence
Colleges have become increasingly risk-averse when it comes to the safety of the kids in their charge. Of course this is right to an extent, but if we prevent young people from making mistakes and getting things wrong when we still have a general oversight for them, it might be making it tougher for them later. Preventing sixth-formers from travelling to conferences on their own for fear they might get lost does them a disservice. We all need the opportunity to get things wrong when the stakes are low, so when we have to cope without a safety net, we’ll have developed some confidence. I’m still astounded by the number of 16- and 17-year-olds who aren’t able to navigate their way around their own towns and cities. Let them go, let them get lost, and let them call their own Uber to get back to school again.
Tax
I don't know about anyone else, but college did not prepare me well for the whole concept of paying taxes. When I received my first pay cheque as an adult I assumed there must have been a terrible mistake. As much as I’d ever thought about tax at that age, I’m sure that while I’d have recognised that public services, schools, hospitals, the emergency services and so on, were basically a good thing, I hadn’t been prepared for the idea that I’d be expected to pay for them.
Bureaucracy
Most students will be blissfully ignorant of the massive ball ache of filling out official forms or dealing with an energy supplier. I am university-educated and fairly resilient when faced with knotty problems to solve, yet I’ve been reduced to a gibbering wreck in the face of housing benefit claims or when trying explain to someone in India that I don’t want a sodding smart meter fitted.
Book an IT room and get kids to try navigating the government website. If nothing else it might spur them on to academic success so that they never have to waste hours and risk their sanity by asking faceless bureaucracies to get anything done. A single lesson having students attempt to claim universal benefit should do the trick. Alternatively, just make sure they all read some Kafka.
Callum Jacobs is a supply teacher in the UK
