Persuading employers to take on work-experience pupils can be difficult but a growing number of schools and colleges are signing up businesses that are also willing to pay the young people involved.
Carly Chynoweth finds out how asking for assistance can help schools and colleges to build links with employers
Back in the mid 1980's, financier Sandy Weill, now Chairman Emeritus of Citigroup, was struggling to find enough young people to join his Wall Street firm, when he drove home through Brooklyn one night, saw young people playing outside and realised that they could be great future employees. The result was the National Academy Foundation, which helps to provide more than 50,000 high school students from relatively deprived areas a year with a programme that includes career-themed study, mentoring and paid internships.
Sandy’s initial idea was that this support would help students to develop the skills needed to move into employment as finance professionals; in this it was something of a short-term failure, says John May, the chief executive of Career Academies UK, the foundation’s sister organisation. “The programme was a complete disaster in terms of feeding him 18-year-olds who could come and work for him,” he says. “All these kids met folks who said ‘you’re bright, you could go to college’, so after the pilot scheme he had found all these young people jobs but they decided to go to university first.”
Raising aspirations and achievements
This is now one of the distinct benefits of the Career Academies scheme in the UK: it helps young people to raise both their aspirations and their achievements. Students join the programme at 16 or 17 for their two final years of school or college; on it, they follow a business-focused course of study that’s equivalent to three A levels (it can be tailored by each individual school, so it could include BTECs or the new diplomas, for example), receive one-to-one mentoring from an employee at a local business and they complete six weeks of paid work experience in the summer between their first and second years. Senior business leaders and other “gurus” also come in to the school as guest lecturers.
John, a former primary school teacher who was once – briefly – the youngest Head in the country, admits that persuading organisations to sign up to a scheme that involves paying 17 year olds at £1.00 an hour above the minimum wage can be tricky but says that they soon see benefits to their business. “Many companies have told us that they started doing it for philanthropic reasons, but they then recognise that these youngsters bring benefits. They get work done and they often come in at a time of year when they would be hiring temps anyway.” In other cases the training students gain on the internship lets them come back and work as part time, for example as Saturday-morning bank tellers.
Vocational and academic learning
Payment aside, there are clear similarities between the Career Academies approach and the new 14-19 diplomas: they both emphasise employer involvement and offer a mixture of vocational and academic learning. “We were described as a diploma with knobs on,” John says. “But there are also differences. The biggest is that we are employer-led.” He also argues that the Career Academies have the advantage of being quick and simple to explain to employers; it’s easy for schools to say exactly what they want from businesses that get involved in the scheme. “I am concerned that [with diplomas] the qualification is being put before the relationship,” he says. This makes it much harder for school leaders to sign employers up to the scheme.
One of Career Academies’ unusual characteristics is that it is run more like a franchise than a traditional centralised charity. Rather than giving its affiliated schools and colleges a list of employers’ phone numbers, it trains a team from each school in how to build relationships in their own community (there are a couple of exceptions, as some major national employers are managed centrally). The training covers everything from building a hitlist of potential partners to identifying the right contact people and launching the scheme in the right way.
Getting the link development process right is hard work, John says. “Some schools and colleges start working with us and say that they think it will be a walk in the park. That makes me nervous.” The starting point is building a team that will act as the contact point between the school and the business community. “People get promoted and disappear elsewhere, so a team approach is important and will make the programme more sustainable,” he says.
Once that is in place, the key thing is for the school to make very clear what it wants from its partner businesses. “Schools and colleges often create employer engagement forums that are very unfocused”; there is a lot of discussion of wanting to build links but very often a failure to make clear, precise demands. Heads and Principals need to give businesses a detailed outline of what they want to achieve and how they plan to achieve it – you can’t expect businesses to guess.
Qualified potential employees
Simply understanding that employers also gain from the arrangements can help. “I remember as a head teacher being terribly embarrassed about asking [for things from businesses]. I did not understand the relationship or what they got out of it. We now spend a lot of time helping Heads to understand what the business benefits really are.” In the longer term, employers will get access to a bigger pool of qualified potential employees but right from the outset, the scheme provides great development opportunities for their current employees, who can sign up as mentors or guest speakers.
For now, the programme in the UK is relatively small – about 100 colleges and schools are affiliated with it – but John is content to grow at a steady pace. “We do not want to grow too fast. There are a number of projects that fail because their ambitions are so enormous.” The biggest barrier is finding enough internship placements; John believes that this will get easier as employers get more used to the idea. “We are not there yet, but we are getting national employers saying ‘okay, we have worked with you with 20 youngsters at our head office. How do we turn this into 50 and then 100 nationwide?’,” he says.
Find out more about how the Career Academies programme works on the ground and what heads, students and business people think of it in the May issue of Leadership Focus magazine.
Page Published: 07/04/2009
