Thirty years in schools taught me that you can read a child’s future in how they talk about work.
I led Spalding High School from good to outstanding and later transformed Skinners’ Academy in Hackney, and in both places the same pattern held: pupils who had met an employer, shadowed a job, or done something beyond an exam paper, were set up better for life outside of education. Those who hadn’t often drifted, not through laziness but through an absence of imagination about what comes next. That absence, multiplied across a generation, is a large part of why Britain now has more than a million young people not in education, employment or training.
I have spent the past year visiting schools and businesses across the country for the Jobs Foundation’s Jobs and Education report, and the pattern held everywhere, with ambition visible in the corridors where careers education was strong. The evidence bears this out: young people in schools with the highest-quality careers provision are up to 20 per cent less likely to become NEET in the most disadvantaged communities. At Harris Academy Greenwich, where every teacher delivers a careers slide each half term regardless of subject, the NEET rate fell from 6.9 per cent to 2.5 per cent in a single year. This can be the difference between a young person who can name three routes into work and one who can name none.
What struck me most, though, was how consistently employers described wanting the opposite of what schools are set up to measure. Every business we visited, from EY, which dropped its degree classification requirement nearly a decade ago, to Tom Kerridge, whose answer to what he looks for in new recruits was simply “attitude, that’s solely it“, said the same thing: character and willingness to learn matter more than grades. At Britten-Norman on the Isle of Wight, the aerospace fitters interviewing apprentices told us that some of their best staff never got a C in English and Maths. Yet practical and vocational courses in too many schools are still handed out as a consolation prize for pupils who have been badly behaved, a signal that hands-on learning is a punishment rather than a genuine pathway, and one that damages both the young people channelled into it and the industries that need them.
The curriculum tells the same story from the other end. Since the EBacc was introduced in 2010, the system has rewarded a narrow band of academic subjects above all else, yet only around 40 per cent of pupils actually follow the EBacc specification, and of those, roughly a third fail each subject. Schools like La Retraite in Clapham show what the alternative looks like: T Levels running since 2020, students placed with Amazon and Berkeley Construction, one former pupil now running the T Level programme at Amazon itself. But La Retraite’s Director of Careers, Ruth Coyle, was candid that the 45-day placement requirement is a genuine barrier, and her proposed fix deserves to be taken seriously, letting employers use the apprenticeship levy to cover the cost of hosting these placements, since at present the burden falls entirely on the business with no mechanism for offset.
This is why the report’s recommendation on accountability matters. We welcome the 2025 revised Ofsted framework’s increased focus on careers education, but the priority now has to be on making sure these standards are deliverable across the education system: enough trained careers advisers, dedicated time and strong employer links to meet demand, and crucially, not just another inspection burden added to schools that are already stretched. Careers education touches every part of school life, and the job of government is to help schools do it well, not simply to grade them on it more closely.
None of this works, though, unless the demand side holds up its end. AESSEAL in Rotherham has built one of the most impressive school-to-factory pipelines in the country, bringing whole cohorts through its doors so pupils can see manufacturing for themselves. Yet, the National Living Wage has risen 52 per cent in three years for a 16-year-old, and that this is pushing even committed employers to turn against hiring the young people they have spent years helping to prepare. A school can teach every employability skill in the book, but if the business on the other side of the bridge cannot afford to hire, the pupil is left stranded regardless.
An Employability Passport, recording attendance, behaviour and contribution alongside academic results, would give employers the signal they are already asking for and give pupils a stake in their own record beyond the exam hall. I reached these conclusions from thirty years watching which pupils found their way and which did not, and a year watching schools and businesses each doing their part while waiting for the other side, and the government, to do theirs.
It’s time that we gave young people a fighting chance.
Thirty years in schools taught me that you can read a child’s future in how they talk about work.
I led Spalding High School from good to outstanding and later transformed Skinners’ Academy in Hackney, and in both places the same pattern held: pupils who had met an employer, shadowed a job, or done something beyond an exam paper, were set up better for life outside of education. Those who hadn’t often drifted, not through laziness but through an absence of imagination about what comes next. That absence, multiplied across a generation, is a large part of why Britain now has more than a million young people not in education, employment or training.
I have spent the past year visiting schools and businesses across the country for the Jobs Foundation’s Jobs and Education report, and the pattern held everywhere, with ambition visible in the corridors where careers education was strong. The evidence bears this out: young people in schools with the highest-quality careers provision are up to 20 per cent less likely to become NEET in the most disadvantaged communities. At Harris Academy Greenwich, where every teacher delivers a careers slide each half term regardless of subject, the NEET rate fell from 6.9 per cent to 2.5 per cent in a single year. This can be the difference between a young person who can name three routes into work and one who can name none.
What struck me most, though, was how consistently employers described wanting the opposite of what schools are set up to measure. Every business we visited, from EY, which dropped its degree classification requirement nearly a decade ago, to Tom Kerridge, whose answer to what he looks for in new recruits was simply “attitude, that’s solely it“, said the same thing: character and willingness to learn matter more than grades. At Britten-Norman on the Isle of Wight, the aerospace fitters interviewing apprentices told us that some of their best staff never got a C in English and Maths. Yet practical and vocational courses in too many schools are still handed out as a consolation prize for pupils who have been badly behaved, a signal that hands-on learning is a punishment rather than a genuine pathway, and one that damages both the young people channelled into it and the industries that need them.
The curriculum tells the same story from the other end. Since the EBacc was introduced in 2010, the system has rewarded a narrow band of academic subjects above all else, yet only around 40 per cent of pupils actually follow the EBacc specification, and of those, roughly a third fail each subject. Schools like La Retraite in Clapham show what the alternative looks like: T Levels running since 2020, students placed with Amazon and Berkeley Construction, one former pupil now running the T Level programme at Amazon itself. But La Retraite’s Director of Careers, Ruth Coyle, was candid that the 45-day placement requirement is a genuine barrier, and her proposed fix deserves to be taken seriously, letting employers use the apprenticeship levy to cover the cost of hosting these placements, since at present the burden falls entirely on the business with no mechanism for offset.
This is why the report’s recommendation on accountability matters. We welcome the 2025 revised Ofsted framework’s increased focus on careers education, but the priority now has to be on making sure these standards are deliverable across the education system: enough trained careers advisers, dedicated time and strong employer links to meet demand, and crucially, not just another inspection burden added to schools that are already stretched. Careers education touches every part of school life, and the job of government is to help schools do it well, not simply to grade them on it more closely.
None of this works, though, unless the demand side holds up its end. AESSEAL in Rotherham has built one of the most impressive school-to-factory pipelines in the country, bringing whole cohorts through its doors so pupils can see manufacturing for themselves. Yet, the National Living Wage has risen 52 per cent in three years for a 16-year-old, and that this is pushing even committed employers to turn against hiring the young people they have spent years helping to prepare. A school can teach every employability skill in the book, but if the business on the other side of the bridge cannot afford to hire, the pupil is left stranded regardless.
An Employability Passport, recording attendance, behaviour and contribution alongside academic results, would give employers the signal they are already asking for and give pupils a stake in their own record beyond the exam hall. I reached these conclusions from thirty years watching which pupils found their way and which did not, and a year watching schools and businesses each doing their part while waiting for the other side, and the government, to do theirs.
It’s time that we gave young people a fighting chance.