Finished With School, But Not Ready For Work – Are We Educating a Generation of NEETs?
Qualifications alone are not enough to ensure the employability of young people, says Kirstie Mackey – so how can schools help bridge the gap between education and the workplace?
One of the many interesting things about speaking to educators and school leaders around the country while running the Barclays LifeSkills programme is the opportunity to hear from teachers first-hand about their concerns for the next generation.
From these conversations, it is apparent that despite all the progress that has been made on careers support, many young people are still leaving education without being ready to cope with the ever-changing world of work. In fact, recent research from the Barclays LifeSkills report “How employable is the UK?” found that just 6 percent of teachers believe that their students leave school with the skills they need to succeed in the workplace.
These skills, from leadership to adaptability, have been identified by experts such as the World Economic Forum as becoming more essential in the workplace as automation increases and candidates with strong ‘human’ skills are more and more in demand. However, despite them becoming more important, our research found that nearly 60 per cent of the UK’s workforce lacks all of the necessary skills to succeed in the future workplace.
The impact of this employability skills gap will not only delay young people from achieving their potential, it’s also a disadvantage to the wider UK economy to have a future workforce that isn’t prepared for working life. For this reason, it is in the interest of educators, Government and businesses to work together to ensure young people are given high-quality careers education and the opportunity to strengthen the transferable skills they will need to thrive in the 21st Century jobs landscape.
Bridging the gap between education and workplaces
If we are to ensure that all young people have the right skills and attitude to succeed in their chosen career, we need to give them the opportunity to develop these skills before they leave education. Yet our research has shown that nearly a quarter of educators (22 percent) don’t think their institution is effective in developing employability skills for pupils.
To tackle this, first of all, we need a curriculum that helps bridge the gap between education and the workplace.
To have the biggest impact, the opportunity to build key employability skills needs to be woven throughout traditional academic learning. That might involve looking at problem-solving techniques during a maths lesson or building in an element of proactivity to homework tasks.
Implementing this whole-school approach needn’t be something that creates extra work for already overstretched teachers. Since September 2018, all schools and colleges have a dedicated careers lead. These career leads can make quick wins by finding ways to weave transferable employment skills throughout the curriculum.
