Blog categories
- What to say to unpaid ‘work experience’ offers
If you work in a role adjacent to young people’s careers, you often receive requests from organisations wanting you to spread the word about internships, courses or work experience. Many requests are legitimate and I’m happy to help when I can. Many are not. Many are trying to get me to promote an unpaid job, dressed up as an “opportunity”. I imagine some such opportunities have been rejected by job sites and or perhaps their unwillingness to pay their workers extend to an unwillingness to pay to advertise their illegal employment practices. I got one the other day from a “music agency” in South London.Read More → - Measuring class
To promote social mobility, we need to measure it. To measure it, we need to define it. We need to identify markers of socio-economic background. To put it crudely, we need to work out what makes someone working, middle or upper class. Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives. Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part ofRead More → - What should party manifestos say about higher education funding?
Forget about canaries, the signs of impending doom are more like the sound of cracking rock thundering through the coal mine and debris collapsing around us. Here are just two recent signs. Sign 1 New research recently revealed that now more than half of supposedly full-time undergraduates are doing paid work for more than 15 hours a week and nearly a quarter have full-time jobs alongside their studies to make ends meet. The idea that students whinge about not having enough money is nothing new. (There are even a jokes about it in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale from the fourteenth century.) But we have reach a differentRead More → - My imaginary university
I felt (quite literally) honoured recently to receive an invitation from the man who puts the ‘great’ into Paul Greatrix – none other than the Registrar of the University of Nottingham, the blogger, the podcaster and the chronicler of all things higher education. He asked me to appear on his podcast My Imaginary University. If you’re not familiar with it (where have you been?), this is the closest thing the HE sector has to Desert Island Discs. It’s a ingeniously simple format in which Paul interviews someone, invites them to make some seemingly fantastical choices and, in the process, of course, they reveal as much about themselvesRead More → - T Levels: what’s the win for employers?
Last week, the DfE announced that it was setting up a £12 million fund to encourage employers to offer work experience for T levels. Good news, right? Well, partly. If T Levels are ever going to be a mainstream success as a vocational qualification, they are going to need a lot more employer engagement. I mean a lot. When you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings
Recent posts
- Admissions and access
- Brexit
- Careers education, information, advice & guidance
- Consultancy
- Covid
- Diversity & inclusion
- Education
- Employability
- Engineering
- Fair access
- HE funding, tuition fees, & student loans
- HE policy
- League tables & rankings
- Lifelong learning
- News
- Opportunity
- Politics
- Skills
- Social mobility
- Student choice
- Student information
- Student wellbeing
- Teaching and learning
- Uncategorized
2018-11-01