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
What is CEIAG and how does know what it is help us improve it?
We’ve all heard – or told – tales about how some careers advisor “told me to be a [insert laughably inappropriate career]”, but people who are helped by careers advice tend never to mention it. Why? Can it be true that careers advice is so wide of the mark? Of course not.
Not a single person has taken a T-level yet and there are still no solutions to finding enough employer support, but DfE thinks we should axe all alternatives.
Drawing on my piece for HEPI, I explain why the National Student Survey shouldn’t change and why – and how – it should.
Prince Philip said, “everything that wasn’t invented by God is invented by an engineer”. Was he right or did he do a disservice to engineers and artists?
Data presented by UCAS’s Chief Executive Clare Marchant shows starkly the correlation between clearing and drop-out…
The long Covid of careers: What’s the equivalent of hand-washing and mask-wearing for young people’s careers
I don’t think I agree with the idea of university as a ‘failsafe’, although I’m still not sure I understand what you intend by the word. So I’m going to use Matt Pinkett’s line: ‘Aim for whatever you want to do, and if you don’t get it, well, at least you can go to university.’ That assumes that whatever you want to do won’t be best achieved by going to uni. Obviously, university is not the best route for everything or for everyone, but for the vast majority of the best paid and most secure jobs, it is – if not a prerequisite – at least aRead More →
There is plenty of research showing a significant earnings premium on average for graduates regardless of background. Probably the most comprehensive work is the paper by the IFS ‘How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background’. The Sutton Trust has also done many excellent studies on different aspects of this question which is actually a lot more complex than it sounds.
Which is the best university? It’s a seductive question to ask, but that doesn’t mean there’s a sensible answer. League tables, aka rankings, is the nonsensical answer you’re likely to get.
Over the past couple of years, I been doing some consultancy work for IP Inclusive, an initiative to support diversity in the intellectual property (IP) profession. I’ve been impressed by what lovely and dedicated people they are. I’ve also been delighted to be working in collaboration with the knowledgeable and utterly driven Duncan Grant and highly recommended web development team Visix. The original job was to create some materials to promote IP careers in schools. I argued that IP Inclusive was a poor brand for this campaign: it looks at the issue from the employers’ perspective, not the students’. I came up with the name ‘CareersRead More →
