Social advantage, access to employers and the role of schools in modern British education

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between social advantage and a particular aspect of careers guidance as it manifests in modern British secondary schools, the use of school-mediated employer engagement to provide career-relevant experiences and insights to young people in fulltime education. Specifically, it explores the access that school-age young people have to people in work, both through their personal networks and within careers provision, what impact such contacts can have on their lives as they move into the adult working world and whether schools possess the ability to harness such engagement in order to challenge patterns of social reproduction. These questions are situated in the context of this collection of essays and its predecessor volume (Hooley, Sultana, & Thomsen, 2018), which addresses the character of careers guidance in national policy environments shaped by the precepts of neoliberalism. It positions employer engagement within a research literature that views aspects of employer engagement as activities which can serve either to challenge patterns of social reproduction or contribute towards them, recognising that interventions can feature contradictory dynamics, with outcomes driven by both the character of the intervention and the participating individual’s context. Within the UK context, we focus on two aspects of employer engagement that are easily implemented and common in many developed countries: careers talks with outside speakers and short work experience placements. For instance, short placements are compulsory in secondary education in Germany and Denmark and a certain number of work experience or volunteering hours is a prerequisite of high school graduation in some Canadian provinces. UK case studies are hoped to add value to this discussion due to two key features of the British system over the last 50 years: structural variation in social privilege at the school level and significant variation in the types and extent of employer engagement across schools. The former is the result of a diverse mix of schools—including non-selective statefunded education (comprehensive schools), selective state-funded education (grammar schools) and both selective and non-selective private education—as well as relatively high levels of inequality (recent OECD data place the UK consistently in the bottom third of OECD countries by Gini coefficient). The latter is the result of high levels of autonomy, both in local government and at the school level, combined with encouragement to work with employers. For instance, local authorities were funded in the 1980s to experiment with new ways to expand technical and vocational education initiatives, often with knock-on effects for other parts of education. Meanwhile, employer associations have long urged schools to bring students into contact with employers as part of general or academic education pathways and a large number of thirdparty organisations have grown up to encourage and help schools to do so (see, for instance, Inspiring the Future, www.inspiringthefuture.org, and the partners of the Careers and Enterprise Company, www.careersandenterprise. co.uk). It is possible that this emphasis in modern British education is partly due to the relatively low participation in technical and vocational pathways. In the UK, young people overwhelmingly follow a general education route where choices of careers are less channelled and less informed by earlier educational choices, unlike much of continental Europe. In such a setting, employers may wish to engage directly with students both to promote their own recruitment opportunities as well as more broadly to help them understand the choices available to them and their particular set of desired workplace skills. High levels of variation and the availability of long-term longitudinal datasets in the UK enable us to gain better analytical traction on how differences in social advantage and employer access interact and relate to social outcomes. This chapter presents new analysis of such longitudinal data to explore the character of labour market outcomes associated with teenage participation in careers talks with people from outside of school. This analysis is undertaken alongside a new assessment of the influence of teenage possession of work-related social networks. The chapter reviews and compares the character of teenage interactions with both school-mediated social capital and real social capital in order to better understand the capacity of schools to channel careers provision to contribute towards social justice outcomes. We argue that schools have the potential to design interventions that compensate for social disadvantage, but that without a deliberate approach, employer contact is more likely to exacerbate inequality (see Chapters 6 and 7, and the chapters by Irving and by Vieira et al. in Career Guidance for Social Justice for further discussion of school-based careers interventions).