C.E.A.E.E.

R
REPORT
Changing Education Limited Annual Employer Engagement
Report 2018

t: 01625 837309
w: ceconnect.co.uk

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Contents

Executive Summary

1. Introduction

2. Employer Engagement, where are we?

3. Internal Challenges

3. 1 Time vs Skillset

4. Equal Opportunities

5. Employers and the growing problem

6. Where are the successes?

7. Our findings

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Executive Summary
The purpose of this report is to take advantage of the unique position Changing Education are
in to analyze the results schools across the whole of England are generating from employer
engagement and to identify the limitations they face. Specific objectives are to identify key
problems in sourcing placements and offer recommendations to schools for future
engagement.

Problems have been identified in terms of the amount of time and resource being allocated to
employer engagement and a lack of skills. The report recommends a major rethink in the way
budgets are allocated to work based learning and a clarification of the job role, it’s
expectations and the KPI’s required to ensure success.

Introduction
This report is being written to discuss the issues facing schools around employer
engagement, mainly the amount of time it takes to create good quality placements over a
wide spread of industries. Other issues this report aims to tackle is the careers advice and
guidance being given to students, the support there after and the adherence to GATSBY
Benchmarking throughout the process of securing work placements. The opinions and
concerns raised in this report are those of Changing Education Limited and have had no
direct influence from any other party.

This report follows a detailed analysis of a focus group picked out at random from the 139
schools and colleges we work with and comprised of roughly 15% of this number spanning
5000 pupils who have completed work experience this year, the overall answer to the issue
faced is primarily based in the amount of resource schools have to allocate to employer
engagement and the mind set being instilled within their students, which we will endeavor to
evidence throughout this report.

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Employer engagement, where are we?

It is fair to say that schools have an almighty task ahead of them, with increased pressure
from the Department of Education to create more and more interactions between employers
and students, many schools will require a drastic reform of their current processes and
staffing to adapt. But before we begin to analyze our data to identify the areas of reform
required, we must first remind ourselves of the Gatsby Benchmarks of good careers guidance
which are broken down into the following areas:

1. A stable careers programme

2. Learning from career and labour market information
3. Addressing the needs of each pupil
4. Linking curriculum learning to careers
5. Encounters with employers and employees
6. Experiences of workplaces
7. Encounters with further and higher education
8. Personal guidance

It is using these benchmarks that we have written this report so as to determine whether or
not schools are currently delivering careers guidance to the highest potential they can be.
One of the first points our data has highlighted is that high percentages of students who self-
place are doing so through primary education and child care placements.

Based on our data this is not a true representation of student aspirations and is actually
contributing to the widening skills gap that the Department of Education is working so hard on
to reduce. As shown in the pie chart below Primary Schools comprise of up to 26% of self-
placements within our schools with a further 6% going into Child Care or Nursey placements.

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Employer engagement, where are we? Cont…

IT and Software
Medical and Development,…
Health, 2%
Finance, 2%
Education, 26%
Scientific, 2%
Hospitality
Services, 2%
Other, 2%
Mechanics, 2%
Legal, 2%
Food Services, 2%
Office, 3% Retail, 7%

Administrative and
Clerical, 3% Child Care, 6%
Animals, 4%
Building Healthcare, 5%
Construction and Sports and
Skilled Trades, 4% Hair and Beauty,
Leisure, 4% Engineering, 4%
5%

*This data was taken from all of our partner schools who have opted for risk assessment services only*

It is reasonable to assume that whilst some students will aspire to be teachers this is not a
true representation of the careers aspirations within schools. In fact, following an analysis of
student placement preferences within one of our schools we found that while education made
up 30% of their placements this year, only 12% of their total cohort had expressed an interest
in this area, ensuing that up to 30 of their students attended a placement they had no
invested interest in.

This creates more than just a mismatch, it actually has a detrimental long term effect on the
engagement of the school’s pupils with employers in their area as these students are unlikely
to create strong positive impressions and experiences whilst on placement, due simply to the
fact that they do not want to be there. Here we must relate to Gatsby benchmark number five
which relates to encounters with employers and employees. Whilst this is clearly geared up to
focus on creating encounters we must also take into consideration the effects each encounter
has on the employer’s willingness to support future programmes.

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Internal Challenges
As a leader in sourcing and running work experience we must draw on our own experiences
to deduce that a rationale for so many students opting for education placements is that the
school has been unable to secure more stereotypically difficult placements in fields such as
mechanical, building, animal care & engineering. This being due to a lack of skills needed to
secure such placements.

There are many barriers a business can throw up when asking for work experience, such as
‘health and Safety’, ‘time’, ‘bad experiences in the past’, but as a company who has engaged
with employers for over 10 years, we believe that there is no objection you cannot reasonably
overcome with the proper research and understanding behind you. However, it is our opinion
that schools do not currently have the staff with the right skillset or experience to counter such
objections, this again is evidenced in the difference between the feedback given to careers
advisors and the placement students are attending, specifically we relate to our placement
preference survey mentioned earlier where only 12% of students had a desire to work in
education yet 30% attended education placements. This creates a strong case for schools to
look externally for to ensure and higher success rate in employer engagement. Teachers
should be left to teach and professionals with a track record of business engagement should
be sought, whether through recruitment or outsourcing.

The approach we have noted when examining past staff efforts to source placements is a
fairly linear one with objections being the biggest pitfall of the process, this is partly due to a
lack of experience in ‘cold calling’ which essentially is the process you undertake when trying
to secure the support of any employer for work related activities. School staff are not trained
to overcome the high levels of rejection they can face when qualifying companies for work
related activities and often offer a poorly versed response and an unwillingness to work with
the company to find a solution. As a company we have lost placements which were previously
secured when school personnel has intervened in the process and contacted the employer
directly. Of course this is not the case in every school however the vast majority are in
desperate need of an upskill programme to prepare the staff involved in this process.

Time vs Skillset
Where the skillset for employer engagement is present, we must take into consideration the
amount of funding and more importantly the amount of time available for schools to action an
effective employer engagement programme. Many of the staff we have worked with who are
tasked with organising work experience placements already have a role in school as a full
time teacher, and although they are allowed extra time in their timetable to fulfil their duties,
are unable to commit the amount of time required to securing placements.

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As a guideline, our own employer engagement team work on the basis that 10 calls will result
in 3-4 conversations with 1-2 placements secured. If we use these conversion rates and then
apply them to a medium-large size school’s cohort of 200 students, we can then assume that
it would take 2000 calls to secure placements for all students.

For a staff member working full time Monday to Friday on employer engagement this figure
would be achievable in a month, however a teacher with perhaps 10 hours per week allotted
to work experience would stand no chance of reaching the numbers required. We’ve also
found that due to the time teachers are given to source placements they don’t usually end up
working with the big chain employers that exist around them, and this is due to the fact that
these companies usually have long and arduous processes to complete.

Equal Opportunity
It is at this stage in the report we would like to draw out some key data on demographics,
specifically relating to sex. After drawing out the data on the makeup of placements across a
selection of schools we thought it would be diligent to run a report on the makeup of
placements by sex of the pupils attending. Our data shows that the majority of students
attending child care, hair and beauty and primary placements are female with up to 70-80% of
the placements falling into this category.

Interestingly vocational area’s such as Engineering, Construction and Mechanics is much

more male dominated with 90% and above of the placements going to male students. With
this information we must relate to Gatsby benchmarks 2 & 8 and ask the question ‘are we
providing all of our students with relevant labour market information and giving them… the

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guidance needed to break out of the usual format of placements?’ What we mean by this is
that, as a rule, there tends to be a higher number of female students attending Education,
Child Care and Hair & Beauty placements across all schools, yet we know the current labour
market has no increased demand in these areas. There has however been a huge surge in
demand in technical vocations as evidenced by the introduction of T-Levels at college level.

It is therefore up to us as educational providers to encourage not only male but female

students to aspire into technical industries, and perhaps to even look at a wider campaign to
push the value of these placements. Obviously this will pose some challenges but we must
ensure that students are being equally pushed in this direction.

Employers and the growing problem.

We have discussed the pitfalls that may be present in schools surrounding employer
engagement, but there are some schools out there who have adapted and put a lot of time
and effort into sourcing placements but are still coming up short. It is to these schools we
direct the next part of this report.

We have spoken a little about objections in our previous sections and how understanding and
research is key to overcoming them, well the reasoning behind this is that a lot of employers
don’t actually know what is involved when taking on a work experience student. This may
come as a shock to many as the rational thinking is that any company that has existed for a
certain period of time must have at least enquired or taken an interest in work experience at
some stage? This may be the case within large chains who are part of a bigger brand, but we
want to focus on the small to medium sized business, mechanics, painters and decorators,
and pharmacies that don’t have the time to put the proper research in.

It is these companies that we are alienating on a daily basis when we express our
disappointment in their lack of support, but it isn’t that they aren’t supportive, it is that a gap
exists in the understanding between school and the employer and the challenges they face
day in and day out.

So what’s the answer? All schools to outsource to a specialist engagement team? Before
getting on the phone the specialist team would be armed with up to date guidelines from the
department of education and the health & safety executive to support any arguments we
make and an understanding of how liability insurance works in relation to WEX students. This
way if the employer says no to work experience as a result of a health and safety concern, we
can then work with them and hopefully bring them back to the table.

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Where are the successes?

We have discussed the general issue of relationships not being built by schools with
employers due to a lack of resource (time, money & skill) however through the analysis of our
2018 school year data we have identified the successes of a few schools. Interestingly
enough the schools in question are located in both the North and South of the country, one
near London and another near to Manchester. Both schools have managed to secure the
majority of placements in Engineering, Retail, Production and Healthcare. The majority of
these placements are notoriously difficult to source, however due to the school’s
determination and internal processes they have achieved numbers which the remainder of
our partners combined were unable to reach.

The success of these schools has been based around tackling the issues we have discussed
in two ways. A full time member of staff has been employed within the schools respectively,
and is tasked solely with building partnerships in the area. After meeting the individuals, it is
clear that they have been carefully recruited based not only on their qualification for the job,
but on a culture fit. They have also outsourced parts of the process to an external employer
engagement team, this team was charged with sourcing mechanical placements with some
engineering, while the internal team would focus on purely engineering placements. All
numbers were achieved within a two-week window.

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Our Findings
The purpose of this report has been to highlight key areas for improvement using real, first
hand data and experiences to make recommendations on how we can improve the work
schools and LEP’s are already doing. It is the finding of this report that whilst we must praise
the hard work schools have been involved in to ensure that the majority of their students
attend a placement, there are key areas to be improved upon in both employer engagement
and a strategy to more actively involve the female population in technical/vocational areas.

It appears that most schools have built a great network of placements through their local
primary schools but have not committed to a targeted campaign to bring on board placements
in Mechanics, Construction, Sport etc. This will need to change in the near future to fall in line
with the Department for Education aspirations to bridge the current skills gap. We must look
into the staff being used to spearhead this process and their ability to do so, both in terms of
time and skillset, as currently from direct feedback we have received from school staff it is
clear that the task is too much for anyone with a teaching responsibility regardless of how
long they have been doing it.

Our recommendations:

 Schools should re-evaluate the Gatsby Benchmarks to ensure that the delivery of
careers on work experience is aligned.
 Look externally for solutions to employer engagement or invest in an upskill
programme for existing staff
 When recruiting internally ensure the responsibility of employer engagement and work
experience coordination is given to someone who can commit at least 20 hours a
week.
 Work closely with your careers team to ensure enough measures are in place to
motivate students to source and find fit for purpose placements.
 Increase the number of assemblies / form lessons dedicated to careers. e as f

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The team behind this report

Dean Maxfield

Employer Engagement Manager.

Prior to joining Changing Education Dean enjoyed a 5-

year career in sales and marketing, since joining the
company he has used that experience to bridge the gap
between schools and employers and aims to diversify the
work experience offering available to our students.

Matthew Hodgkinson

Director and co-founder of Changing Education.

Matthew is a director and co-founder of Changing

Education. He is a former business studies teacher
who has previously worked in sales and marketing.

Armed with 10 years’ experience in providing and

managing workplace provision, Matthew is keen to
shake up the way we view work experience and the
place it holds in the student journey.

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