Having submitted my Fellowship report and started to plan follow up activities I will continue to use this blog to record my activities, especially as most of them involve travel of one sort or another.
I continue to research the effects of employer interaction with full-time vocational IT/Computing students, this year focusing on what makes a work placement successful. There is research available exploring the views of both colleges and employers but there seems to be very little focus on the student’s view and the effect that a work placement has on a variety of students in terms of personal development as well as progression. My report on this research will be available from July 2015.
The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust awards grants to individuals to allow them to ‘travel to make a difference’. I learnt so much from my Fellowship, in Scotland, Denmark and Japan, a fantastic insight into relationships between colleges and employers. These relationships were diverse; sometimes resulting from an employer’s desire to help, as I saw in Scotland (these relationships always need an effective system on the college’s side) to an employer view that the college system is a service on which it can rely for the effective preparation of its future workforce, as in Japan. Denmark demonstrated a mixture of both relationships with financial incentives from the government to ensure that employers’ desire to help is more sustainable.
Travelling can afford the individual time: time to think; time to plan; time to progress.
In my day job, I changed from a part-time to a full-time contract at an unfortunate time for me. It was necessary so that I could afford to support two children through university but create a real poverty of time, which has made researching and reporting a real struggle.
During the Easter 2015 break I have made a solo trip to Swanage, Dorset. A five hour train and bus journey gave me plenty of time to read and review some current research reports on work experience and the hostel has plenty of space to sit with my laptop, to plan and to write. The beauty of being here is that I can take regular breaks to walk by the sea, to see the birds, walk along the cliffs, see historic sites and interesting natural features. This refreshes the brain and makes it so much more productive.
The school group, year 9 or 10, who stayed in the hostel last night, reminded me that some of the benefits associated with work experience are also associated with trips. These students have travelled. For some this may be their first time away from home, students need to adapt to sharing a room with other students, to following a new and different timetable of events and to managing some learning at the same time. Time out of education, especially where it is purposeful and encourages a degree of independence, is so important. It is such as shame that the bureaucracy of organising a trip is so shattering and that because so many staff need to be involved, (and so released from classes or asked to give up some holiday time as the seven teachers with these students have) that it is difficult to find enough people to commit to attendance and organisation. Add to this the prohibitive cost for some students and the likelihood of purposeful, residential trips taking place is low.
In Japan I learned that students may not need to do work placements in order to be ready for work. There, students are encouraged to travel; indeed, 50% of kosen students live in college accommodation and trips and placements abroad are strongly encouraged. Competitions and a full, active, five-day timetable add to the building of those skills but at a cost, some of which is paid for by industry. Industry is very keen to recruit from kosen. There is an expectation that students will be work-ready, although there is an accepted recognition that students have a broad education and specific training for the industry will still be needed).
In Denmark I learned that meaningful work for students in the Skolepraktik must come from the voluntary sector and from community groups. This is an important lesson for us in the UK, one already being acted upon in Scotland and in projects across the UK, albeit on a smaller scale.
In Swanage I am staying in a hostel run by a charity. There are a number of roles in the Youth Hostel Association for volunteers, some of which are suitable for students. Regardless of whether or not a student wants to go into the travel and tourism or hospitality sectors, this is an obvious opportunity for a student to develop team working, customer relations and communication skills, in fact all those skills reported to be valued by employers. Why is there no brokerage organisation specifically targeting the pairing of students with voluntary agencies? Maybe there is and I just haven’t heard about it.
Also in Swanage, a heritage railway is advertising for volunteers. Roles include restoration, signalling and telegraph, travelling ticket inspectors. It is not hard to imagine the diverse set of skills required for s steam railway, from engineering to customer relations, catering and cleaning. There are many agencies that match volunteers with much needed roles in the voluntary sector. Perhaps more could be done to target young people for these roles. Where students are only required to attend college, and possibly sixth form in the near future, for up to three days per week they are in an excellent position to take up these roles on a one or two day per week basis. Could it become part of a study programme? If so, how much would this require in terms of human resources to make it work effectively as part of an employability programme?
It would be interesting to hear if schemes such as this are already in existence and if so, what the results are in terms of developing employability skills in the students involved.
Computing and digital employability projects 