AIBU to think there should be organised work experience placement schemes for school students

[DuaNinja]

Starting to feel very frustrated trying to help DD to find a year 12 work experience placement. She completed a week in year 10 but this year the school want them to find something relevant to future studies and not just to go to work with your parents or similar. It sounds so easy in theory but in practice why would a random company want the hassle of dealing with a work experience kid? It would be great if there was a proper system in place for this. I believe in Ireland students undertake work experience in year 11 and have a vocational / transition year between lower exams and senior exams (apologies if this is not correct, I only have a very vague understanding of this). In my day the school had links with local businesses and we signed up tor a placement and the company we went to had a plan in place for us. DD's school offers no practical help, just links to websites about how to write a CV. So far she has sent her CV and a targeted email to 9 companies and has not had a single response. Also, if she does get a response, we know nothing about the potential companies offering the place. I would feel happier if I knew she was going somewhere that had been vetted in some way. Not that she is going to get a placement at this rate.

How long ago was that?

We had a WExp coordinator. The job disappeared when she retired. Stuff to do with careers is now organised via non teaching careers staff - but they have huge workloads not confined to work experience. Ours does arrange placements for FSM year 10 students. Recently we had a year 10 work experience 'week' (it was three days). They mostly seemed to manage to find something, to be fair.

The local banks used to be great placements. They have mainly disappeared too.

"The careers department" at my school is one member of staff with two extra non contact periods on their timetable.

And as a pp mentioned, her main focus is making sure we have a careers education programme so we meet the Gatsby benchmarks.

We do a week in year 10 (which 50% of the parents love and 50% hate) and one in year 12 - but the y12 have to sort their own placements.

By drawing on staff contacts, we often manage to find really interesting opportunities for them, but which can require a bit of effort on their part.

I won't be going out my way again after a placement I'd found contacted me to tell me that neither of the students we were sending had bothered to turn up.

It's simply not caught up with how work works today. Remote working, the loss of physical shops & banks, the increase of self employed people (in the industry mine are going into most are self employed & unsociable hours).

My son did a Music Btec. Getting work experience in that industry is incredibly difficult. The few local rehearsal/recording studios were inundated. The sound & lighting company who do everything for local amdram would take on their own members but only if it co-incided with a scheduled show week.

In the last 5 years half a dozen local bank branches have closed. There is no public transport for kids to even get to a placement.

Youngest daughter is 28. I remember when our WExp coordinator was got rid of in the school where I worked - she left to move elsewhere and was just never replaced. Questions were asked at the time about what the kids were supposed to do about Work Experience, but the school just dropped the whole thing. This will be more than ten years ago now.

That was my point, that this used to be an actual thing. It was well organised, it was one person's entire full time job. But it was cost cutting that saw it off, not anyone saying that it was no longer possible or necessary.

We have a Centerparcs near us (and soon to get a theme park). These are sold to us as advantageous for employment but also excellent for schools as they offer training, work opportunities and placements. Hmm.

Centreparcs come in every so often for careers talks. They employ loads of our sixth for on low wages, won't let them cut their hours near exams time and often demand extra shifts out of them. they 'don't do work experience'.

So even a big , modern employer isn't interested . They want a paid workforce. None of the DIY stores locally take students and nor do Next any more. Waitrose sometimes do. The airport no longer takes under 18s.

Yes, 28 does sound about right for the last gasp of whole school work experience.

I really don't understand why schools are so keen to get students out on work experience. I've worked for a number of companies that take them and it a real struggle to find them meaningful things to do.

What do the students gain from it?

My yr 10 has just done her weeks work experience.

She spent a week in an engineering company, learnt how to do CAD design, had a go at soldering circuit boards, sat quietly in some meetings and made excellent use of the unlimited free hot chocolate from the fancy coffee machine. She had a varied, interesting and educational week.

But to me it really hammered home how much parental connections matter, even at such a young age. Because the only reason she got the placement is because dh works there. Its a company where I imagine a lot of dc would love to be placed (STEM/ engineering/ manufacturing/ computing/ business) but they generally don't accept work experience placements as most staff WFH or are hybrid. DH was fine with commuting in every day for a week, dealing with the paperwork, etc because its his daughter. It will be interesting to see if the school contact him next year to see if they could place one of their work experience candidates there again, but knowing the school it seems unlikely. The school mostly expect the dc to arrange it themselves.

I am pretty sure the Gatsby benchmarks (guidance on school careers provision) require schools to organise WEX for y10 and y12 and that Ofsted would have something to say if they didn't.

Otherwise I think it would have gone by now.

Plus there are school/college based qualifications that actually require it (BTEC and T-level).

The government definitely needs to think a) about how businesses can be incentivised and b) what an inexperienced 14/15 or 16/17 year old can actually DO.

TheHateIsNotGood · Today 00:02

including extending CV19 lockdowns just to protect 'teaching staff' with no thought given at all to the effects, short and long-term on the students you were being paid to teach.

I wish that you would stop spouting this BS.

Sadly I think the whole concept of 'work experience' is outdated and doesn't suit the a modern world of work. Not just hybrid working and H&S but because the sort of simple tasks that could be given to WE kids have disappeared. Nothing can replace that old WE model.

The admin job I did straight from school, and another I did in my 30's (banking) no longer exist! Literally not done any more thanks to technology. We no longer file paper documents, open sacks of mail and deliver it internally, photocopy agendas and papers, sign physical documents, produce physical invoices, pay in cash or write up cheques to be entered into a finance system. Professional jobs like accounting. legal, banking etc are all done completely differently than in in the past. I could go on.

Even 'blue collar' work is reducing. Out in the garages & depots, vehicle maintenance is totally different because the vehicles are run by mini computers. Fixing a car is completely different from in the past. The physical stuff is too dangerous for a young WE person to do and no mechanic or engineer wants to babysit a kid around big machinery. It's hard enough with a proper apprentice needing supervision. And it's actually really hard to find kids who want physical, dirty jobs like building, plumbing, electrical these days.

And as a recruiter I can't say I've ever taken any notice of a weeks work experience on a cv, no matter how relevant . A part time job of any type is actually more useful, at least I know they can turn up on time, be reliable and work to a decent standard.

Our requirement to meet Gatsby Benchmarks has been mentioned a few times.

People complain when schools don't do anything other than teach lessons. We get told we don't know anything or prep children for 'the real world'.

Employers complain when school leavers have no idea about any workplace norms.

The students who don't get placed at ours quite often end up working in the canteen. This, I think, is genuinely quite useful. Everyone benefits from learning to e.g. chop salad, peel potatoes, make pastries etc hygienically.

I also work for a University in a niche field and do my best to accommodate requests, but I get more students than I can manage, and honestly it's really hard work! They can't be left alone, everyone involved needs safeguarding training, lots of paperwork to be filled out etc. So I now do two structured sessions a year, and once they're full that's it.

If a student sent me a CV I'd be unlikely to read through it - they are always like the type of thing you used to put in your Record of Achievement back in the day and I just don't have time to go through them. However, I do think that finding their own placement is important - that's the reality of getting a job, it's not always easy and rejection and no responses are common in the real world of employment.

A short to the point email about why they feel a work placement in my field is relevant to them e.g. I'm hoping to come to your uni and study this, my relevant hobbies to the field etc will always make me more likely to consider them (and I do reply to all, even if we can't take them).

Two red flags for me:

They aren't really interested in a career in my field, just looking for a generic placement or because its handy;

When their parent writes the request for them (this puts me off massively because it suggests a real lack of interest/confidence from the child, even if that's not the case, and typically I find these children much harder to engage when they come).

I'll always accommodate someone who has a genuine interest, so I'd suggest having a good think about what the child might want to do and being very targeted in who they approach. There are also organisations who can help. I'm in a science field so e.g. https://www.stem.org.uk/placements and https://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/students-teachers/nuffield-research-placements can help too.

@LemonGelato I well remember my WEX in an estate agent in one of the late 80s recessions, ripping up addresses on card indexes after transferring them onto a green DOS screen!

They did take me out on a couple of survey jobs and let me stick the little colour pictures onto the brochures for the posher houses. I also learnt I didn't want to be an estate agent, and organised WEX myself after that.

I should add, I was recently involved in one of these too, and it was very good! It's a 3 day virtual work experience, which means there are far less limitations on the numbers that can join (we had around 40 students) and they got an overview of many different fields. Bonus to the staff involved is that they only had to give up a short period of time and weren't directly meeting the students so less worries from a safeguarding perspective, might be an option for some:

https://www.speakersforschools.org/vwex/

The wider question is "what is the point of work experience?" - particularly for 14 year olds. Is the idea to give a 14yo who wants to become a doctor a face-to-face experience of working in a hospital, or providing care, or what being a medical student will be like, to help them decide if they really want to go into that work, to add to their personal statement for their uni application? For what it's worth a few days hanging around a hospital wouldn't be as useful for that latter one as a teenager who is able to demonstrate a longer term commitment, initiative and hard work through something like washing up in a pub and glass collecting for two years around their studies.

What about a 14yo who doesn't know what they want to do, is the idea to expose them to a job they may not have considered to help them decide? Or a 14yo who knows they want to do a childcare apprenticeship, is it meant to try to link them up to a nursery they could get a job at in a year or two's time? Or is the whole thing just meant to expose them all to "The World of Work" - to the idea of turning up on time, being attentive to instructions, customer service or following work procedures, etc etc.

If you wanted to expose kids to the idea of what working in an hybrid office job is actually like then you'd be better off creating a fake office job scenario - a roleplay environment, take a week and assign them into teams, give them some tasks to achieve and have them schedule meetings and make powerpoints and so on, do a presentation at the end. Because coming and sitting with me and having me waffle on explaining what I do would be very dull and it's not like I could give them a laptop and let them play about on our systems.

@Piggywaspushed Employers complain about everything.

What they want is for someone else to do absolutely all the training and work so that they can have 'oven ready employees' and save themselves money.

In fact their perfect employee is one that is heavily subsidised by the government, already trained and that shuts up and puts up with terrible workplace conditions.

I'm not sure that is what education is for although I think 16-18 compulsory education is a terrible idea.

I agree things have become more difficult now so many are WFH/Hybrid, but surely a major point of all this is to give Y12s practice in putting themselves out there, which they'll have to be doing pretty soon anyway - though looking at some replies I'm wondering how long it'll be until some expect schools to do the Uni applications too

It doesn't even stop once they're in employment either - the sector in which I recruited involved newbies arranging to shadow an experienced person as part of getting through their first stages, and I had parents insisting I should be sorting that for them too

I organise our work experience placements but I’m beginning to loathe the extra work it generates. We do accept work experience in year 10 and 12 and are inundated with requests. We now offer a set number of weeks and when they are full, that’s it. It’s very time consuming - the paperwork from the schools or the form on Unifrog which takes forever to fill in. One is fine, but multiply it by 8….. Then working out the programme, finding teams for them to join and then making sure they have enough to do and a varied programme.
Making sure they have a contact for each day as I’m not in the office full time. What I’m finding is that there’s little appreciation from either the school and increasingly the students.

Crazy it may be but when I started teaching in the very early 2000s it was part of the role of Head of Careers. I know this because I did it and organised work experience for a year group, organised a rota of colleagues that visited every child whilst on placement and collated all the relevant paperwork as computers weren't really a thing then. All done while teaching, I think I might have been given an extra hour off timetable for a few weeks.

This was in a very deprived area where most parents didn't have professional contacts to just call upon and every kid got to do something that interested them.

Much better than the shit show two years ago when DS's Careers Coordinator rang me at 3pm on a Friday saying DS needed a placement for Monday morning and could I sort it? He'd been supposed to go to a residential Army placement (that he'd sorred himself) but it had been cancelled some weeks before and she'd forget to tell me.

Needless to say he had a riveting week acting as technician for his Food teacher. It is absolutely not beyond the wit of schools to sort this, and the kids would have far greater opportunities and less stress if they did!

Unfortunately the shool work experience model is completely outdated as others have said, and its appauling for intrenching inequality. So yes if schools want to do it then they should work directly with employers to secure a portfolio of appropriate placements which student can then apply for, and support it properly. But the whole system needs an overhaul really.

I work for a local charity and we offer 2 WE places a year (1week). Youth involvement is a key aim of our charity so from that perspective its worth it to us in a way it wouldn't be for many organisations. It's also manageable because we have lots of staff who are competent working with young people. But even then one of my reports is assigned as supervisor for the entire week and she literally does nothing else, so it's a huge commitment of staff resource, and the paperwork is a ballache.

Young people have to apply and interview for our placements and we expect this to come from them, not parents. We receive 50+ applications and spaces are always filled before Christmas, so over 6 months in advance.

The only advice I can offer is try targeting organisations that either work with children/young people themselves or that are opporate in public spaces (ie libaries). These organisations are more likely to be able to manage the safeguarding requirements so may be in a position to say yes, although it may feel less relevant to her interests.

If you wanted to expose kids to the idea of what working in an hybrid office job is actually like then you'd be better off creating a fake office job scenario - a roleplay environment, take a week and assign them into teams, give them some tasks to achieve and have them schedule meetings and make powerpoints and so on, do a presentation at the end. Because coming and sitting with me and having me waffle on explaining what I do would be very dull and it's not like I could give them a laptop and let them play about on our systems

They do something like that in my country, in 6th grade (12/13yr olds), they first learn how to do job applications and have an "interview" for their job (DD's was university guidance counsellor) then they spend one day in a 'business village' which is in a convention centre, with fake businesses in all kinds of fields, and the children spend half a day working their jobs then half a day spending their pay in the other businesses (DD spent hers on crisps and chocolate in the fake Lidl). Highlight of primary school and taught them a lot about work. In 9th grade they do similar except they make their own businesses selling a product or service.

hmm, when I was in 6th form I ended up volunteering at a charity shop one afternoon a week as my placement. It was a very good experience tbh. Sorting donations, tidying stock, putting together window displays, customer service, using tills.