Harsh opinion - is it fair to give work experience to students who in reality haven't the academic ability to enter the profession e.g. medcine?

[mids2019]

I work in a large NHSq trust and we are continually being asked by our widening participation team to take on work experience students for a range of medical careers including clinical science and medicine.
A lot of the children unfortunately are forecast 3/4/5s at GCSE yet schools and the widening participation team keep saying we should be giving work experience to these children who in reality won't be qualified for some professiions out of what I see is a misguided sense of fairness.

The medics push back at this saying they simply have no time and time would be wasted enthusing a child about a profession they would be unlikely to be able to do.

The medics are quite happy to take students from a locally high performing grammar school as a matter of course unofficially (and often due to parental connections)

They might run a business they don’t necessarily own it; and many tradespeople are not self-employed.

My point was simply that offspring often follow a parent into a trade or profession because they’ve seen how it works.

Nepotism simply will not get you onto a course for medicine. You might have an advantage of being able to shadow a parent at work but it’s not a requirement. If you don’t get the grades it doesn’t matter how many doctors you know.

OP are you in Kent which still has a grammar school system? In which case I can believe grammar schools might dominate work experience through numbers and pro-activity. Otherwise it’s not credible.

Half the doctors I know went to comprehensives. They may be exacting about grades but they won’t care about school type.

@mids2019 I bet the dc who out perform a predicted 3/4 at GCSEs to get to 6/8/9 at GCSE and then ace Chemistry/Biology (probably) and other hard A levels to get to medical school is vanishingly small as to almost zero! Schools are not that incompetent!

TBH - I would be surprised the if a GCSE student shadowed the doctor for entire two weeks. If this is actually the case, I am not surprised the medics pushed back. I agree I think are other way to gain experience.

Do you find it sinister that those with parental connections/ attend the local grammar school are “unofficially” allowed to attend?

What you do for your school work experience doesn’t mean you’ll be doing that job as an adult.

I don’t know about OP’s trust but most trusts offer 1 to 2 week clinical work placements to students aged over 16 but it is very much just observing. They spend time following different doctors, nurses, possibly other HCPs, not just one doctor. There are other volunteering opportunities and non clinical work experience opportunities for sixth formers in hospitals that are more hands on.

ETA that was a response to @Lavenderflower.

The only taking on grammar school kids is incredibly pompous of the medics. I can understand the personal connection element though - this has always gone on.
Predicted grades aren’t particularly reliable - and if the kids in question are in year 9 or even year 10, those predictions could change massively in the space of a year - especially with the right motivation. Plus work experience at this age isn’t about getting experience in the specific profession - your colleagues are misguided. It’s about getting experience of going to work, any kind of work. Your trust should offer a range of roles within the teams. But just because a child isn’t necessarily going to become a surgeon/dr, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t get a great deal out of shadowing one. They might feel inspired to become a nurse, paramedic or physio. Or they might just have a great experience and use that to try hard in their exams and do a different career altogether.

Grammar schools exist in a few parts of the country.

Liverpool got rid of theirs. Wirral kept them.
Trafford has them too.

@Pinkfluffypencilcase Bucks is fully grammar school. There are 165 grammars I think so not as rare as hens teeth and of course doctors dc go to them!

So allowing opportunties for aspiration is bad? But nepotism is fine?

Weird logic.

I’m aware there are a few grammar areas. In some areas there are none. And then there areas that have a couple of grammars eg areas of London like Kingston or Barnet.

My point was that if this is a grammar area and 30% of students are in grammars, that’s a very different read from there being 1 or 2 grammars in an otherwise comprehensive area where say 10% of all state students are at grammars.

Anyone who gets onto a medical degree with a slightly lower contextual offer/widening participation still actually has to pass their medical degree at the same standard as everyone else.

The NHS is a huge organisation with opportunities for people of all abilities and there are other routes to get qualifications other than GCSE. I work in the NHS and have no problem with young people coming in work experience. I tailor their work experience to their abilities, clearly someone who is getting grade 4, which is an average pass I would send to shadow a doctor but they could be come a lab assistant, work in admin or a healthcare assistant. To me it sounds like you really can’t be bothered with them. It would be interesting to know what your role is as you seem to write young people off who are not getting 9’s!

You’re getting confused with the term Grammer School. With the exception of Kent where all grammer schools are selective state secondary schools, there are very few that are still state schools. One you mention, Kingston Grammer is independent!

It would make sense to couple work experience roles with academic ability but there is no method to do this. As we have to basically allow anyone to take on work experience roles we do find we have some students that don't have the interest because the subject matter of the work is complex. If NHS staff are there to encourage the aspirations of deprived children in gneral , fine, but this has to be part of their role and includes such things as community outreach. The reality is there simply isn't the time so those that can find time in their stretched schedules tend to want to semi mentor those with strong academic ability and interest.

Gosh, I bet you are a delight at parties. The whole point of work experience is to inspire the children in to taking on a profession. At work experience age they are only in year ten and doing their mock exams. Mocks are often poorer than the actual results they get for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to nerves and often apathy. Work experience provides the motivation to set a goal and aim for something higher. If you only get top performing children from the grammar school then that’s creating an elitist environment which already exists in medicine and has potential to harm patient outcomes because of bias etc. I struggled at school and left school with 4 GCSE’s due to an underlying neurodivergence that had flown under everyone’s radar and was told I also wouldn’t be good enough to work in the NHS, that I was more akin to working in a shop, basically I was “too thick” so I did. Started off in a shop and then a kindly nurse I started to talk to told me about the vocational training you could do as a care assistant, so I read about being a carer and I started off as a care assistant in a nursing home, did every level of health and social care qualification I could (and excelled at it) and then went on to work in a hospital on the ICCU as a critical care assistant and continued my training, I was ready to undertake the next step to begin training to become a nurse however the then government removed the bursaries to study towards the vocational training. I decided to explore higher education, did an access course and got all distinctions, and then got accepted on to a degree course and never got a mark below 70% (1st)-so imagine if you will if I had gone on work experience and I had someone encouraging me, despite my mock results, despite the fact I wasn’t a grammar school student, to work for them. Imagine someone saying to these children that explaining that marks on a piece of paper are not the sum of a persons intellect and that if they were truly passionate, non-judgmental, kind and honest and hard working and willing to learn that there would be a place for them somewhere in the health profession. Not everyone has the ability to perform for the education system which only supports and favours a certain type of child, any child that is slightly different to their peers is getting lost in the system, I see it with my own children but that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of being excellent in a profession, they might just need to approach it in a different direction. I often wonder what my potential could have been if the system had worked for me and not against me. I want to finish by saying I hope you’re not a Dr or someone on the front line, because this kind of judgemental attitude is just what is making healthcare settings the classist clique/boys clubs they can be. If the children are unfortunate to grace your path, I hope you can take just a moment to reflect on my words and treat every child as an individual and see it as an opportunity to inspire rather than condemn. You don’t know the influence that you could have on a kid, and it’s up to you to choose whether that influence is positive or negative. One would hope you stop being overtly snobby and choose the latter.

I don't think I am being judgmental as in reality there is judgment made about our career opportunities through examination results. I think it is a different discussion about whether this is entirely fair or not but maybe at some point children have to realise that all opportunities won't be open to them and this is maybe a harsh reality of life we all have to face. It would be argued that for some work experience you may be offering class hope e.g. shadowing a professional actor when you can't act. Is there any merit in supporting unachievable dreams.

It is just a reality a greater proportion of grammar school children go on to study medicine than other schools with the required grades so some would say it is just pragmatic to focus on those children. Again this is about making the best use of people's time.

They are being accused of class bias because they are bias.
Do you really want a system where only children who go to grammar schools become doctors, regardless of their grades?
The multiple suggestions of using grades sounds very sensible, isn’t that the whole point of grades existing.

but the point is, which for someone who proclaims to work in STEM you’re being particularly obtuse to, is that all children can have all opportunities open to them, what tends to be the issue is adults gatekeeping professions based on predictions and assumptions and classism. You’ve no idea what potential an individual child may have, and what the work experience may inspire them to accomplish and inspire their social mobility. You are being incredibly judgmental about the sum of a child’s potential based on the outcomes of one set of practice examinations. You say they won’t be successful in a field because of the (mock) results therefore they are written off in favour of those who have performed well the first time, but if you took myself as the example (once again) I only got 4 GCSE’s and so would have been one of these children you are writing off as not “good enough” and yet now I could very well be one of your colleagues, and what would you ask me? Where I went to university? Did I get a 1st? Or would you be grilling me about my GCSE’s? I doubt it. You’d want to know that I was capable of doing my job and keeping my patients safe or that my research was done properly. By only taking the time to foster the encouragement of grammar school children you are perpetuating a classist culture and the antiquated notion that only certain people can achieve certain things when the reality is that anyone can have the potential to achieve something great such as working in medicine! Now, that said, I certainly don’t believe in putting forward children “just” because they are from a lower socioeconomic background, however, I believe in equality and inclusion. The children with the lower results may just need to know it’s a possibility for them which is where you come in. I doubt you’d be making threads on mumsnet about the grammar school children with excellent results who came to do work experience and “wasted your time” because they chose not to pursue a career in medicine. There’s multiple possibilities for people, and your job is actually not even to wonder about what grades these children have and show them how you do your job, it’s not something I think you need to be so vexed about, unless of course you are being judgemental…you should be fully aware that unconscious bias exists, so perhaps you’re not thinking you’re being judgemental here, I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt but you are. Also, the actor analogy is poor-have you watched television lately? Mind you, I have. I managed to catch the documentary on Netflix about Londons fantastic trauma teams, and interestingly enough some of their most important surgeons had poor social mobility (one from a council estate) and both had little in the way of GCSE results before being inspired to undertake a career in medicine so there’s further food for thought for you.

This is the real issue. There is a process by medica bypass it to give the jobs to kids of friends. The issue is not making space for low performing kids, it is to have a robust process so that everyone with the right academics and attitude, whatever the school and family they come from can apply and be considered without bias.
i M appalled in the nhs medics can facilitate job experience to kids of friends, this is a public service and this should not happen. It should be brought to life and stopped.

Surely this must be a wind-up? 🤔

I wondered the same.

It's the time wastage really...children want work experience in careers they want to do but it is forgotten professionals have to allow this experience for free and it does take time.
Jesus op, if everyone had this opinion, what about giving back, our children are the future etc? I also take huge issue with your assumptions about the type of schools, this is back to people hiring and choosing who goes forward in life according to school they’ve attended, where they live, what their parents do etc.

@stayathomer If there was a minimum standard dc are reaching educationally, they could come from any school. It’s actually the public giving in the NHS. There’s an opportunity cost. Many firms don’t have under 16s due to insurance and they do want dc who aspire to that career and have the educational attainment to make it. They might be directed to apprenticeships or degrees but few firms are charities. Vast numbers won’t do it at all!

Hate to break it to you but here work experience is solely via connections. Never heard of “widening participation” teams. State school south west.

It’s a frankly a right pain having to pump your friends and acquaintances for favours. God knows what the kids with unconnected parents do it’s hard enough for professionals with a wide network as it’s an effort and a quite a big ask having a teen hanging around you at work for a week. Most go with parents.