If you're a teacher who advises students on their A Level options ...

[inthisvehicle]

... which of these factors influence your advice, and in what order?:
1.The student's stated interests or career aspiration (and your confidence in their ability to reach their goals).
2.The student's predicted KS4 grades?
3.Attracting good students to your own subject area? (Please say what that is).
4.The school's need to fill up undersubscribed courses.
5.The school's aspiration to retain students that might otherwise go to college or elsewhere.
6.The Office for Students' guidance to HE institutions on its strategic priorities, and their categorisation of some courses as low value.
7.Trends in the graduate job market which show that some courses are more likely to lead to "graduate-level" jobs than others.

Fwiw, my personal experience as a parent (which might not be typical) is that 1-5 are all influential but that not all teachers have visibility of or interest in 6 or 7. As a consequence, they advise based on their own past experience of university, which can be out of date.

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When the Russell Group first introduced its "Facilitating Subject" list, it was supported by the Sutton Trust and other social mobility groups, because it helped students understand which subjects would maximize their chances of getting into top universities. But later, the same groups raised concerns about unintended consequences - some schools had started to limit subject offerings to just the facilitating subjects. Creative and vocational subjects were disappearing, even though they are needed for some careers and degrees.

This is relevant, because many students aren't destined for "top" unis, and don't need to be in order to access "High-Value" university courses. They can access them at institutions that are lower down the league tables. They just need to be advised on what the high value courses are. Students with middling grade predictions who want/need to get best value from university can be steered towards, for example:

Nursing or Health related courses
Engineering
Computing
Teaching / Education
Physical and Natural Sciences

They will need 1 or 2 specific A levels (or equivalent) to access most of these at universities that are lower down the league tables, so there is still some room for students to study a creative subject in parallel.

Middling grade students would really struggle with the Alevels needed to do Engineeing and physical sciences.

Coming to Alevel Maths or Physics with a 6 at GCSE puts you at a huge disadvantage and you are statistically unlikely to do well. 5s and I would have huge concerns. 7s and up, which is what the majority of schools ask for. @noblegiraffe has the statistics in this one.

Middling grades could still consider these subject areas but need to look at alternative routes - BTECs, apprenticeships and vocational training.

You could argue that students should have more access to vocational training / information post 16 but that isn’t the teachers job - that is the careers department. Teachers are there to teach their subject and to share their enthusiasm and love for it. I wouldn’t expect a history teacher to know the pros and cons of a bricklaying apprenticeship.

Being flexible, orfabiaes and a critical thinker is most important to young people who will experience variety of work due to technological improvements and climate change. Mumsnet lives going in about how great it is that their dc can code but AI doing a lot of it now.

I wouldn't expect a teacher to have a comprehensive knowledge of point 6 & 7. That would fall under the role of a careers adviser.

At no point are you acknowledging the role of career guidance practitioners who's actual job this is...

@JamesWebbSpaceTelescope "Middling grade students would really struggle with the Alevels needed to do Engineeing and physical sciences"

No more than they would struggle with any other A Levels. All A Levels are academically challenging. But if a student is destined for Bs, Cs and Ds, then getting those grades in physical sciences can be more conducive to getting into a graduate career than in other subjects. There are many engineering, health and education-related university courses with lower entry grade profiles. Careers in these fields recruit across the grade spectrum, and from a much wider range of universities than e.g. the financial sector, law etc. They are interested in vocational skills, with graduate-level academic skills being important, but less so.

Careers provision is patchy. My son had one meeting with a careers advisor in Year 11 and some of his friends got none because she went on long term sick leave. Students obviously have far more contact with teachers.

Parents can give guidance too, but only if they know about it.

Education is everybody's responsibility.

“Careers provision is patchy therefore teachers should add giving expert careers advice to their already considerable workload”

No.

But teachers aren't trained to be careers advisers. There is no careers training provided in teacher training programmes.

State schools have a statutory requirement to ensure that young people have access to an appropriately trained careers adviser and personal guidance appointments. If this isn't happening than you should hold a school to account. Appropriately trained means holding at least a L6 (degree equivalent) qualification in Career Guidance.

We should not be expecting teachers to give high quality careers guidance. They absolutely should know how their subject relates to careers and they should know where to get reliable labour market information but career guidance should be left to the professionals.

Rather than adding this to a teacher's workload we should be working on improving access to career guidance from properly trained professionals.

Exactly.
Career guidance should be from qualified careers practitioners not teachers with little or no careers training.

1 2 and 3 probably in equal measure. 4 and 5 inasmuch as we need the numbers or can’t run the courses, and I want to be able to provide a wide range of options and broad curriculum for our students. We also give guidance on 6/7 but encourage students to look at the pathways their courses and universities identify and the employability % for the course.

I’m unlikely to tell a student to do a course with high graduate prospects if I think they’ll hate it. I had a student who desperately wanted to be a baker and open a cake shop and her parents wanted her to be a pharmacist. She hated chemistry, but brought in gorgeous stuff all the time and ran several bake sales, as well as enjoying young enterprise.

I’ve also seen lots of students that I know from experience would love my subject and get a/a* but they’re talked into something more stem based and come out with less because they’re not as interested. Or they come out with a decent grade but spend all their frees with me in my extra curriculars 😂

Having said and read this all - I also think I’d have been pretty happy following many different paths - I like problem solving, project planning, research.
I was always funnelled into English and now teach and write. But if I’d been more funnelled into science (I was ok, got top GCSEs) maybe I would’ve enjoyed something that would have opened me up to a more lucrative career. Enjoyment can be created too.

Parents aren't trained as careers advisers either. We all just do our best.

As I said, education is everyone's responsibility. If any teachers or parents reading this thread have learnt something new that they then go on to share with a young person to their benefit, then the discussion has been worth the effort.

I have a child in year 10 who is likely to do well in STEM and in the creative arts. I know which he's more passionate about (arts), but he finds Maths and Physics easy and always has. He's keen to do all creative arts A levls and my heart is breaking for him a little bit, because I'm a uni lecturer in the creative arts and absolutely would not recommend this route to anyone due to the high cost of degrees (average around £67,000 in the UK, last time I checked) and low career prospects. Believe me, if I still had the option to go back into my own established media career, I would absolutely do that. But my industry is dead on its arse.

Three years doing something you love of course, there's value in that, but I have no idea how to advise him and without clarity on the future jobs market, which is impossible, I don't see how a schools careers adviser can help him either.

And all the research points to parents giving poor and out of date careers advice. Obviously not all parents, but on the whole they are not best placed to offer effective careers guidance.

It's a shame that you seem to be minimising the importance of properly trained careers professionals.

You keep saying that 'education is everyone's responsibility' but it is far more nuanced than this. You wouldn't expect parents to teach their children physics if they weren't qualified and we recognise that it isn't ideal to have teachers trained in one subject being expected to teach a completely different one. The same should apply to careers education.

Parents should be supportive of education but recognised the limits of their knowledge and experience. The same goes for teachers, knowing when to signpost to a relevant professional is part of the job. They can't (and shouldn't) do it all.

Three years doing something you love of course, there's value in that, but I have no idea how to advise him and without clarity on the future jobs market, which is impossible, I don't see how a schools careers adviser can help him either.

A careers adviser ( school or university based) absolutely can help.
The career development sector liaises with employers and we know what skills they are looking for now and the skills they are predicting they will need in the future. While we can't predict 50 years into the future we can prepare young people for the next 5-10 years.

It's not abut specific jobs, it's about the skills they will need.

You don’t get it. Your blithe ‘education is everyone’s responsibility’ is actually trying to tell teachers that expert career advice is their responsibility, which it isn’t.

And you can bog off trying to tell us that it is, tbh.

Not true. With physics getting a 6 or below (middling students) statistically have a 60% chance of a D, E or U. Similar story in maths. You would struggle to get into uni to study engineering or physical sciences with a DDD. That is just not a good option for you.

Compare this with history, where a 5 or below at GCSE still has 56% getting a C or higher.

The numbers getting As or Astars are closer aligned. This is because it is just as hard to do really well but the sciences & maths have a high threshold to get over, which makes other subjects easier to access and do better at.

If a student wants to stay in STEM but struggled to get the grades at GCSE then a vocational route could well be a better fit.

This is what the careers department is for. Not individual teachers.

edited as I forgot the link: https://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/707601-progression-from-gcse-to-a-level-2020-2022.pdf

Good to know. I only know my area (Film / TV) and I can tell you the skills needed there are definitely not being taught at my university. We're struggling to keep up with the developments in tech and in the wider economy, so even if the advice given post GCSE to our students was good, most (not all) of our graduates ended up five years later with a degree that's certainly not worth what they've paid for it, in terms of employment prospects.

Then that is an issue with your curriculum not the quality of careers guidance.
Ideally, academics should be working with their careers department and careers consultants to design a curriculum that is aligned with the needs and wants of employers.

Academics and students also need to understand the nature of the UK labour market. We have a labour market that is predominantly skills based rather than knowledge based. Clearly some sectors will require specific knowledge and those degrees often have significant employer involvement ( medicine, nursing, pharmacy, engineering etc) but others are looking at skills.

The latest figure from the ISE is that 86% of graduate employers don't specify a degree subject but they want applicants to demonstrate the skills they developed while studying at degree level.

In that situation I would advise combining Art or DT with maths, physics or computer science at A Level, and then looking at digital design courses at university.

The maths and physics are very useful for any type of digital design work because the knowledge and skills can be used to specify algorithms.

Then why the hell aren’t you keeping your curriculum up to date? What do your externals think? How does your programme get through periodic review?

Where would you put a new degree course like BSc Game Design (University of Surrey if it makes a difference) - high value like computing, or low value like Media Studies?

"Then that is an issue with your curriculum"

That misunderstands how HE works. Schools build their curriculum from off-the-shelf courses. In contrast, HE institutions build bespoke curricula, so are limited by their lecturers' knowledge, skills and experience. Research-intensive (e.g. "Russell Group") universities are able to attract academics who are working at the cutting edge. Non-research-intensive universities rely on attracting lecturers from industry. They are limited in who they can attract to their teaching positions by the salaries they have to offer, and other factors, such as location.