Employer Engagement in Education
Author: Mann, Anthony
Date: 2014-00-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Employers,School Business Relationship,Educational Research,Work Experience Programs,Mentors,Career Education,Field Trips,Competition,Curriculum Enrichment,Educational Resources,Outcomes of Education,Education Work Relationship,Foreign Countries,Teacher Surveys,Semi Structured Interviews,Focus Groups,Secondary School Students,Secondary School Teachers,Program Effectiveness

The subject of this paper is employer engagement in education as it supports the learning and progression of young people through activities including work experience, job shadowing, workplace visits, career talks, mock interviews, CV workshops, business mentoring, enterprise competitions and the provision of learning resources. Interest has grown rapidly in the UK and overseas in employer engagement as a subject and, from 2013, it has become, for the first time, a required element of a key educational stage. The purpose of this report is to review existing and new evidence about how employer engagement can impact on the learning and progression of young people. It does so as the beginning of a process which is designed to provide school leadership teams and individual members of teaching staff with access to the best available information in order to make strategic use of employer engagement as a resource. It examines available evidence to identify patterns in the character of different types of employer engagement, asking whether perceived benefits vary by discrete types of pupil, by attainment levels or destination intentions. The paper presents a review of the main research literature relevant to typical employer engagement activities and the primary outcomes (attainment and employment) considered. In addition to insights from the literature, it is also based upon interviews with staff members at five English secondary schools and focus groups undertaken in 2011 with teaching staff who had experience respectively at Key Stage 4 and 5, which explored questions relating to the differential impact of employer engagement activities on different types of young person. Interviews were arranged either through CfBT or contacts of the Taskforce and carried out over the summer of 2012. Interviews explored the reasoned behaviour of schools understood to have invested considerable interest and resource into employer engagement in education. An additional focus group, also dating from 2011, spoke to young people (Year 11) about their experiences of a learning programme rich in employer engagement. Finally, the paper draws from a unique new survey of teaching staff. Based on a total sample of 556 teaching staff drawn from the Pearson panel, the survey segmented respondents with experiences of teaching at Key Stages 4 and 5, presenting respondents with a list of 17 different employer engagement activities and inviting participants to consider the relative effectiveness of only those activities which they had themselves observed in supporting specific types of outcomes for different types of pupils. In presenting such detailed evidence, it is hoped that both this summary paper and the supporting literature review will prompt further interest and discussion. [Early thinking about this paper emerged from meetings of the Education and Employers Taskforce Research Group. In addition to this paper there is a separate publication (&quot;Employer Engagement in Education: Literature Review&quot;) which includes the full literature review on which this guide was partly based (see ED546794).]