Enda McBrien was restless. He had spent considerable time sorting out retention, attendance and attainment in Reading College’s plumbing department (he detailed this in Tes on 11 October 2019). But something was still niggling him.

“We were doing well but I still thought, ‘We can have a better provision here.’ One of the main issues was that we weren’t working with employers enough. We weren’t getting students real-life experience and employer encounters,” he says.

So McBrien, faculty manager for the construction and motor vehicle departments, and also a plumbing lecturer, did what he always does - he tried to fix it. And what he found out will be of interest to every department in every college. His aims were:

• To increase work experience participation in the first six weeks of the course.
• To evaluate the impact that increased work experience had on attendance, retention and achievement.
• To improve students’ knowledge of their chosen industry.
• To relate college and industry learning.

Underpinning these efforts was a statistic from a 2017 research paper by Anthony Mann et al, entitled “Contemporary transitions: young Britons reflect on life after secondary school and college” (published by the charity Education and Employers).

The analysis states that higher volumes of school and post-16 mediated employer engagement activities are associated with reduced incidence of students being not in education, employment or training (Neet). Those who undertook four such activities were 86 per cent less likely to become Neet compared with those who did zero activities.

“That was a big thing for me,” McBrien says. “You always want the best for your students to help them progress.”

Opportunities in the pipeline

The starting point for engagement with work experience in the plumbing department was a low one. Less than 10 per cent of student plumbers were gaining relevant work experience placements. And professional relevancy was the key for McBrien: work experience had to be meaningful and it had to be related to the vocation.

“In the past, a student might say, ‘I work at McDonald’s or Tesco,’ so we’d tick the box and say, ‘That’s your work experience done’,” he explains.

All experience of work, regardless of links to an area of study, promotes useful learning opportunities - building confidence or increasing customer service skills. But as McBrien argues, an unrelated work experience placement will have less value on a student’s CV with regard to their chosen profession.

“If I was an employer and two people came to me for a plumbing job, one who’s worked in McDonald’s for six months or one who has been working with a plumber for six months, I’d go for the guy with the relevant work experience in the chosen industry,” he says.

So, McBrien got to work. The first change in the department was a cultural one: work experience became a central component of the course. There was a new emphasis on it during open days, initial pre-enrolment interviews and inductions, as well as throughout the curriculum.

For example, the first six weeks of the course were reframed as a “probation period” for students on full-time level 1 and 2 plumbing courses. One of the targets that students were set was to be actively engaged in securing a relevant work experience placement. After the college positioned this remit front and centre, 33 per cent of learners secured placements by the end of the six-week probation period in the first year of the project.

Students were supported in finding placements and tasked with researching local companies, contacting a number of employers and documenting what they had done. The process had a positive impact beyond securing work experience.

“Students who are looking up plumbing jobs are also finding out about plumbing careers,” McBrien says. “They could be a bathroom installer, a kitchen fitter, a gas engineer - a vast range of jobs related to the industry. It gets them thinking, ‘Oh, I could do that’, which enhances the learning and gets them more motivated.”

Researching career pathways also provided an opportunity to discover the potential salaries involved. “Money is an important thing for them and their own research has a big impact - finding out, ‘Oh, I could make £40,000 for this’,” McBrien explains

The curriculum was explicitly linked to building employability skills in the classroom and in the workshop. Students created an industry-relevant CV and worked on the attributes that employers were looking for - which McBrien is acutely aware of as a highly qualified plumber and former plumbing assessor.

“We know employers are looking for problem solvers, critical thinkers. That’s what they want as well as the hand skills,” he says.

But McBrien had to acknowledge the challenges in what he was trying to achieve. There are significant barriers to students gaining work experience, specifically in the construction industry, which is mostly made up of sole-trader companies. “Man and van” organisations have understandable concerns about taking on a student.

The good name of a one-person micro business is built over time, often by word of mouth. In the plumbing profession, the relationship between trader and customer is key, and a reputation for expertise, reliability and trust is integral to growing a business. This trust isn’t just about the presumed skill of a professional who works with dangerous gases, or about the importance of health and safety in a construction environment, but also exists on more personal level. Entering a customer’s home to work on a heating system or refit a bathroom is a huge responsibility, so taking on an inexperienced student for a work placement is a substantial risk.

In addition, there is also a financial impact - not only in providing increasingly expensive insurance, to legally permit the student to work in a potentially dangerous environment, but also in the time spent giving them the support they will require on the job.

Persistence pays off

“It’s really tough,” McBrien admits. “One student sent out maybe 50 emails, made loads of phone calls and no one ever got back. Whereas another student phoned one company and got a placement. So, sometimes, it’s just down to luck.”

To increase their chances, the department has welcomed employers into the college.

“We get a lot of manufactures coming in to do talks with our guys: McAlpine, Mira Showers, one of the best was Charlie Mullins of Pimlico Plumbers,” McBrien says. “He’d been through similar experiences to a lot of our learners - he wasn’t very academic but he’d worked really hard. And now he pays some of his plumbers £100,000 a year. They really took to him and they responded to him.”

With the college’s support, more than 90 per cent of learners engaged in sourcing work experience opportunities in the local area by the end of the year.

Positive results followed: achievement, retention and attendance figures all increased by up to 14 per cent in the first year of the project (with retention hitting 98 per cent). And the focus on work experience has been rolled out through the rest of construction, as well as in the engineering, motor vehicle and ICT departments.

It is telling, McBrien states, that the three students whom the course did not retain did not complete any form of relevant work experience.

Typically, McBrien is still not finished. He is embarking on an MPhil at the University of Sunderland, researching how current vocational teaching practices could be influenced and improved by the philosophies and historical teaching of the “crafts”.

Essentially, McBrien is exploring how the work of Aristotle (among many others) informs a good vocational curriculum, how theory is embedded in practice and how a skill is actually learned.

Sarah Simons works in colleges and adult community education in the East Midlands and is the director of UKFEchat. She tweets @MrsSarahSimons

This article originally appeared in the 31 January 2020 issue under the headline “Why focusing on real-life experience works wonders”