How to teach careers advice to primary pupils

While young children often say they want to be a footballer, a ballerina or, increasingly, a YouTuber when they grow up, it is important to teach them at an early age about other potential career pathways so that they are better informed about the direction they wish their futures to take, says James Evelyn
2nd July 2021, 12:00am
Careers Advice Primary Pupils

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How to teach careers advice to primary pupils

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/primary/how-teach-careers-advice-primary-pupils

Ask a primary school student what they want to be when they grow up and it’s likely you will get some rather unrealistic answers. While some children might indeed go on to be ballerinas, astronauts and YouTube stars, the majority will end up doing jobs that their primary-school selves would have considered a lot less exciting.

That’s why James Evelyn and his colleagues wanted their students to have a more useful understanding of exactly what the working world is like and how what they do in primary school is helping them to take their first steps towards their future. Here, he talks us through the new approach.

Careers are a long way off for primary children. Why did you decide it would be useful to start careers advice early?

There is plenty of research showing that significant, long-lasting views of future careers are formed by primary-age children. Those views can involve misleading stereotypes (such as which jobs are meant for “boys” or for “girls”), the elimination of potential career pathways for themselves and preconceived ideas about what they can go on to achieve.

Despite this, our previous careers offer was limited to occasional assemblies with guest speakers from different sectors. The children therefore had limited knowledge of what it meant to have a career, the process of getting a job and the options that would be available to them.

We wanted to open our children’s eyes to the myriad opportunities out there, so that when they start to make choices about the direction they wish to take, they make them from an informed position. We also want them to have a greater understanding of different career trajectories and an appreciation of concepts like adult learning, career changes and flexible working.

That’s a lot of ground to cover. Where did you start?

The first step was to consider our overarching approach at our annual governing body strategy meeting. Our governors work across many different sectors and all have experience of recruitment. Drawing on this knowledge, we worked with the governors to produce three key aims for our careers provision: development of the softer skills children need to build inner confidence and readiness for the workplace, increasing children’s financial literacy and building up children’s knowledge of the careers pathways available to them.

How did you go about meeting those aims?

We decided that the best resource we had at our disposal to make provision realistic and relevant was our parent community.

We asked parents to submit details of their own career pathways, explaining how they started out, the changes that happened along the way (planned and unplanned), training they undertook and their general reflections on their experience of the working world.

This meant that as well as developing an understanding of the wide variety of career options available, children would have a realistic appreciation of career changes, the need to balance home and work life, and how a career develops over time.

The parent submissions were turned into profiles; we now have a bank of over 40 profiles, ranging from surveyors to chefs, train drivers to journalists and doctors to estate agents. The profiles include a description of the specific role along with a timeline of the career path that the contributor took to get there.

Alongside this, we planned to deliver a programme of enrichment activities, including visits to different places of work, a careers fair with different employers, mock job interviews and career consultations with a secondary school careers adviser.

What do you do with the profiles in the classroom?

We developed a dedicated careers curriculum for key stages 1 and 2 and this has become the focus of the PSHE (personal, social, health and economic) curriculum for the first half of the summer term, so each class has one dedicated lesson per week.

Part of each lesson involves reviewing one of the parent profiles and discussing the different emerging themes. These have included seeking opportunities to gain more experience, pausing a career to start a family and the challenges of setting up a new business.

The profiles give us a chance to make children aware of barriers they might encounter and the nature of how opportunities come your way in a real-world context. It also exposes them to jobs that they didn’t know existed, such as a translator for computer games or a journalist who writes solely about travel.

Has the new focus on careers brought any challenges?

Launching this new area of the curriculum during the Covid period has unfortunately meant that the enrichment piece that sits alongside the teaching content has had to be put on hold until next year.

While this delay may have lost us some of the wow factor this year, there has been a silver lining: it has meant that teachers have had a chance to focus solely on familiarising themselves with how to teach the new material as effectively as possible and how best to facilitate the most thought-provoking discussions. This means that they will be in a great position to deliver the content again next year, along with the enrichment side of things.

Even though the pandemic has meant that you have had to scale back the programme, have you seen positive effects so far?

The measure of success, for me, was always for children to think in a more nuanced way about careers. Rather than just saying they want to be a footballer or an influencer, the children are now weighing up different priorities and recognising that a fulfilling career comes in many forms and should not always be judged by the salary.

While they are still keen to state what they “want to be”, they increasingly have a more realistic awareness of the route they need to take to get there. We know it is too early for primary-age children to be making definitive decisions about their careers but I am hopeful that the children will come to understand that career pathways take many forms - and that the best-paid job may not always be the best one for them.

James Evelyn is head of school at Ark Atwood Primary Academy in London

This article originally appeared in the 2 July 2021 issue under the headline “How I teach careers advice to primary pupils”

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