AEIAG0055

Written evidence submitted by BECOME Education

CALL FOR EVIDENCE

This submission sets out the case for strengthening career education from year 5 (age 10 years) in order to more effectively and efficiently deliver career advice and guidance in the later years.

SUMMARY:

• There exists a strong evidence-base that shows people as young as 4 years of age are forming ideas about careers and mental maps of occupations.
• Young people’s career thinking shows gender bias and premature circumscription of viable occupational avenues if not provided with structured career education.
• Structured career education, especially for those in primary education is rare and less likely to be present for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
• Career education initiatives need to be early, often and integrated into the curriculum.
• Career education should have a goal of fostering adaptive, creative and flexible career mindsets in young people to equip them to meet the changing and unpredictable needs of the labour market as well developing the curiosity-driven exploratory and entrepreneurial skills to shape future labour markets.
• High quality career education programs deliver the Gatsby Benchmarks and can enable a whole school approach to careers education in advance of formal space on the curriculum and changes to teacher training.
• Capturing real-time individual and aggregated data in schools regarding student careers engagement and exploration should be implanted across all primary and secondary schools to facilitate pathways planning, personalised targeted, intervention and foster school-labour market linkages.
• Data published by the OECD as a global example of Effective Practice illustrates how an innovative Australian Ed-Tech company (BECOME) supports schools to implement programs that make an empirically demonstrable positive difference to the career education of young people.
• These positive outcomes include ‘agency’ over their future career pathways as they have developed the skills and confidence to independently explore, research and critically examine future possibilities.

Tailored Career Education to meet differing student needs, backgrounds and barriers

Career Education can play a powerful role in helping young people understand that they have a space in our community where they can express their talents and make meaningful contributions. Raising this awareness accelerates student engagement by making explicit the links between their curriculum activities and possible future selves. Careers Education programs need to be designed so that they can be authentically tailored to a diverse range of backgrounds and needs. This in part can be achieved by having technological integration at the heart of the approach, alongside tailored and curriculum relevant lesson plans.  BECOME Education’s impacts show that appropriately adapted and integrated careers programs lead to day-to-day engagement gains and increased optimism amongst students.

The importance of a whole-school approach to career education: early often and integrated

The curriculum is crowded. Despite repeated demands over many years in many countries for the integration of career education into curriculums, relatively little progress has been made. This is in large part due to the legitimate competing priorities. Consequently, the need to facilitate a whole of school approach is great. We must now provide space in the curriculum not for token efforts at world of work awareness or tackling gender stereotypes but for careers education to be done deeply. It needs to be early, often and integrated.

The BECOME system is based on well-researched dynamic models of career development that emphasise the complex, continually changing nature of work, the labour-market and personal circumstances. Thus it prepares adaptable learners for the realities of modern work. The web-app at the heart of the program has been developed within this framework and therefore represents a significant advance over the 1st generation web-based career tools that are digital versions of careers tests and pathways information provision.

We have designed a curriculum-aligned program which enables schools to deliver explicit and deep careers education units teaching students the skills to explore, design and navigate their future. Within existing timetable and curriculum constraints. The program provides an engaging way to deliver the curriculum rather than something else to fit in.

We argue that student engagement with all key learning areas can be enhanced by embedding real world relevance and all teachers should be able to have great career conversations but the embedded should complement not be a substitute for the explicit learning of these skills.

The foundations for a more effective and efficient model of CEIAG

The model we recommend moves the focus of careers education from a single pathway decision to the acquisition of skills which will be required for a lifetime of learning and course adjustments. Success is measured by a young person’s ability to explore, design and navigate future possibilities for themselves as they and the world around them continue to change.

Learning these skills from the upper primary years gives all students the opportunity to break out of their lane and puts them in the driving seat for their life. Our evidence shows a significant increase in young people’s ability and intention to take action on their future rather than being passive in the education system. Laying these foundations properly means that more of the population will be self-sufficient when it comes to careers advice and guidance, lightening the load on the system and enabling focus on those who need it most.

The efficiencies that this learning foundation creates can be augmented by the innovative use of the data created in the learning process itself. This involves a personalised approach that provides schools and systems with real time data on explorations and aspirations at a student, class, cohort, school or regional level. This enables stakeholders to deliver proactive solutions and interventions that address misalignments proactively when the students need it rather than a one size fits all approach towards the end of high school when it’s often too late to adjust course.

Government can ensure more young people have access to a professional and independent careers advisor and increase the take-up of the Lifetime Skills initiative in part by using technology to make it more efficient.

Local Community Partnerships: Providing real time aggregated data to foster school and local employer collaborations

Career Education has been slow to appreciate the power of big data afforded from technological solutions. There is now the reality of being able to capture in real time student aspiration and exploration behaviour. This data has the potential to revolutionise career education at the individual, school and local community level.  School offerings and support can be adjusted to the needs of each student. This holds out the promise of accelerating student career education learning. It also levels the playing field by identifying students at risk at any stage in the process, permitting tailored support and interventions. School level planning and resourcing is enhanced with such data enabling better targeting and measurement of funding. Aggregated data will inform local community partnerships and careers and enterprise brokers. Identifying gaps between labour market needs and opportunities, and student awareness and aspirations, provides opportunities to calibrate career programs to tap into local demands, as well as providing employers with timely opportunities to sharpen their appeal to students.

The BECOME Insights dashboard captures both individual and school aggregated real time data about student career exploration behaviour and thinking.  This data provides powerful insights into how a school’s career education program is performing. It provides insights into the areas that students are currently interested in and exploring. Gap analyses can then be conducted comparing these patterns of exploration with local employment market opportunities

Scaling best practice with schools in the driving seat

There are pockets of excellence in careers education in schools but these are not consistent and are often built from scratch by those on the ground. Careers education globally within the school context suffers from an image problem inherited from being done so poorly for so many years. Interventions which are commonly agreed to be ‘what works’ are often lacking in imagination or innovation and fail to shift people’s thinking about the importance and power of careers education.

We need to provide scalable innovation and momentum to better engage and excite educators and students to do the work that’s needed.

Our experience working with hundreds of schools across systems and sectors is that school leadership need to be educated about the broader benefits of this work and excited about the broader student outcomes it can deliver both in students’ commitment to their learning right now and for their future. In our experience, when the head teacher is the lead learner - the program works.

We would recommend that the Government provide funding directly to schools to implement the Gatsby Benchmarks fully and in a way that scales best practice fast. School and careers leaders would be invited to use that funding to:

a) choose from a suite of evidence-based, innovative existing programs to take part in.

b) design and fund their own program which can then be shared as an option for other schools to build on in the following year if successful.

Whichever option they choose, they will join a community of schools working together who can share resources and learn from each other as well as providing continuous improvement to these programs.

Early years technologically infused career programs have demonstrable impacts

The OECD has recently published an Effective Practice paper highlighting the BECOME careers education program in an Australian primary school (Bright & Pennie, 2021).  The longitudinal data showed that:

• 99% of students said they had learnt more about careers from the BECOME program.
• Pre-program, students aspired to a narrow and traditional set of careers, 52% of the cohort aspiring to just five occupations.
• 60% of the cohort discovered new career possibilities, but importantly, relevant and interesting career possibilities.
• 20 students had aspired to medical occupations before the BECOME program, after the program only 8 students still felt that this suited them given what they now knew about themselves and the world of work.
• Students in upper primary are actively thinking about their future – 77% of them saying they think about it often or all of the time yet less than 10% have discussed those ideas with a teacher pre-program.
• The was a significant increase the proportion of students reporting that they are talking to their teacher about their career plans post the program.
• Students demonstrate an increased sense of agency over their future, an increased bias to action and feel more excited and positive about their future.

March 2022