Opinion: Policy

How Labour can deliver universal work experience equitably

With only seven per cent of employers currently offering work experience,here are three recommendations for Labour to deliver its ambition

With only seven per cent of employers currently offering work experience,here are three recommendations for Labour to deliver its ambition

27 Jul 2024, 5:00

The new government has this week announced the creation of Skills England, a key part of what Bridget Phillipson has called “a revolution in work readiness”. The policy mainly focuses on colleges, but schools will also play an important role, most notably by delivering Labour’s promise to guarantee two weeks’ worth of work experience for all. The question is how.

At Speakers for Schools, this policy (and the government’s mission to improve careers advice and hire 1,000 additional careers advisers) is music to our ears. Universal work experience is a crucial policy. Despite significantly impacting a young person’s chances of accessing top universities and jobs, over half of state school pupils do not participate in it.

However, while the government’s commitment to two weeks is promising, any work experience placement must also be of high quality and impact. We can’t rush this and risk it becoming a tick-box-exercise that fails to create tangible outcomes. Nor can we have a model that reinforces inequalities by relying on where young people live or who their parents know. This would hit the target but miss the point. 

Helpfully, we have explored how this policy might be implemented through our Work Experience for All campaign, building on several in-depth reports with SQW, YouGov and The Social Market Foundation. What we’ve found is that it is both achievable and affordable. The key will be to make it easy for employers, educators and young people.

Here are our top three recommendations to do that. 

Incentivise employers

Just seven per cent of employers offer work experience to teenagers. Only 40 per cent engage in any kind of career activities. They want change and increasingly recognise that early intervention is a key part of the solution to their skills shortages. However, they face unique challenges in doing so.

Labour’s proposal to reform the apprenticeship levy into a growth and skills levy could help. Greater flexibility in how funds can be spent could help employers invest more in talent pipeline development, not just in apprenticeships but other social mobility schemes, including work experience.

The government should work with existing providers to give clear guides on what ‘good’ looks like and what it requires based on models of best practice.     

Prioritise investment and capacity expansion

Almost all (95 per cent) secondary schools have a careers lead. However, they do not all sit at the senior leadership level, and they need that buy-in for most of their decisions. They also often have a wide range of responsibilities and are not qualified career experts.

Our review of international work experience systems also shows that successful models dedicate resources to finding and coordinating placements and delivering other career activities. This is currently not the case in England.  

In addition, the estimated cost of delivering good career provision via the Gatsby benchmarks is about £38,000 to £76,000 per school but careers education spending is currently estimated at £5,000 annually.

If we are serious about competing with other global economies on career-readiness, this must be substantially increased. This could be done through the revision of devolution deals and the levelling up agenda.  

Democratise access to opportunities

Much like the wider careers ecosystem, our work experience landscape is fragmented, resulting in inefficiency and duplication of effort. Access to work experience also still depends highly on postcode and family networks.

Public and private sector brokerage exists, but not at the scale necessary to ensure high quality opportunities for every young person. There should be a single, quality-assured clearing house or marketplace where those seeking work experience placements can see the full range of opportunities in their local area and nationally.

This platform should not replace the shoe-leather work of identifying employers, working with them to develop effective placements, and briefing, debriefing, learning and iterating. Such work is still vital for connecting employers to schools, which is vital for many other reasons. 

We estimate the cost of universal work experience in secondary state education to be somewhere around £35 million annually. It would likely be lower, as that figure refers to what it would take to build a new system, which is unnecessary if the government uses existing sector innovations. 

The fact that universal work experience has been achieved in the past should give us confidence that we can do it again, even if it takes time. The challenge is to ensure it is high-quality and equitably shared. We look forward to working with the new government to achieve that aim and help secure a better future for all young people. 

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