Relatively soon, we will have students who will work into the 22nd century. They need to be ready for anything, and the choices they make regarding their careers and futures are changing.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) frames the issue in terms of the pursuit of wellbeing. This is not just economic wellbeing, but also civil, personal and spiritual, and perhaps physical and environmental too.
As well as the pursuit of this wellbeing, there are other changes to the way people think about work. They include issues of trust, such as the erosion of deference to expertise, and the increasing issue of work-life balance. People are evermore reluctant to take on work that harms their families, their communities and the environment. And whereas in the past our work often formed a large part of our personal identity, a sense of identity in today's world is as likely now to be formed around shopping as around working - as the philosopher Baumann points out.
In addition, there are three challenges to the way we live and work. The first is economic. Global business increasingly demands sharper competitiveness - calling for radical workforce up-skilling, enhanced employability and enterprise. The second is cultural, as global communication expands and reshapes the basis for people's beliefs - especially on what is possible and who is trustworthy. The third is environmental, as global exploitation gives us critical choices for the future of the environments we inhabit, and share, with all living species.
All of these factors make it increasingly difficult for young people to have the right information to make choices about the future wisely. To give them the best possible chance to do this, the curriculum needs a new focus, away from the current subject-based, or academic system. While a subject-based curriculum helps with selection procedures, we also need a curriculum that helps young people cope with other pressing issues, including substance abuse, obesity, teenage pregnancy, bullying, gang violence, apathy and eroded nationhood. How people stand in relation to these issues has consequences for how they stand in relation to work.
In careers education we look at what action people can take to achieve things in their lives. We know that students invariably do not believe what they are told, that evidence of satisfaction is not necessarily evidence of learning and that performing well in assessment guarantees nothing in life. We know also that little of what is learned in a classroom is used in life. We need to ensure that learning reminds students of their lives and, conversely, that their lives remind them of learning.
This is done in a three-step process. The first is learning to learn. Students need to get into a learning frame of mind by questioning what they encounter. They need to find out, sort out, check out and work out what they need to know. The second step is making progress. Students need to move through each piece of learning aware of its step-by-step progression - from what they are finding now, through to how they do and might see things, to what they will do about it. The third step is transferring learning. It is here that students bring learning into their lives by setting up credible life-relevant markers for how this learning helps in life.
These three steps all count as what Maclure and Davies call 'thinking skills'. They enable students to deal with what they find in academic learning, but they also equip them to deal with what they encounter in the media, on the Internet, in street-level gossip and in all those other beckoning and enticing sources of informal influence.
What they learn in particular subject-based lessons might serve them for a year or two, perhaps a little longer. But command of the learning process serves them lifelong.
One of the important career-harming influences is the blocking assumptions about what is available to 'the likes of us'. People with potential, from all backgrounds, see themselves easily moving into some opportunities, but not into others. This social stratification raises serious issues for competitiveness and employability, but also for fairness and wellbeing. And the dynamics are bad: the people who most need help with issues like these are the hardest to engage.
The question of who gets to do what is one that careers education shares with human resource management, although, of course, an educator's interest is different from a selector's. Educators need to understand how 'habits of mind' become 'change of mind', and how 'letting go' becomes 'moving on'. Dismantling stereotypes figures here ahead of enhancing skills, because people allow stereotypes, both their own and other people's, to stop them investing the energy needed for acquiring skills.
The Tomlinson Report sought to dismantle the stratification of vocational and academic routes to advancement. Recent government proposals for 'academic' school-leaving diplomas put that issue back on the table. All of this is part of a long-standing call for restructuring the curriculum, and deep in that analysis is a case for linking how students gain knowledge to how they use it.
Of course, the quality of any programme cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. The future of careers work depends on attracting the interested attention of the best in the profession, and that includes the best of our academic teachers. The academic curriculum is good at setting out what is going on, from the mathematics of probability, through the history and geography of opportunity, into the narratives of self and onto the science of consequences. But this needs to be combined with a curriculum that focuses on how to achieve future wellbeing.
Doing this does mean interfering with timetables. Recent blue-sky thinking, commissioned by the QCA to inform its proposals, sets out a design specification for the use of 'set-aside' long-slots. These are periods of time in which able and motivated academic teachers can work with wellbeing specialists to help students with both 'knowing what' and 'knowing how' types of learning. The long-slots create shared time and space for students to question what they find, imagine possibilities, work out what they can do about them and rehearse-and refine action. This makes learning less about what we offer and more about how students shape it.
We may not know precisely what shape the future will take, but we do know that the futures of our current students will not much resemble those of our past ones. In order to equip these students for that future, however it may be, we need to change careers education and general education, in order to help them take command of their own learning processes and their own actions to find and achieve their goals.
Bill Law is a Fellow at the National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling, and holds visiting roles in a number of research and development organisations.
He developed the Government's open-learning pack Careers Work, and provided blue-sky thinking to inform the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's reform of the 11-19 curriculum. His website on careers and learning can be found at www.hihohiho.com.
T +44 (0)20 7438 2500
F +44 (0)20 7438 2501
Nesta Operating Company, a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales with company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SC042833.
