Top tips to embed careers education in your school

As an Assistant Headteacher, I’m responsible for ensuring our students have the best possible education and experiences around PSHE, but also around their own personal development.  I've discovered some effective strategies to embed employability and skills development seamlessly into our school life, whether you’re new to this or looking to enhance existing efforts.  Here are my top tips to help you hit the ground running this term.

1. Find the opportunities in your school curriculum to do things differently

Where can you find opportunities to introduce careers education? Think about form time, the PSHE curriculum, subject-specific lessons, assemblies, and drop-down days for each year group. No matter what your school’s structure is, there can always be a way to regularly include careers education.

We have a daily form time programme that covers a variety of personal development activities, like ‘Time to Talk’ day, ‘Aspire’ day, and ‘Get Thinking’ day. 

We also have a ‘Behaviour Curriculum’ week once every half term, which involves form tutors substituting normal form time for 15-minute lessons focused on building communication skills. One scenario-based task we have used is ‘Sophie takes the communication challenge’ which asks students to think about how they’d react when dealing with a problematic buyer in a coffee shop – helping them build core transferable skills.

2. Work with PSHE colleagues and support them to embed employability consistently

If you are not a PSHE lead or don’t teach PSHE, find out what topics are being covered in their curriculum.  

Like many schools, we have a large team of staff delivering PSHE. I recommend asking your headteacher if you can meet monthly with PSHE staff during a staff briefing. While 10-15 minutes say once a month might not sound like a lot, if you can offer support and guidance to staff around the content of lessons and upcoming topics, you can build their confidence with the topic and ensure they feel supported. 

It's also an opportunity to spot new places to drop careers education into the curriculum. For example, when my students are learning about crime and the UK justice system, I connect the topic with links to jobs/careers within the police, law enforcement and the justice system. Anything you can do to open young people’s minds about the opportunities and core transferable skills needed within these industries that they may not have considered or known about is valuable and a great way to embed careers education. 

3. Make core transferable skills visible in every lesson

Another effective way to build careers education in your school, is to share these core transferable skills icons with subject leaders and encourage them to use them where appropriate in their lessons.  

I started this approach with the Design Technology department and encouraged them to incorporate these icons in their lesson slides when students were demonstrating these skills in their lesson activities.  

This gives our students the opportunity to recognise and articulate how they’ve applied these skills in their learning, then as they learn about opportunities in different industries they understand how they are building these skills.

I also find the LifeSkills skills tracker very useful as a tool to help them reflect on these skills which are sought after by employers.

More recently, we used the LifeSkills ‘Enterprise project challenge’ with Year 9 students to get them thinking creatively and aspirationally. The challenge is flexible, so we extended and adapted it so it is more like The Apprentice.  It gave our students the opportunity to learn important skills around teamwork, problem-solving and assigning roles. 

Find out more about core transferable skills here.  

4. LifeSkills schemes of learning can be an accessible starting point 

These schemes of learning are great to support schools in sequencing their curriculum. I like how the lessons show the core transferable skills they are developing over time, which we can actually refer to with learners during lessons. They include info we need to integrate into our curriculum, like narrative summaries, key topics, any prep they require and even real-world links for students. 

This means they are a great starting place for curriculum leaders to embed employability skills over time or across subjects. I recommend looking at your school calendar, assembly schedules or awareness days or weeks to find opportunities to build in these topics progressively. 

5. Rise to the challenge of embedding understanding of the workplace 

Schools are really looking to see how they can bring employers into classrooms. With the Government’s pledge for all KS3 students to have two weeks of work experience, this is more important than ever. 

While we’ve got a great network of local employers who come into our classrooms regularly as part of our career’s carousel day, it’s really valuable to give students exposure to employers that are based further afield – for instance from London.

Tools like LifeSkills ‘Virtual Work Experience’ are invaluable here, helping to give students exposure to the world of work, before they actually get there. Access all the LifeSkills’ work experience resources here, including advice on preparing for and finding work experience. 

6. Embed diverse profiles of different careers 

I’ve embedded careers education into our ‘Aspire’ day, where students hear from people working in different industries, gaining insight into their careers and the skills required, and promoting gender equality.

For example, we frequently highlight a diverse range of top professionals from different fields, such as a leading architect. I create a PowerPoint with background information about this architect and then share it with our form tutors. Alongside this, I include details about the architecture industry and related careers, such as conveyancing, surveying and urban design and the core transferable skills needed within these roles.  

If you’re stuck for time, there are great resources on the LifeSkills site with helpful career case studies. All the case studies are very real, on point and cover a variety of job sectors. 

7. Bring careers to life with a careers carousel

How about looking into planning and implementing a ‘careers carousel’?  Each year, we invite 3-4 professionals from different industries to visit and talk to each year group about skills and qualifications that are important for their job. We find these professionals by reaching out to parents and staff to see if they know anyone willing to share their skills and experiences. We’ve had some amazing guests who have generously given their time to speak with our students.

During these careers carousel sessions, each class receives a 15 minute talk from a  professional, and then we rotate the visitors so that every class hears from multiple people. During this 15 minute talk, the students also get to ‘hot seat’ the professional and ask questions themselves. The feedback from students is always positive - they love hearing firsthand about skills in different career paths and industries.

I hope these ideas inspire you to start embedding careers education into your school’s routine.  By taking small steps now, you can make a big impact on your students’ career aspirations throughout the academic year.

Jenny Barnes has been teaching for 25 years. Originally trained as a PE teacher, she became a lead PSHE teacher in 2015. Now, she's the Assistant Headteacher for Personal Development at King Ecgbert School in Sheffield.