What do schools want from their employer partnerships?
Our National Grid partner schools told us what they value most from employer-school relationships.
National Grid’s LPT Programme is an ambitious plan to engage 100,000 young people across London over 5 years. National Grid aims to support young people to learn more about STEM and green careers, with the knowledge that the UK will need to fill 400,000 new jobs to reach its net-zero target by 2050. There are four key pillars to National Grid’s LPT School Engagement Programme:
- Net Zero Learning Outcomes – We want students to learn more about net zero and green collar jobs, as well as routes into these roles,
- Sustainable School Relationships – We want to develop long-term relationships with schools and colleges, to impact young talent year-on-year,
- Volunteer Engagement – National Grid employees and sub-contractors volunteer at our events to provide relatable role models to young people,
- Early Talent Pipelining – The long-term ambition is to provide tangible job opportunities for students who we engage with.
As part of creating sustainable school relationships, National Grid has adopted Connectr Early Engagement’s Partner School Model, to work closely with target schools on a multi-year basis. A key part of this is to host regular Partner School Roundtables with Careers Leaders at these partner schools, to collect feedback, encourage collaboration, and share expertise. These Careers Leaders are experts in what works well for students in school, as well as how to support schools in achieving the Gatsby benchmarks and ensure meaningful interactions between employers and young people.
Key themes that have emerged from teacher roundtables so far are:
Theme One: The importance of long-term relationships with schools
Careers Leaders appreciate employers, such as National Grid, creating long-term and sustainable relationships with their schools. Importantly, these relationships ideally allow students to have multiple interactions with employers over the course of multiple academic years. The teachers that we spoke to were keen to repeat similar activities from this academic year into the next one, such as National Grid’s STEM workshops, to create this long-term relationship. This supports the Careers and Enterprise Company’s Employer Standards for Careers Education, which suggests engaging over the long-term and partnering with others as two particularly effective measures of creating quality business outreach.
Theme Two: Students appreciate real-world experiences with employers and companies
The rise of virtual working has, undoubtedly, created many new opportunities for employers and companies to work with a range of young people. More young people than ever before can have interactions with employers in the virtual world, for instance by engaging in virtual work experience. However, teachers were clear that young people still appreciate in-person interactions as much as possible to help them understand a workplace. This could include trips to offices, in-person networking with employers, or work experience which will allow students to at least spend one day in a workplace. They also told us that this helps students fully engage with workplace interactions and to really make the most of them.
Theme Three: The need to track interactions between students and employers
Teachers require systems in schools to track interactions between students and employers, as this is a key requirement for Careers Leaders to achieve their roles. Firstly, Careers Leaders must be able to demonstrate that they are providing these opportunities to meet statutory Provider Access Legislation, as well as to evidence how they are meeting the Gatsby benchmarks. Not only this but being able to demonstrate these student interactions is also necessary for schools to inform Parents and Carers about their children’s careers education, as well as to support in any Ofsted inspections. Wherever possible, employers can support Careers Leaders in this by creating these long-term relationships which schools appreciate.
National Grid and Connectr are grateful to the teachers who gave up time in their busy schedule to share these insights with us. We are looking forward to continuing our LPT school engagement programme with these members of staff for the rest of this academic year and into 2024/25!
To find out more about National Grid’s LPT School Engagement programme so far, please see the London Power Tunnels Project Social Impact Report, 2020-23.