Work experience isn't working

Over the last year I have been doing ethnographic research with teenagers in south London. Many of them have grown up in households and communities with high levels of long term unemployment or worklessness. With little other contact with work, the one or two weeks of work experience organised by schools played a key role in shaping their understandings of employment and their future career ambitions. However, the experiences that they had received were often limited to low level retail work or assisting in hair saloons. They came away from the experience thinking that that was work and that was what they should do when they left school.

A better variety and quality of work experience would raise the young people's aspirations and ambitions. Teenagers would have a completely different understanding of work, if they returned to school talking about the variety of jobs they had experienced, saying to each other ‘I did this', ‘I did that', ‘I want to be this' and ‘I want to be that.'

The resources and time of teachers and school career services are clearly stretched and with all the will in the world they do not have the capacity to organise the high quality work experience opportunities that these young people would benefit from. An alternative solution is a social enterprise model, developing an independent not-for-profit organisation that specialises in organising and delivering high quality work experience opportunities in areas where there are high levels of unemployment and worklessness. Commissioned by a local education authority, such an enterprise would build relationships with local employers, organising work experience in a variety of companies and institutions. It would provide basic work etiquette skill training in school before the work experience fortnight, design a good work experience model with employers, and run follow up sessions in schools to manage new aspirations and help plan individual progression routes.

Breaking the vicious circles associated with worklessness is notoriously difficult. We need to be thinking of new ways to raise aspirations and ambitions of those young people in this situation. Work experience plays an important role in shaping the futures of young people and needs to be taken more seriously.