Assessing Readiness for Employer Engagement and Building Powerful Partnerships
The aim of this resource is to help you to assess your school/college readiness for employer engagement and powerful partnerships so you can build better relationships, in turn offering opportunities for employers to engage with your organisation that are clear, intentional and sustainable. Building strong sustainable relationships will also help UK schools/colleges achieve Gatsby Benchmarks 2. Learning from career and labour market information, 4. Linking curriculum learning to careers, 5. Encounters with employers and employees and 6. Experiences of the workplaces.
Once your school or college has reached out to employers, or vice versa, it is important there is a clear idea of how, when and who the employer can engage with. How this is managed and activity and outcomes are captured and reported. To build sustainable relationships with employers you need to establish a mutual understanding of how your relationships are structured and how they will function to achieve the main goal that working effectively together will significantly improve student and community outcomes. It is also essential you are very clear about your ’ask’ to the employer, Ofsted’s ‘Getting Ready for Work’ report highlights the importance of this to ensure intentional employer engagement happens in schools and colleges.
Before you start to plan it is important you assess the readiness of the school/college and your employers to ensure your engagement and partnerships are successful.
Assessing School/College Readiness
Part 1: Readiness Indicators for School/College teams including Senior Leadership Team
Your school/college assessment should focus on answering a variety of key questions.
- What’s in place that will help set up a partnership for success (structures, roles, schedules, developed your ‘ask’ etc.)?
- What’s already happening partnership-wise?
- Are teachers/staff engaging with partnerships? If so,
with what intensity?
The school/college assessment gathers information helpful to a successful partnership kick-off. That way, the employer and the school/college are entering into the relationship at the best possible starting place given their readiness indicators and capacity to engage.
The below topics are recommended starting points to listen for, learn from, and ask questions about when assessing your school/college. Doing so will help you gain a deeper understanding regarding how and to what degree you are capable of partnering with business and community organisations. Are they fully prepared and committed to going significantly beyond the occasional guest speaker or the annual careers event?
The broad topics to consider in depth include:
- Extent and sustainability of leadership support, provision of resources, and existing structures.
- Current level of experience with partnership activities.
- Experience with collaboration and a continuous improvement mind-set.
You can assess each topic using a simple Observation Rubric Tool as included in the downloadable version of this unit (at the bottom of this page), or you can adapt it for your organisation.
Part 2: Listen and Learn
You will need to ask questions in order to really know what exists, what should be in place, and how you can support the school/college to develop sustainable employer engagement and powerful partnership success. It will also inform what Continuous Professional Development is required across the school/college.
Always ensure your teachers feel valued and included throughout the assessment process and during engagements. Communicate regularly and a simple ‘Thank You’ goes a long way.
Example questions you may want to explore:
- What instructional approaches and experiences have teachers used in the past? Have these been implemented in individual classrooms or as an integrated approach (across multiple classrooms) for your students to experience?
- What have been teacher’s experiences with both in and out of the classroom (and virtual), work-based learning experiences for students? What have they learned along the way?
- Describe the current structure of the subject teachers and the format for collaboration among teachers.
- Describe the types of professional development the teachers have been provided in order to deepen their capacity around successful practices that are part of the partnership activities.
- To what degree has the business community been involved with your school/college (not just with the career and vocational teachers, but also with the teachers who teach core subjects)?
- Is the organisation within your building structured in such a way that it reinforces the ongoing touch points needed for building and maintaining powerful partnerships with employers? How often do you meet with teachers? How often have you met as a team along with your business partners?
- What is the relationship between the teachers and the “outreach team/colleague” (careers lead/ business engagement lead) in terms of having a strategic approach to partnerships? How do the teachers and the careers lead/business engagement lead collaborate and communicate around successes, challenges, and sharing of partnership results (data)?
Assessing Students Readiness
Just as you are preparing the employers and the teachers to engage in powerful partnerships, students need to be ready too.
Ask yourself what’s currently in place (or should be in place) to support students in order for them to have more touch points and opportunities with employer partners? When transitioning their experiences to those that powerful partnerships provide, students will have a foundation of experience, attitudes, and preconceptions. Discovering and filling any gaps in that foundation is essential to grow the outreach programme with employer partners.
When assessing readiness across the organisation be inclusive, include diversity of students
- Newly enrolled students
- Graduating students and/or alumni
- Students representing a range of abilities, interests, and grade levels
The best way to undertake this assessment is through a combination of individual meetings, site observations, and student focus groups. The following categories and definitions will help you assess the readiness of a group of students and then use their input to guide what is done for ALL the students in the school/college.
Empowerment and Self-Efficacy: a student’s perception of their own abilities to take ownership of their learning, make decisions that will be supported, and achieve success.
Dealing with Ambiguity/Problem Definition: a student’s ability to unpack and define complex open-ended situations.
Problem Solving: a student’s ability to apply strategies for solving a problem or answer a question they’ve never seen before.
Solutions and Solution Testing: a student’s ability to brainstorm and create solutions, as well as their ability to know how to determine whether the solution is effective and then make revisions as needed.
Awareness and Perception of the 21st Century World of Work: a student’s ability to describe what a workplace looks, feels, and sounds like and what kinds of sectors and perspectives they may encounter there.
Working as a Team: experience gained by a student working with other students, their perceptions regarding the value of working on a team, and their ability to understand and apply team roles.
Working on Projects: experience gained by a student working on longer term projects requiring milestones, checkpoints, and formative assessments
Additional student centred questions could be:
- What experiences do all of your students have with inquiry-based approaches and real world learning? What is their level of experience with the application of design thinking?
- What experiences do all of your students have with integrated curriculum within both core subjects and career and technical education curriculum teachers)?
- What is the scope of experience with designing assessment tools using student outcomes and metrics?
- What have been the successes, challenges, barriers experienced in developing an effective teacher team?
Pause and reflect:
Now that you have had the opportunity to hold intentional conversations with students, teachers and senior leaders consider the following.
- How would you assess your school/college current level of readiness? How about that of the senior leaders? Are they collectively indicating readiness for sustainable employer engagement and powerful partnerships?
- If they are not yet ready, what type of preparation might help them engage and/or support employer engagement and powerful partnerships?
