Top tips to embed careers education in your school

As a new academic year begins, it's the perfect time to think about how you can weave careers education into the fabric of your school. As a Senior Teacher for 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. Discover opportunities to embed careers education

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 your school’s structure, there can always be a way to regularly include careers education.

In my school, for example, we have a daily form time program that covers a variety of personal development activities, like ‘Time to Talk’ day, ‘Aspire’ day, and ‘Get Thinking’ day. I’ve embedded careers education into our ‘Aspire’ day, where students hear from people working in different industries, gaining insight into their careers 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 out there with helpful career case studies like the ones in the Exploring careers and workplace skills lesson from LifeSkills.

2. Make core transferable skills visible in every lesson

An 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 the icons on the screen 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. I also find the LifeSkills skill tracker very useful as a tool to help them reflect and on these skills which are sought after by current and future employers.

3. Conduct a careers audit of your PSHE curriculum

If you are not a PSHE lead or teach PSHE, find out what topics are being covered in their curriculum.  Is there an opportunity to drop in some careers education?  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 within industries that they may not have considered/known about is valuable and a great way to embed careers education.

4. 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. We find these professionals by reaching out to parents and staff to see if they know anyone willing to share their 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 each 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 different career paths and industries.

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