Exams and Employability

Highlights from Season 3, Episode 5 of The Exam Man podcast

This week we welcomed Oli de Botton, the CEO of The Careers & Enterprise Company, to talk to us all about education, exams and employability.

You're the CEO of The Careers & Enterprise Company, so there's obviously a big focus on careers, and it'd be great to hear a little bit about that. But before we start, do you want to give us a little potted history about your career, Oli, because I know you've done quite a lot!

I've been in education since I left education myself in 2003. I did the Teach First programme when it was in its infancy, with you Sophie. Then I worked for almost five years in a school in north east London, a school that was going through a big transition. It was a very exciting time to be in education, I thought, because things were on the move.  I was an English teacher and we had the National Literacy Strategy, and London Challenge. Our school became an academy while I was there, and it was exhilarating in lots of ways. I guess that's where I got the bug and I learned how much I didn't know about things, but also I had a sense that committing to education over time would be incredibly rewarding personally and, hopefully, for other people involved with children. I was a Head of Sixth Form as well, so had that end of the education experience too.

Then I did various bits of consultancy, both here and abroad. I really enjoyed working internationally, thinking about what systems could look like, what education could do, what the debates were elsewhere. I also dabbled a bit in politics. I was a local councillor in Hackney, which was a fascinating experience. I did some work for David Miliband on his leadership campaign, thinking about education and skills. Then I had the real privilege of founding a school called School 21 in Stratford in East London. As co-founders, we had an ambition to educate the head, the heart and the hand. So the head, the academics, the really important stuff, which exams measure so well. The heart, this sense of confidence and power, particularly for those from kind of under-resourced communities. And then the hand, the technical skills, if you like, which I know are controversial, but hopefully you'll give me a chance to explain how they're not in opposition to knowledge. So I did that for nearly 10 years and we did well, we got good Ofsted, results, et cetera. And then I left there about four and a half years ago.

I’m now the CEO of The Careers & Enterprise Company. We're the national body for careers education. We do various things, but we stand for getting young people ready for work as a legitimate element of education - not in opposition to others, but an important part. We do that in various ways, working with employers, gathering data. And it's given me a real wake up call, in a way, to some of the views that I had when I first started teaching. It's National Apprenticeship Week this week. If you'd asked me in 2003 when I first started teaching - what's an apprenticeship? - I'm not sure I would have known, to my shame. And yet there are young people across the country that I've met in this job who are extraordinarily successful and are not going on a university route. I'm very interested in how we develop those young people going forward.

Do you think your view of things has changed because the prevailing view has actually changed about those things as well? If you go back to the mid-noughties it was all about a knowledge economy, everyone going to university. And that debate has slightly shifted. Do you think you moved with the times in that respect?

Well, I hope I don't just follow it there! You can see these ideas playing out in lots of different ways. And I think it centres on the social mobility question. The dominant discourse that I was trained in, and I guess got from home, was go to university - that is the best route to success. And it's a great route to success for children from under-resourced backgrounds. And people from the Sutton Trust think that's still true. I suppose what people are seeing now is what's the end point of all of that? Getting a good job feels like a premium for people, for whatever prevailing reasons, the economy or whatever. And so people are interrogating, what's the best route to get there? And what do employers want? And is the university route signaling something in particular, or are there other routes? So I suppose I think things feel like they're shifting, but I think it's contested.

Could you talk to us a little bit about what you think in terms of enabling young people to be employable and successful at work? What does the education system do well at the moment, and what doesn't it do well in terms of producing that outcome?

Before I get to that, this question of getting ready for work has been going for a long time. We had the Technical Education Commission in 1882 that asked that question. I'm not sure I'm going to tell you anything that it's solved. English and Maths are really important. So you have to start with that. And we've made gains in this in recent years. We had these literacy strikes, then phonics, all of that is part of getting ready for work. English and Maths are access to everything in the world around you.

Employers often talk about generic skills, problem solving, creative thinking. Then educators say, well, actually, you can't teach those creative skills or critical thinking absent from knowledge. In other words, you need the knowledge base in order to get creative and that's where the debate always is. I think probably we could all do a bit better job understanding where the other person is coming from. So I think from the employers perspective, and I don't want to speak for all of them, they want a young person who comes into them via an apprenticeship or wherever, who's confident, can do, wants to work with others.

Attitude as well as.

Exactly. And I think from the teacher or the education point of view, you can have what we might call a plurality of excellence. If you look at the creative thinking element of PISA, which England wasn't part of, Singapore is top for English and maths and science and also creative thinking. Why? When you look at the detail of it, the Singaporean children are saying, I've got space in lesson to reflect and to come up with ideas. And my teacher is encouraging creative thinking. They're not making a trade- off because they're incredibly good at the academics, but they've also found a way, possibly through pedagogy, to help young people find their voice. It's also interesting to know that there were some children who excelled at the creative thinking who were good at the English and maths, but weren't excelling. So is it possible to imagine where you've got a foundation in really powerful knowledge and core skills, you can excel at other things and we can encourage that.

Where does employability sit within the priorities of a school? What level of importance should it be given?

I suppose this is where we get your world of assessment. The case for exams is strong. It's doing a good job of measuring what's in the curriculum. I think the evidence is quite positive on that. But you might think there's a bunch of other stuff that we want out of our education system, readying for work in its broader sense. Is it people saying, we do want that? We think that is important, but there's too much, schools have got too much on their plate. It’s totally understandable. And you can’t assess it, or assess it as well.If you're making priority decisions, it's absolutely natural the construct that sits around the academic elements of school life come to the fore. But I don't think you find many people who say these other things aren't important. So the challenge for all of us is, what's the way of giving that rigour, doing it in a way that is meaningful, that doesn't de-prioritise other important things. I found this running a school. You're trying to balance these things, and both are important.

How did you do it?

Well, we had successes and failures, to be fair. Two things I think we got decently right. One is this oracy question, that I think other people have said was a good thought, i.e. how you might use talk in lessons to extend learning in lots of different ways. A by-product of that might be that you gain confidence. I'll give an example, we are very good in this country at number in maths. It's a real strength. If you look at the very top performing systems, they are finding spaces in the classroom for word prompts that are discussed. And it's building on knowledge. And we've got great programmes here, like Maths Circles. Oracy is doing something in that curriculum space that is great for the subject. But I also think it's great for the young person as well. The other thing we did from the employability side was work placement in Year 10, actually two work placements, 18 weeks over the academic year. That's quite a lot of curriculum time, so we tried different forms of assessment, the main one being the employers. And we said to them, if our young person isn't turning up on time, isn't doing what you need, you've got to tell them. And potentially you could fire them. We wanted to make it sound and feel as though this was a very meaningful experience for young people. And the point about that, it's hard to argue that the employer isn't a rigorous form of assessor of the young person. It worked because people did get fired, and then the young person had to find a different placement. It was a decent assessment. That sense in which the audience of assessment wasn't the examiner, it was someone else who might employ them in five or ten years hence, created a different sort of dynamic, which I thought we could learn from.

Am I right as well that you were getting teachers to go and work with employers, or to look at apprenticeship schemes and things like that and try and inform classroom practice through that process?

That's more currently what we've been trying to do at CEC. We've got about 2000 teachers out into industry over the last two years, so teachers can have a sense of the world of work. I was lucky enough to go around Oxford Biomedica, which is an incredible thing. I took eight biology teachers with me and they understood everything that was going on, gene vectoring etc, but I was completely lost. There were two things they were saying, which I think are quite meaningful for young people. One is, you mean you have apprentices here? And the other interesting thing was that they said, when we're doing gene vectoring in biology, I can bring it to life in a way that is good for careers, but also good for the teaching. You know, and that's been relatively popular and well evaluated. And I remember, Sophie, when we did our initial teacher training, we did have time with industry, and it was thought that that was a good bit of hinterland you might take with you into the classroom.

Yes I thought that was excellent, even if you didn't go into working in other industries at the time, it was still at the back of my mind while I was teaching. And I think it’s quite powerful in terms of bringing in opportunities for the students and also just having that outside perspective. So you haven't just been to school, maybe been to uni and then been in the classroom, you've seen other things.

It links to your point, John. There's things you can do within the school day, within the curriculum that we've got, and elsewhere, to think about the connection to the world of work that are beneficial to all really.

Can I just take you, Oli, back to the oracy question for a second and thinking about assessment. So with the current GCSE English language there's still a speaking and listening element to that, but it no longer forms part of the overall grade. Do you think that we should be incorporating oracy more into summative assessment? Or do you think it's just a tool for use, for in-class formative assessment?

Essentially, I remember the debate and I think the debate is we don't want to go back to anything like coursework or anything like that. Is it valid? Is it reliable? Is it too much work? Isn't this where you get innovation? We have seen some work done on assessing oracy and they're using comparative judgement versus a construct. Efficiencies driven by different forms of marking and assessment could get us to an exciting place. And I'm quite excited by how you could use AI potential, particularly on oracy, because it is quite time intensive. You're hearing a young person talk. And then actually, what we also want to do is think about how they interact with one another. So if we can innovate on that, I think we will make progress.

One thing I’m interested in is the structure of exams and how it helps post-leaving school. It keeps coming up in conversations that we've had. We've heard from quite a few people, leaders within schools, who've said to us about the process of preparing for exams, the cycle of the academic year, building up to those big exams at 16 and 18, as being really important life skills. It teaches resilience, and if there is some failure involved in that, making failure, failing at something, an important part of being a teenager so that they’re ready for the world of work.  Do you think that is quite helpful? What do you hear from employers around that? Obviously with the potential for digital assessments being used more widely and being able to take assessments whenever children may want, if that could ever happen, that would change things in that area. What do you think about that kind of resilience in exams?

I hear that, and you hear that in other forms, people say, well, you know, young people need to understand failure. And I think that's right. But isn't the challenge to find the strengths of every single young person so that they can succeed. And so that's why I'm in favour of this kind of plural view that the exams are doing an important job but if a young person doesn't succeed at them, that child will have other strengths. And I always think you've got to hold on to kids long enough in the system to find out what's going to animate them.

I think exams are an important part of getting young people on. They do a job for universities, they do a good job of attitudinally getting students ready for them. But that's not everyone's path, and nor would we want it to be, frankly. I always think you've got to find a way broad enough for long enough in the provision, to hook young people in, to get them excited so that they go to their next step with confidence and power.

We have heard the other kind of perspective as well, from people talking about employment where they're saying, effectively, the argument is that the current system doesn't really provide students with a very good reflection of how they will operate and work in the world of work. Working towards exams, taking exams, the particular circumstances that they do them in, are not very reflective of anything to do with how you work generally. It's interesting what you say about the purpose of assessment. Exams fulfil a purpose for universities, with that filtering process. But maybe we haven't got enough purposes within the system to account for all the different things that we might want to see in young people and in their abilities. Getting those strengths, as you were saying, Oli, out of every child. Can you suggest some of the different ways in which we might assess students? Obviously, you said that there are problems with coursework etc, but aside from exams, are there any other things that you might like to see introduced to help us assess what young people can do?

There are four things I've seen that are quite interesting. I'm the governor of something called the London Screen Academy, and they're a very interesting model where you've got industry incredibly involved from the beginning. It's a 16-19 sixth-form college, and a lot of it is presenting your best work. In that industry you're iterating, crafting something to an end product, that's how it works. So when you've got the top titans from industry coming in and saying, that's good or isn't good, that's a pretty decent method. So I've seen that work, and the response of the young person to it. It's like, okay, now I know the standard. So the assessment is also motivational.

In our work at the Careers & Enterprise Company, the government is very interested in the two weeks-worth of work experience for young people building up over time. One of the things that we've put in place is what you might call a learning framework. What sometimes happens with work experiences is kids go out and say, I now know what I don't want to do. But it's two weeks of curriculum time, potentially. That's more than sometimes music gets in Key Stage 4. You kind of want to put a framework of learning around it. So we're trialling at the moment with some combined authorities, management, et cetera - with each experience, what are you trying to learn from it? And that might be skills. It might be knowledge, and then keeping a track of that. I suppose the logical extension over time is you might do some, I wouldn't want to say assessment, but some formative work on that. So what have you learned from working with employers?
The third is obviously the VIVA process, which is well understood. And I think that speaks to what we're saying about oracy.

The fourth - and I can hear people getting out their record of achievements already. It is true that you want to find a way to capture your strengths, and, in the absence of a better kind of assessment process, it's not a terrible idea for a young person to have a portfolio of things that they've developed.

What I find mad as well is that in this digital age there doesn't seem to be any centralised way that people can keep all their achievements together. You've got all your validated achievements and qualifications but that facility doesn't exist.

Kids are turned out with a piece of paper, which might get lost.

And we get phone calls from people in their mid 30s saying, do you still have my exam certificates? Often the exam boards don't even exist anymore. Or they've completely rebranded. On that note, I have no idea where mine are....

And yet you're still thriving, guys!

I'm thriving without the certificates.

Yes. I suppose I want to make the point, which I think you're saying, is that when you get into work, it's the things you can do which are more important. So you're trying to find a rigorous way, without crowding out the other important things, to recognise and nurture that.

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