Themed Weeks: Gatsby Benchmark 4 - Linking Curriculum Learning to Careers
This weeks Gatsby Benchmark in focus is Benchmark 4, Linking Curriculum Learning to Careers
Every young person will benefit from thinking about their career while they are at school and college. One way to ensure no one gets missed out is to make sure that careers provision is well embedded in the curriculum.
Gatsby Benchmark 4 definition states ‘All teachers should link curriculum learning with careers. For example, STEM subject teachers should highlight the relevance of STEM subjects for a wide range of future career paths’
Institutions need to adopt a strategic approach linking curriculum learning to careers and developing a coherent rationale for embedding careers in subject learning.
Careers in the curriculum has twin purposes:
To promote students’ career learning, development and well-being
To enhance students’ subject learning and attainment and their overall personal and social development.
It is about making subjects more relatable and relevant to everyday and working life. Real-life contexts and examples from the world of work can make subjects easier to understand and help students feel more engaged in their learning.
The three main ways of delivering careers in the curriculum are:
Providing career learning as a subject in its own right
Incorporating career learning within other subjects
Organising career learning through co-curricular activities (i.e. enrichment activities strongly connected to the formal curriculum).
Over the next two weeks Careers Hub Luton hopes to share a number of resources that will support your institution with this benchmark. Please also do share your experiences and provide examples of good practices.
Careers Education is rarely assessed through formal tests and qualifications, although such forms of external accreditation of students learning is available
Examples of accrediting careers education: ASDAN Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE) https://www.asdan.org.uk/ and OCRs Employability Skills qualifications https://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/by-subject/employability-skills/
As Career Leaders you would want to know what has been learned and there are a range of ways you could do this: discussion with students, observations, surveys, tests or oral presentations. One of the most effective is for students to keep a portfolio of their work for careers. Career Leaders are using different platforms to do this e.g. 16x16, Unifrog, folder of work completed etc.
In most school and colleges you may find several members of staff teaching careers in the curriculum. As a Career Leader you will need to meet with your colleagues to receive the feedback and plan for next steps.
The most widely used framework is Career Development Institutes Framework for careers, employability and enterprise education 7-19 https://www.thecdi.net/Careers-Framework
The Framework offers a comprehensive list of objectives for each four phases of education: key stage 2, 3, 4 and post 16. You can take the relevant list and tailor and adjust the objectives to produce a bespoke set of objectives for your scheme of work, taking into account the context for the group of students you are working with. This will also be determined by how much curriculum time you have available.
From the above link it is also possible to access several different supporting documents that can be used for auditing and planning programmes for careers education
Here are some resources and tools to use in the classroom to help you achieve Gatsby Benchmark 4:
