Are students equipped with the new skills they will need to survive and thrive?

 

Mary-Curnock-Cook-UCASThe CEO of UCAS, Mary Curnock Cook, has said that students at independent schools are ‘sleepwalking’ into lucrative careers.

The law, banking and the media seem to be the career destinations most favoured by those fortunate students who will, according to Curnock Cook, be ‘love bombed’ with offers from exactly the range of of employers who offered identical jobs to their parents.

Curnock Cook made these remarks to a meeting of the heads of leading independent schools, and she then went on to say that independent schools really should try harder to ‘encourage their students to be independent-minded, and to develop a sense of future self that breaks the mould a bit’.

The notion of students from independent schools going through an ‘identikit education experience into an off-the-peg life that mirrors what generations of the affluent classes have aspired to’ will not assist the changes our economy will need to undergo in order to remain competitive in a fast changing world.

Plus ça change

Curnock Cook pointed out that students from these backgrounds, with all the significant advantages they have, are ‘shunning’ high tech subjects such as robotics or bio-engineering, and instead going straight traditional middle class careers, usually in the traditional professions.

Whether students are from a comfortable middle class home, or a less well off home, they will all face a daunting set of problems in a world which has actually changed in very significant ways since their parents first entered the work place. Many of the assumptions upon which career choices were made, and the first steps into independent adult hood were taken, are no longer valid, as patterns of employment, or access to the housing market have undergone almost seismic shifts in the last 20 years or so.

Students from independent schools will not all remain immune from these changes, even if a small minority do, and it is just as important to make sure that these students are equipped with the new skills they will need to survive and thrive in the new economy, as it is for the entire student population, whatever kind of school they come from.