Agenda item

Please provide an outline of the roles and responsibilities that your post involves, and an overview of the services supplied by Education Business Partnership Kent.

I am the Executive Director of EBP Kent, which is a limited company.  Some 17,000 other companies work with us.  We work with young people between the ages of 4 and 24, and we link to 67 Schools for Work Experience and a further 25 who contract purely for activities around employability.  We are funded in small part by commissioning fees from KCC but most of our income comes from schools which purchase our services.

I am pleased to have been invited to address the Select Committee, as EBP Kent has been working on the Student Journey for 10 years.   We work with pupils in Key Stages 1 – 5, and with university students.   We work on the principal that every student is ultimately aiming to enter employment, whether at 16 in an apprenticeship scheme or after graduating.

We base our work on the need for employability skills such as customer awareness and teamwork, which are needed in all jobs, rather than technical knowledge, which will change frequently and require constant re-training.

We currently work with 35,000 young people from Key Stage 1 onwards, addressing issues like motivation, attitude and employability.  We find that it is good to start early with softer skills.  We use a range of different programmes. For example, 1,000 Primary school children will visit Turner Contemporary with EBP Kent to take part in workshops and science schemes, and we also go into schools to deliver inspired learning programmes.  We start on these initiatives very early, with our enterprise partners.

Our aim is to let employers see young people’s scope and how they could develop them.  Employers tell us that young people are simply not fit for employment when they leave school, and they need preparation, so we provide employment professionals to act as a link between young people and potential future employers to address the need to enhance their work-readiness.

We instil confidence in employers and run mentoring and skills events across Kent.  From these and the comparisons we are able to make with other areas of the UK, we have seen that Kent is well developed and more advanced in some aspects of this work than many other areas.

We work with the Kent Federation of Small Businesses, universities, the Youth Offending Service and 40 special schools. The pack I have handed out lists examples of what we do, and also includes some examples of feedback from students.

We are not funded for what we do – we have a basic budget of only £3,000! – so we rely on the goodwill of universities, colleges, employers, etc to support our work. For example, one of our projects - ‘Special Choices’ – was funded by Sue Dunn’s directorate. This enables such activity to take place and the EBP is very grateful for such support. We deliver very good value for money!

Feedback from employers shows that they find our services very useful, and that there is much commonality in the issues they come across with preparing young people for employment.   A German company sponsors bio-scientists, a discipline which links to 270 different careers, and they test young people’s knowledge of the scope of this field and the options it offers.

Is KCC using its resources effectively in this field?

There is some duplication of effort.  I would ask if KCC feels that a filtration method is needed to help direct and focus its resources and give the best support.

Academies are very driven by a main sponsor.  They will move away from KCC control but will EBP Kent capture them?

Academies will purchase the best services they can find, and we have to be good to win custom each time.  Some academies have different levels of quality.  Our aim is to work with every partner and together raise the quality.

Academies get their funding direct from the government.  KCC needs to decide what services it wants to offer, without the budget that it once had for those academies when they were schools.  Has the KCC been quick enough to capture the audience of new academies, or could we lose out to other providers?

I believe the KCC should take on a strategic and not an operational role.

Your presentation has been very useful to us, but what views do you get from students, and what level of take up?

The services we offer are spread geographically across the county, and we find that students have different experiences and aspirations in different areas.  We demonstrate to them how little they will pay for university, to show them what they could do, but some need a cultural shift to see this.  They see university as something which they cannot aspire to, and now see it as something they simply couldn’t pay for.  Some employers offer to train a young person as part of an employment package.  Some 117,000 young people each year do not go to university, and there are lots of possible pathways for them.  Services will need a certain amount of tailoring to suit different geographical areas of the county.

Employers need new young trainees to arrive with good basic numeracy and literacy.  How seriously do schools take this?

Some schools do very well at preparing a child with a holistic, well-rounded education, and there are areas which perform better than others in this respect – although these areas can still contain pockets of significant deprivation.  We have to have a foot in the door to influence inspired learning of the applied numeracy and literacy employers tell us they need.  However, some very academically able students have poor social skills and do not have the inter-personal and time management disciplines which are also very important to employers.

Form your experience, how do you think schools see themselves?  Can they be insular, and fail to see any role for themselves in preparing young people as useful well-rounded citizens?  We would need to address this.

Schools on the whole do a brilliant job with the many constraints they have (for example, there were 352 White Papers last year relating to various aspects of education!) and they have to follow the system.  We need to work with them.  Year 12 used to have community experience sessions but the time previously spent on this had to be re-directed to exam preparation. The International Baccalaureate goes a long way to address some of these issues.

As an example of a way in which older students can take on a community leadership role, at the Turner Contemporary days we had sixth formers running a camera obscura workshop for younger students.

What you have told us has been very enlightening, and young people need to be able to benefit from the passion that you have.  Employers need the ‘soft skills’, and these have not changed in the last 25 years, but we need to link the development of these skills into the school curriculum.  They are ‘skills for life, not just for jobs’, and we need to spread the message about their importance.

I agree! Many employers are also parents, so can see both sides of preparing a young person with good life skills as well as academic skills.  EBP Kent seeks to promote the importance of this when we talk to schools, and most schools are very aware.

We have heard about ideals in the way young people are prepared for work, but the KCC must have a strategic role and be an enabler rather than a deliverer. We need an overview of what services are out there, what works well and how we can encourage it (for example, by lobbying MPs, etc). I believe that EBP Kent’s services should be available to every child in Kent, but how can we make this happen?

The Wolf review was very clear on a recommended standard for employment training, and those which do not meet this standard would not be able to operate.  EBP Kent is the only organisation in KCC’s area which meets this standard.  There are 120 EBPs across the UK.  They are all separately constituted but they all have to reach the same standard, managed by the Institute of Education Business Excellence.

I believe the role of the Select Committee is about influencing. Many of us are School Governors, so we can and will influence. 

The employability journey starts early; children need to start learning the soft skills from the age of 4.  Are there any models which can be used to teach those skills to that age group?

I am not aware of one. 

How does the UK compare to the USA in this field?

Their culture is different, and children are very outgoing at a very early age.  We need to measure young people’s progress by stage, not purely by age.  

We have planned a digital media day for young people.  Each school will prepare a 3 minute blog to sell their skills to employers.

I would find it helpful for you to comment on the Select Committee’s preliminary findings, as I would value your view on what we come up with.

Yes, I would welcome an opportunity to comment.