Research

Summary page

Research

Informing post-school pathways: Investigating school students' authentic work experiences

Aims of project

This project investigates how best to utilise school students’ experiences in paid part-time work to enable them to have a better understanding of post-school pathways, as well as the ability to make wise decisions about these pathways. We regard these paid work experiences as being more‘ authentic’ and informative than school-organised work experiences, since paid work entails an employment arrangement, immersion in workplaces and the exercise of the obligations and requirements on the part of both employees and employers.

The specific questions addressed by the project were:

In what ways can school students’ engagement with paid work experiences assist them and their peers to understand work, working life and post-school pathways?

What kinds of teaching practices might secure these outcomes?

How can schools best organise experiences to inform students about work, working life and post-school options?

Background

Preparing young people for life, including working life beyond school, is an implicit goal of schooling. Many, perhaps most, Australian school students in Years 10, 11 and 12 engage in working life through their paid part-time work outside school hours. In addition, school students are increasingly being employed as school-based apprentices and trainees as part of their schooling program. These working-life experiences can be regarded as a resource that schools can utilise to assist students to prepare for and make decisions about their transition to work and working life. This can be achieved by using, as part of the school-based curriculum, these instances of ‘authentic’ working-life experiences in classroom-based activities to individually reflect and collectively discuss and appraise work, working life and post-school pathways. These paid work experiences can be maximised by extending students’ understanding of the value of their part-time work and engaging them in reflective practices with those students who do not participate in paid work experiences.

The ‘authenticity’ of these experiences derives from their real-work context. As part of the workforce, students need to fulfil the requirements of employees and be subject to employment obligations. In this, they are distinct from school-organised work placements. In Queensland, employers taking school students on work placements are not required to provide ‘real’ work or payment for work experience. In Victoria, on the other hand, the employer offers the student a contribution to out-of-pocket expenses. However, this research proposes that the paid work experiences of Australian school students are different from and potentially superior to these schoolorganised work placements, because paid work expects both students and employers to recognise the rights and responsibilities of their employee–employer relationship. Furthermore, these work experiences are usually ongoing and of a longer duration than school-organised work placements.

Through their paid work, school students can gain impressions (individually and collectively) of the different kinds of work in their workplaces and how working life plays out for different kinds of employees. The guided reflection of these experiences has rich educative potential for a critical and reflective understanding of work and working life. As a consequence, students will be assisted in making informed decisions about post-school pathways. It is important to recognise however that these work experiences should not be seen as exemplars but as instances of work and working life with the capacity to offer insights into the world of work.

While this innovation has an educative purpose, it also provides a practical solution to a shrinking pool of work placements, given the difficulties that many schools experience in providing and monitoring these placements. Classroom-based reflections on students’ paid work experiences can become an educational resource—one that is freely available in Australian schools—and offer the prospect of considerable savings in school resources (for example, administrative and travel costs to support work placement programs). These resources can then be redirected to other means of preparing and supporting students for their post-school pathways. In this context these paid work experiences have the potential to provide a rich resource.

Procedures

The procedures for this study comprised four stages. First, schools were approached to elicit their participation in the project, to gain consent and to establish the research relationship. This first stage resulted in a total of ten classes and their teachers in six schools across two states (Queensland and Victoria) participating in the study. To assist the school environment in being supportive of the purpose of the study, preference was given to those schools with a track record in VET in Schools programs. Second, teachers and researchers in the six schools were to negotiate ways to meet the needs of particular classes and students in the implementation of classroom-based activities designed to assist students to reflect on their paid work experiences. This second stage was intended to encompass working with selected teachers to develop the necessary classroom-based activities to assist students to describe and understand their paid work, thus allowing them to reflect upon appropriate post-school pathways. Aspects to be considered during these discussions were the school’s setting and location, student cohorts, and student readiness. A framework for describing the students’ work was adapted from earlier studies and comprised categories of work activities and interactions. Teachers were encouraged to tailor this to their students’ needs and competence.

During the third stage, ten classes of students in the selected six schools were involved in the implementation of the research project. Four metropolitan schools in Queensland and two in regional Victoria participated. One Queensland metropolitan school began the classroom activities in the final term of 2004, with the remaining five schools in Queensland and Victoria participating in the first half of 2005. Stage four involved progressively gathering and analysing the data and writing the report.

Findings

The findings can be categorised according to the following key areas:

negotiating the procedures established by the research
understanding work
understanding future pathways
reflecting upon work and post-school pathways.

The findings also address the teachers’ roles in the process and advance considerations forvocational education and schooling.

Negotiating the procedures

From the pilot study, a set of classroom resources was created and basically adopted unaltered by all the participating schools. They were, however, implemented in quite different ways by each school, which led to distinct sets of classroom experiences. In some instances, students and sometimes teachers struggled with the classroom-based activities. The variation in experiences arose from:

the capabilities of the teacher involved
the interest and readiness of students
the resources for and status of work experience and vocational education programs within the school.

This initial finding is noteworthy as it highlights the centrality of the teacher’s role and the school’s commitment to supporting them in vocational education and training (VET) initiatives.

Understanding work

Through classroom activities, the students were able to engage in and present critical, although sometimes not particularly considered, analyses of their work experiences. Crucial features identified included:

the contrast between the conditions and roles of part-time workers and those of full-time workers
the unrewarding and unattractive nature of menial work
the nature of discretionary work roles (where they act autonomously or semi-autonomously)
differences in work roles
concepts about and appraisals of team work
the standing of workers and their treatment (for example, by customers and management)
the requirements for work performance.

These findings support the claim that workplace experiences derived from authentic employment relationships provide a richer base for experiencing and considering work and working life than do school-organised work placements. The extent to which classroom activities can produce educationally worthwhile reflections on work experiences depends on the work by teachers, the depth of their understanding, and their capability to facilitate this within the classrooms.

Understanding future pathways

Through their reflections on their paid work experience, students identified that they had learnt about:

working life
different kinds of work—their differences and similarities
the kinds of work they do not want to engage in post-school
the kinds of work they want to engage in post-school
their preferred work options
their preferences for a post-tertiary or university-prepared occupation
the relevance of school-based learning for preparing students for the work to which they aspire.

In all, they indicated that reflecting on and discussing their part-time employment in classroombased activities provided opportunities for considering options for working life, for identifying employment preferences and, in some instances, for the need for investing greater effort at school, or in tertiary or higher education to ensure the realisation of their working life goals.

Reflecting on work and post-school pathways

Overall, students reported that reflecting on their part-time employment had been useful. Clearly, they enjoyed discussing their work experiences and the opportunity to share experiences and insights in ways rarely provided in the classroom or workplace. In addition, the discussion of this topic in class provided insights for those not yet employed. Even students who struggled to present their ideas in a written form provided responses supporting the conclusion of most students: that their paid part-time work was the best way of understanding work and post-school pathways. There were also suggestions about improving other ways of learning about occupations. These included advice from teachers, industry speakers and careers advisors, and access to electronic resources and agencies whose role it was to provide information on forms of employment. Although these other resources could provide a welcome complement, school students consistently claimed that their paid employment offered the most effective educational resource—and one that is freely available in most Year 11 and 12 classrooms in Australian schools. With minimal re-organisation of school programs, these class activities could be accommodated by both teachers and high school students to enable reflection on the world of work beyond school.

Teachers’ roles

While students bring their experiences of paid work to classroom activities, teachers are required to provide classroom-based experiences to enable individual and group reflection on paid work experiences, thus assisting students to realise the full potential of those experiences. In this context it was clear that teachers needed the capacity to:

adapt and utilise resources to meet students’ needs
facilitate student learning (that is, draw upon learners’ experiences)
manage the teaching/learning process to promote students taking up productive critical reflection
understand the potential of thinking about work
expand students’ views about learning and educational goals.

Levels of teacher competence in their roles in this area of learning and innovation determined the usefulness of the outcomes. Not all teachers possessed this expertise or were able to provide effective guided reflective experiences. These considerations seem particularly relevant to other initiatives aimed at improving information for school students about post-school options (for example, career guidance).

Lessons for vocational education and schooling

In all of the schools, the teachers used the pre-prepared materials supplied by the researchers with little or no modification. While this was successful in some schools, in others it led to unsatisfactory outcomes for both students and teachers: the uncritical and unadapted use of externally derived materials was problematic. Teachers need the support of school resources, including the capacity to adapt materials and educational resources, such as the learning guides and other non-endorsed resources supporting training packages. These materials need to be adapted to meet the requirements and capabilities of particular student groups. However, teachers’ reluctance to trust and engage those outside the school (for example, researchers) who have specific knowledge and who can provide expertise not available in the school is a shortcoming that reflects the ‘closed culture’ of schooling.

The diversity of teachers’ levels of competence in the areas of work and vocational education was surprising. Furthermore, schools’ espoused track record with VET was not a predictor of positive educational experiences. Even in schools committed to VET in Schools programs, arrangements for vocational and workplace-based experiences appeared marginal, unsupported and unmanaged. Clearly, additional demands have been placed on both schools and students with: take-up of school-based apprenticeships; VET in Schools programs, as well as part-time employment after school and weekends; and the ongoing pursuit of academic qualifications for entry into higher education programs.

Some schools claimed that vocational education was already an integral part of their operation. However, this did not guarantee effective and well-managed school-based activities associated with and providing opportunities for understanding work, working life and post-school pathways. Central to the success of vocational education programs in schools were the focus given to the vocational program, allocation of adequate resources and appropriate programming. The research also found that the demands placed upon students and teachers should be more balanced to permit the additional activities required for vocational education in schools to be accommodated.