Bringing together teachers, local authorities, ed-tech and our Access Aspiration programme student ambassadors

Philip Jolly is the Mayor’s Fund for London’s Employment Programme’s Manager, dedicated to evaluating programme outcomes and improving effectiveness. Philip reflects on the spring teacher forum. 

Our partners at GIA Surveyors generously hosted us last week for our spring term teacher forum. The session brought together teachers and senior leaders from academy school sixth forms, teachers from a University Technical College (UTC) our Access Aspiration Student Ambassadors and U-Explore, the ed-tech provider contracted by the Careers and Enterprise Company and GLA to deliver labour market information for London.  

The session was an opportunity to convene our current partner schools, bring in best practice sharing and to learn more about how educators can better use labour market information resources to help students navigate their future options aligned to workforce demand.  

A big focus of the session was a workshop to help understand from all of these unique stakeholder perspectives: 

• What activities do schools need from careers education providers 

• What are the barriers to students engaging in careers education and how to overcome them together 

• To what extent young people are influenced by labour market information in their decision making and how provide students insight into future job demand 

With the years of experience across the education sector and from these unique perspectives and expertise, we’ve gathered some brilliant insight into these questions and more that came up throughout the conversation. One additional focus that came through with real feeling from everyone in the room was the need for more support and coordination around T-Level placements. We’ve noted all of the amazing conversations that happened during the session.  

Our work now is to analyse the points that were made and to move these forward, whether in programme design, advocating for funding and support or convening organisations to meet the needs of schools and young Londoners. A huge thankyou to all involved. 

This forum was part of Mayor’s Fund for London’s Employability programme, Access Aspiration. Access Aspiration creates more visibility of career pathways for 16-18-year-olds from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds who are making key decisions about their future but struggling to link with employers. Please email info@mayorsfundforlondon.org.uk to be involved or for more information about our work.