How Do You Prepare Pupils For The Unknown?

At this summer’s INSET on 22 May, we got the chance to see the results of the most recent Teaching and Learning Survey. Among the overwhelmingly positive feedback from pupils assessing the quality of their own T&L experience was one very slightly less positive finding – a proportion of them don’t think the content of their lessons is “relevant to their life”. The question did not ask students to think specifically about their current or future lives, so we may assume they were thinking of both or either. 

My first thought on hearing this was “how would they know?” 

In just the two short weeks leading up to INSET day, three big employers in industries to which many of our students aspire had all talked of their inability to predict the future of the labour market. These were Barclays CEO C S Venkatakrishnan, Amazon’s UK boss John Boumphrey (both on the BBC’s Today programme) and Jamie Dimon, CEO of J P Morgan Chase, talking to Bloomberg. They did not know what technical skills would be needed just a few years from now; none of them could predict which jobs would be done by AI and which would need humans. With this in mind, it seems unlikely that either teachers or students can accurately know which technical skills and aptitudes will be “relevant to” the future lives of our students.

Results from the 2026 Teaching & Learning Survey

Careers Guidance

The idea that the UK workforce would benefit from early careers advice emerged in the opening decades of the twentieth century, as new industries and increasing workplace specialisation expanded the range of opportunities available; young people entering the labour force had the luxury of choice for the first time, and growing sophistication across industrial sectors forced employers to differentiate more clearly between the skills required for different jobs. 

This need for vocational knowledge and skills eventually trickled down to schools, with the development of careers education in the late twentieth century. Its role in education, as opposed to unemployment benefit administration as it once was, wasn’t fully in place until the 1973 Employment and Training Act, and the statutory duty of schools to provide careers support wasn’t enacted until the Education Act of 1997.

The eight Gatsby Benchmarks, which are now recommended by the Department for Education

One of the most prominent organisations that emerged within this field was the Gatsby Foundation, a charitable foundation established in the 1960s by David Sainsbury. The main contribution of the Foundation to careers education has been the development of a set of eight benchmarks (above). These benchmarks have been widely welcomed and adopted (including by Ofsted) as giving a framework for the development of career education. 

On the face of it, there is very little here to argue with. They present a set of simply expressed measures in a concise form; however, like all such frameworks, they will only deliver the intended benefits if the actual content is forward-thinking and well-informed. For example, Benchmark 2 is that career information should be based on ‘labour market information’. Indeed, Morrisby, who provide broad career support to schools and pupils, make great play of their use of data from Lightcast, a US data analytics firm. But while labour market information (LMI) such as data on numbers of hirings, advertised posts in different sectors and earnings trends can be collected and analysed, it may only be relevant for pupils who expect to enter the labour force in the next two to four years. It has progressively less and less value the younger the cohort. LMI is what economists would call a lagging indicator - it tells you what happened in the past, and even gives a clue as to what is happening now, but it is a risky way of trying to predict the future.

Similarly, while Benchmark 4's advice to ‘link curriculum learning to careers’ could be powerful and effective, it would be easy for teachers to fall into narrow ways of thinking that rely on simple links: studying Biology if you’re interested in veterinary science, Art if you want to be a designer, or Economics if you want to work in finance. This approach would inevitably miss some of the most valuable contributions to future employability that may come from some surprising places.

Research on future skills from the World Economic Forum

Listening to those CEOs, it was clear that while they did not know exactly what professional skills and competencies they would seek in the next generation of workers, there were things they could foresee. For example, one belief they all shared was that artificial intelligence (AI) will have a significant, but as yet uncertain, impact on jobs: 

• They expected to need people who understood and could use AI

• They expected the focus to shift from backroom jobs to customer-facing roles that cannot easily be automated

This is something that has been echoed in the World Economic Forum's ‘Future of Jobs Report’ and in the OECD's ‘Skills for 2030’ document, which continues to drive curriculum change across all sections of our School.

Ultimately, employers will need young people they can put in front of clients, young people who can form constructive relationships with their co-workers and customers, discerning their needs and offering innovative ways to meet them. They will need workers who are aware of their surroundings, picking up details, watching the competition, and understanding their market.  Above all, they will need to be adaptable because it is likely their working lives will change many times during their careers, and they will need to be ready.

While we continue to embed this in the curriculum, we can look imaginatively for ways to work on the five themes that came through in the interviews I’ve heard. Here they are with some ideas for developing them:

1. Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of others

• Identify and use opportunities when teaching anything controversial to develop empathy; for example, when discussing abortion rights, genetics, international relations, or the payment of benefits. Encourage pupils to analyse their own attitude to what others are saying; ask them to pause before reacting to formulate a considered response.

• When a pupil has strong views, use these opportunities to get them to present the opposite case. For example, in Academic Challenge Seminars for Economics, I often ask pupils to speak in favour of communism or increasing benefits - two concepts they may disagree with.

• When teaching about poverty and inequality in Economics, we may also ask pupils to work out a weekly budget for a family of four living on two minimum-wage jobs to help students understand the realities of life for others they may not come into contact with.

   

2. Inquisitiveness: the desire to know more, to understand, to explain

• In most subjects and year groups, opportunities exist to start a lesson with a knowledge treasure hunt. Ask pupils to use their laptops to find out something specific, such as “What country has the highest level of national debt?”, then send them further into the topic with, “Now, find out who they owe the money to” and “Why did they borrow so much?”

• Any opportunity to encourage students to find out the answers to their own questions is worthwhile. At the same time as finding answers to current questions, we must also try to help them build a repertoire of reliable sources they can use in future. This helps navigate a problem that exists in Economics (and probably many other subjects) where the range of self-appointed ‘A-level experts’ on TikTok ranges from the well-informed (who basically tell them what we’ve already told them) to the downright misleading and idiotic. Not all students can tell the difference without our help.

   

3. Active listening is the skill of fully concentrating on what someone is saying and is important for most roles as it enhances understanding and builds rapport.

• Getting students to listen to each other can be a challenge. My experience is that when someone asks a question in class, other pupils can often regard this as a private conversation with the teacher and switch off, assuming neither the question nor the answer is relevant to them. Simply opening the question to the class, or putting it to another pupil, can help address this, especially if done routinely. Pupils will become used to the idea that any question asked could become a question for them.

• Check for active listening by asking a student to give another example, sum up a topic in three sentences, or explain what the class were discussing.

   

4. Verbal communication is the ability to convey information effectively through speech

• Getting pupils to consider the way they communicate is key. Consider asking them to rephrase a contribution they’ve made in class using a specific term, or ask how they would explain the same thing differently to a younger sibling.

• We use presentations in many areas of Economics. This includes short presentations on a current news story as lesson starters, projects in academic challenge, and as a DIRT activity once individual feedback is finished. In each case, presentations require audience eye contact, no written notes, and pupils must be open to questions, so they can practise explaining things they haven’t prepared for.

   

5. Written communication is the skill of expressing thoughts and ideas in the written word

• We have found that many students do not consider the impression their written work gives the reader. In DIRT sessions, pupils will often say “but you know what I mean”, when challenged about their poor communication. While the best way to get their attention may be to say that an examiner won’t ‘know what they mean’, in truth, the skill of written communication has value way beyond an examination.

• Many students never actually read what they submit as written work, especially if they have already tried to shortcut the task by getting ChatGPT or Claude to write it for them. During DIRT, ask pupils to read their work aloud to you; even a single carefully chosen paragraph can give them great insight, especially if they then rewrite it to improve.

• Reading each other’s work and suggesting improvements can also highlight poor communication; this could be done at the end of a lesson before it comes in for teacher marking.

   

This is just a small selection of simple techniques for developing these key skills, most of which can be adapted to any classroom environment. The reality is that neither our students nor we can know exactly what the labour market will look like in ten or twenty years. However, what we can do is help them become adaptable, curious and effective communicators: developing young people with the confidence and capacity to apply their knowledge and skills to whatever opportunities and challenges the future may bring.