Benefits for schools and colleges
Curriculum change has placed new obligations on schools and colleges to deliver a varied, motivating and relevant curriculum that prepares young people for their adult lives. Effective relations with employers are central to delivering the new curriculum and increasing numbers of secondary schools and colleges are already working with employers to support teaching and learning. Employers can also provide support to underpin the wider health of the school or college.
Employers supporting the professional development of staff
Support for senior leaders
Increasing numbers of schools and colleges are working with employers to help develop teaching staff and senior school and college leaders. Institutional relationships can lead to strong individual relationships - in mentoring, coaching or buddying arrangements - where senior staff are provided with a space to reflect on their working lives, challenging the isolation that is sometimes felt within educational institutions. Such mutually beneficial relationships also help employer partners develop better understandings of the educational process, its challenges and opportunities.
The HTI Stretch initiative, for example, provides senior teachers with secondments to business, giving an employer a fresh perspective and expertise for short-term projects; the Take 5 programme enables employers to develop their staff through challenging five day assignments in education, normally spread over five weeks.
Support for subject specialists
Teachers can work with employers whose areas of expertise covers their teaching needs. This means that teachers are able to discuss aspects of their subject specialism with fellow professionals, whose perspective on the subjects is different. Teachers are also able to keep up to date with the latest real-world developments of their subject specialism.
Teachers can participate in professional development placements at employers' premises. Such placements are becoming increasingly important to secondary school teachers in particular, due to the promotion of vocational subjects and qualifications (e.g. the Diploma). Teachers can develop their expertise in the work-related skills connected with their subject specialism. This will enhance students' understanding back in school.
For more information and videos on professional development placements, visit the Diploma support programme website.
Financial and in-kind support
Employers can provide schools and colleges with a range of resources free of charge, provide sponsorship for school activities and events and provide learning resources and equipment.
Under the Time to Read programme, for example, which involves employee volunteers listening to children read in primary schools across Northern Ireland, during 2008 more than 1,000 children in 130 schools worked with 500 volunteers from 120 employers. Since 1999, evaluators calculated, Time to Read volunteers had worked with 3,500 children during more than 53,000 hours of volunteer time, at a value of £1.3m, and provided £130,000 worth of reading resources to schools.
For further evidence of why it makes difference visit Research Reports.