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As Jeremy Clarkson likes to remind us at this time of year, getting poor results at GCSEs and A-levels doesn’t necessarily land you on the scrap heap.
After all, some of the UK’s leading businessmen and women either failed their exams, like Clarkson (one C and two E’s), or couldn’t bear to waste another nanosecond at school.
Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson is perhaps the best-known entrepreneur who escaped the classroom as soon as he could.
Nearly a third of the 2,000 young school leavers interviewed regret their career choices. Two-thirds said they are not doing what they dreamed of while studying.
As did mobile phone magnate John Caudwell, Dragon Den’s Deborah Meaden and X-Factor’s Simon Cowell. If you’re looking for truly ambitious leaders who shunned higher education, think Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.
However, these are exceptions, as are those who know exactly what they hope to achieve in life.
Most young people don’t know this. Career guidance in Britain is notoriously hopeless and in many schools it is almost non-existent.
I will never forget the look of pride on the face of a young apprentice I met at the Bentley factory in Crewe.
He had left school at 15 to work in a garage because he liked tinkering with cars but hated it. By chance, he got an internship at Bentley.
When we met, he was one of Bentley’s advanced apprentices and studying engineering part-time at university.
And, as he himself said, he was debt-free. He was also one of Bentley’s “ambassadors,” visiting schools to tell students what they were missing. A genius.
Why aren’t more companies running programs like this? Most teachers don’t have much time and don’t know enough about apprenticeships or the job market (especially cutting-edge sectors like artificial intelligence) to advise their students.
A Saatchi & Saatchi study published to coincide with the exam results shows just how bleak the situation is.
Nearly a third of the 2,000 young people who finished school and were interviewed regretted the career choices they made. Two-thirds said they were not doing what they dreamed of while studying.
More worryingly, about half said school had not prepared them for their jobs and more than two-thirds said they did not have the right skills for what they were doing.
There was also a striking gap in satisfaction between public school students and their peers in private and specialized schools.
About half of public school students say they like what they do, but more than two-thirds of those who graduate from private schools (and 70 percent from specialized schools) say they are satisfied.
It’s not a surprising difference. Teachers at private schools are more likely to be engaged with students.
Parents tend to put their children in touch with contacts and potential employers. Call it nepotism if you want, but, like it or not, we are tribal creatures.
Saatchi & Saatchi undertook the research out of fears that public schools are failing students and leaving them virtually in the dark about creative fields.
Which is nonsense, as the creative industry is big business worth around £100bn a year and employing two million people.
Improving career advice should be a priority for the Labour Party: satisfied people tend to be happier and, in fact, healthier.
Instead of destroying private schools with its vindictive VAT hike, the government should find out how and why pupils in private and specialist schools are so much happier with their work and why their results are systematically better.
And it’s not just about money, as the extraordinary results at Michaela Free State School in Wembley, north-west London, have shown. God forbid other teachers should take advantage of their methods.
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