Enhancing Student Employability: Higher Education and Workforce Development 27-28 January 2005
ENHANCING STUDENT EMPLOYABILITY:
Higher Education and Workforce Development
Ninth Quality in Higher Education International Seminar in collaboration with ESECT and The Independent. Birmingham27th-28th January 2005
‘(L)earning for employability’: Undergraduate traineeships in social care
Pat Green, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, University of Wolverhampton
Mary Keating, Learning Resource Network Development Manager Topss West Midlands
Introduction
Higher Education has, in recent years, been experiencing mounting pressure to respond positively to graduate employability. Concerns have been raised about the extent to which the HE sector equips graduates for the workplace (Blasko et al, 2002; CHERI, 2002; Mason et al, 2003; Mantz and Yorke, 2003; Yorke, 2004).
Particularly within institutions such as ours, current financial pressures on students continue to have a significant impact upon the way they study. It has meant that many take on paid work in a range of jobs whilst simultaneously studying for degrees (Moxley et al, 2001:125), and is often unconnected with their course or subject.
The School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences is the largest school at the University of Wolverhampton, offers more than 25 academic subjects, and just two of these, British Sign Language Interpreting and Social Work, carry professional status. Most of the student body within the school therefore, are working towards degrees that carry no direct vocational professional exits. Subsequent evidence from the First Destination Survey (FDS) has highlighted a significant need to develop strategies to support students in preparing for the world of work, and for ‘graduate jobs’. Consequently there is both external and internal pressure to address both retention and employability agendas.
Over a number of years, the School has developed an ongoing relationship with organisations across the region, mostly within the public, voluntary and community sectors, where students have been able to access a wide variety of work-related opportunities whilst studying.
STUDENT LINK
MODULE
UNIVERSITY
WIDEVOLUNTEERING
VOLUNTEERING ______HLSS ______PATHWAY IN
MODULESOCIOLOGY
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
AND LEARNING
MODULE
Student Link
The Student Link scheme was the first of these initiatives to be established. It enables students to combine academic learning with a project undertaken on behalf of a voluntary or public sector organisation. This gives them the opportunity to learn the practical skills of project management, delivering a sustainable self-contained project to an organisation that will directly benefit, whilst at the same time developing a critical awareness of the social issues being encountered. (Cameron & Green, 1995).
To date this opportunity has proved popular across the Social Sciences, developing professional skills as well as academic knowledge. Indeed, many who have taken up this challenge have gone on to successful careers in these sectors.
Volunteering pathway through Sociology
To prepare students more effectively for the Student Link challenge in the final year, accredited modules in volunteering have been developed in Sociology at first and second levels. These require a commitment to volunteer their services with an agency, develop the skills appropriate to the tasks taken up, and reflect upon the social issues thus encountered within the sociological context.
Career Development and Learning module
This is an opportunity for students to familiarise themselves with the graduate employment market, examining the needs of employers whilst identifying their own skills and career goals. This enables strategies to be developed that support students for the transition from higher education.
University wide volunteering module
HEACF (Higher Education Active Community Fund), through third stream funding from HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council England) enabled these links with the voluntary sector to be developed and strengthened further, with a range of volunteering opportunities available for all students across the university. (Hall et al, 2004) As a result, a further second level module has been accredited, through which students gain knowledge and understanding of a social issue through engagement with the voluntary sector.
Students in the School are therefore able to access all of these opportunities as part of their undergraduate studies, gaining credits towards their degree.
Research
By 2002 most of these initiatives had been in place for a number of years, and some analysis of their effectiveness was needed. During the academic year of 2002-03 a research project was carried out, to test out to what extent these opportunities were being taken up by students, and to explore the perceptions of staff, students and recent graduates, of the employment relevance of these. What are the assumptions that inform curriculum planning across the School? To what extent were subjects encouraging and supporting the take-up of such opportunities? Did such provision help students get jobs? What are the experiences of those students and graduates who have taken them up?
Interviews were conducted with staff, current students and graduates. In addition, an employers’ consultancy group was formed which carried out an employability skills survey which informed the research process.
Findings
Different perceptions about skills for employability
Different language used by academics and employers
Take of work related learning (WRL) by students across the School very small
Those who did WRL found difficulty in understanding relevance to world of work
Students wanted to see more opportunities
They wanted to see more emphasis placed on skill development, whilst preferring to use opportunities which were related to their Career and skills development should begin at level 1 subject(s)
(Keating et al, 2003)
During 2003-04 we moved on to attempt to embed some of these findings into the work that we are doing, albeit on a small scale. We concentrated on the Social Sciences, where the commitment of staff and students is greatest for this kind of learning opportunity. At the same time the Social Care degree, now in its third year, was recruiting surprisingly well, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that the academic format for the degree needed to further support both the aspirations of the students and the needs of the market place.
Social Care - National and Regional picture
The social care sector, estimated as 1.82 million workers, experiences problems of recruitment and retention, qualification and skills gaps, and currently problems of an ageing workforce. Social care employers are operating in a highly competitive environment. Evidence suggests the sector suffers from two problems:
- poor image and lack of status compounded by lack of career paths
- lack of identity, a lack of basic knowledge in the working population about what social care workers do.
Summary of the first Annual Report of the Topss England
Workforce Intelligence Unit, 2003
A variety of strategies are being considered and employed to bring young people into the sector, including Care Ambassadors whose role it is to reach out to young people in school, F.E. and H.E. and inform them of the opportunities available. This project forms part of this wider agenda and goes one step further by also offering undergraduates experience and vocational qualifications.
In the context of the West Midlands Region the picture is replicated and clearer evidence available of recruitment and retention problems and skills gaps. A recent survey highlighted recruitment of managers and senior cares workers as being very difficult, as the following suggests:
2002-03 440 staff leaving-229 staff joining
2002-0365.6% senior care workers) suitably
2002-0468.5% managers) qualified
Topss England in the West Midlands Training Needs Analysis 2003-04
On 21 October 2004 Topss England launched its strategy for the leadership and management of the social care workforce, emphasising the need to develop leadership potential as part of workforce planning:
“practitioners and service users moving into management positions are often ill prepared and have little access to opportunities to understand the management role and develop their skills. Therefore more attention needs to be paid to induction into management.”Leadership and Management :a strategy for the social care workforce. Topss England 2004
It has emerged during our discussions with a number of employers that they see these undergraduate traineeships as a way of developing future managers. While managers have traditionally risen through the ranks, employers involved with us recognise that this new initiative may be a way to overcome the difficulties that they experience in recruiting and retaining younger staff. They see the benefits of employing a graduate in a rapidly changing and expanding market that requires graduate skills of analysis, research, flexibility and ongoing learning.
In summary our work has addressed the following issues:
Skills and staff shortages in social care
Ageing staff profile in social care
Changing the perception of graduate employment in social care
Making the most of undergraduates’ need to be in employment
Providing an optional vocational route
Addressing issues coming out of the research
Involving employers
We set ourselves the task of expanding the employer’s forum, using contacts established through the social work programme as well as the volunteering and research modules. The employer’s consultancy group set up for the original research included representatives from the Local Authority and the training manager of a large Housing Association. The general feeling was that we had undergraduates that needed work experience and they had ‘graduate’ vacancies (as illustrated above) that were difficult to fill. Out of this gap on both sides came the germ of an idea that became known as “undergraduate traineeships in social care”.
Invitations to an employer’s workshop, sent to all our contacts, proved very successful and a selection of employers including local authorities, private social care agencies, recruitment agencies and voluntary sector agencies either attended or expressed an interest. At this workshop we proposed the following model for an undergraduate traineeship:
“The form that such Sponsorship/Traineeship might take will be decided by each individual agency, but the following are some suggestions:
Offer of employment to undergraduates on a part time basis and/or in the vacations, with structured progression in diversity and complexity of work.
Contract to run throughout the degree programme, or in years 2/3.
The opportunity to collect evidence and be assessed at NVQ level 3 / 4.
The School offers to publicise these opportunities to our undergraduates. Students would then make an application directly to your agency following your usual personnel procedures”.
Presentation to employers workshop 24th Feb 2004 University of Wolverhampton
Outcomes
Project 1 – We gained funding from a workforce development confederation for a pilot within a regional boundary targeted at services working with learning disability and mental health. These two service user groups having been identified as having particularly severe difficulties in recruitment.
Project 2 – The second outcome was a successful bid for funding through the Centre for Learning and Teaching at the University, to develop models of traineeship with a variety of social care employers across the region and across service user groups. To do this interested employers were targeted to pilot models that could be disseminated further through the Employers Forum.
Project 1 – process
To identify interested agencies, we targeted larger Housing Associations. Experience has shown that within these organisations there was likely to be the infrastructure both to effectively manage a trainee, and to offer employment opportunities on completion. We identified three interested and committed agencies and together we planned the recruitment process and agreed guidelines to a three way learning contract between the University, Student and Agency.
The opportunity was marketed to students across the social science disciplines, through promotional information and workshops. The subjects included Social Care, Social Policy, Deaf Studies and Sociology. The first three of these subjects can only be taken in combination so the total subject areas were much wider. Seven students expressed a firm interest in the project. It had been agreed that students should be allowed to visit a number of the identified projects in order that they understood the demands of the service user group and setting. Introductory visits to a number of projects were arranged, with subsequent applications then being made.
An application and interview workshop was made available to all interested students, and ongoing support is available through the Career Development Service.
Training providers were identified for induction, foundation and NVQ level 3. In order that students were not over burdened a timetable was agreed whereby students would commence the NVQ Level 3 at the end of their second year giving them the summer vacation to complete a significant amount of their portfolio, and workshops are timetabled for this.
During the final year, students on these courses have the opportunity to do a Student Link module and/or a piece of independent study. It is expected that students will take these opportunities to develop and report on work with the agencies, so that a proportion of their final academic year can be linked to the service user group and the setting. This directly links academic learning with professional development.
All of the agencies targeted had experience of taking social work students on placement, and knew of the three day work based supervisors course provided by the social work programme. It was felt that offering such a course to the supervisor of a trainee would be beneficial both for the trainee and for the agency because such skills and knowledge supported the wider social care agenda of encouraging work-based learning.
The three day course covers the following elements:
- Adult learning theory
- Assessment
- Supervision
Workshops are planned for students and work based supervisors organised by the University at regular intervals during the duration of the project.
Issues
Employers – when embarking on this project there had been an expectation that the University could just be the broker between the student and the agency and once having brought the two together the University would have little further part to play. In reality considerable resource has gone into developing employers, refining and standardising the process and the model. Supporting this process will be ongoing. For example employers had made the suggestion that students visit the projects so that they are aware of all the issues prior to application, the employers also wanted the University to arrange these visits.
Students – We had expected students would fall over themselves to be involved in this project. That the take up by students has been less than expected could be due to a number of factors not least the limitations imposed upon this pilot. The project was limited to Shropshire, a large rural county. Few students on the targeted programmes live in Shropshire, and so use of a car is essential. Already significant numbers of interested students were unable to participate. The service user groups could also have been a deciding factor, if students had no experience of such disability the prospect could well have been daunting.
Because of the time frame we were unable to personally talk to student groups before the summer holiday. Ideally this possibility needs to be considered from the moment the student joins the University so that by the end of year 1, students can make informed decisions. To do this means engaging and informing staff across the disciplines, and embedding the traineeship within the culture of the School.
The target number for this contracted pilot is 10 students. When it is clear how many of the seven will proceed and be successful in their applications then it is planned that the opportunity be made more widely available within this School (Humanities Languages and Social Sciences) and within the School of Legal Studies, where informal interest has been expressed. This will provide an interesting contrast, particularly comparing the outcomes of the social science students to those students whose first degree might not immediately seem relevant in this employment sector.
Project 2 - process
There is less to report on this project as to date most time and effort have been spent on the pilot, but in turn the experience of the pilot has informed the way we have approached this project. We have learned that engaging committed employers takes considerable time and energy, and that institutional processes and decisions, particularly those involving money, move slowly. Also, that employers are quite rightly cautious, and that although expectations are that the student will have the opportunity to complete an NVQ, employers are not willing to commit to this without the student completing a probationary period.
Employers who have expressed interest in undergraduate traineeships came from a variety of settings. It was necessary therefore to try to develop a variety of models that would meet the needs of different organisations. To date we have two Local Authorities who are interested and a social care Recruitment Agency.