My goal for Jobs & Skills is to be as ambitious for children as they are for themselves. That means taking a cradle-to-career approach to skills that includes a stronger focus on vocational options and better careers education.
Over the last year, the office delivered a huge amount to help children see the connection between the skills they are learning and the careers that they want to have in the future. You can read more about what we’ve done here, or read more about the exciting work we’ve done with child-focused resources such as ‘Where can I go with maths?’ and the Big Ask Maths Week Challenge.
Over this current year, I am very excited about the new ways we will deliver on children’s ambitions for the future, as laid out in my Business Plan for 2023-24.
My priorities for this year are:
- Advisory Boards: I look forward to working closely with my Care Experienced Advisory Board and Children’s Advisory Board on the ambitions of children for the future, and how to ensure they have the skills and support achieve them.
- Causes of poor employment outcomes: I want to explore those factors that lead to children to go on to have poor employment outcome as adults, and what we can do about them while they’re still children. A key focus of this work will be children in Alternative Provision and care experienced young people.
- Exploring different career pathways: I will talk directly to children about their experience of work experience, to encourage vocational routes into careers and to see the routes into green careers, and what is the experience of children working in ‘Saturday jobs’ while in education.
- STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths): I will continue my work to encourage children to value numeracy skills and to see how this can lead to STEM careers in the future. A key part of this work will be exploring the Prime Minister’s pledge for children to continue maths education to 18 years old.
I look forward to another exciting year of being ambitious for children.
