Work Experience in Secondary Schools

John Eggleston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138321434
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429839955
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Work experience schemes were becoming an ever more central part of the curriculum in secondary schools in the early 1980s; indeed, 'work' had become a new subject in many. Fundamental changes in the nature of work and in its distribution and availability for school leavers made it particularly important that young people had experience of the kinds of work that may have awaited them in the outside world. A wide range of schemes were developed to meet this need, including work study, simulation, link courses and pairing. Yet schools and their teachers found it difficult to obtain information about these schemes and their results. This book, originally published in 1982, solved the problem by bringing together accounts from Britain, Australia, Ireland and the USSR, with an extended editorial introduction which examines both the reasons for providing work experience in schools and the underlying social economic issues.

Chapter 1
Work experience and schooling

John Eggleston

Most subjects have been added to the school curriculum only when informal education by family, church or community becomes unable to ensure the learning needed for adult roles. The history of the ‘3 Rs’, school science, physical education, environmental studies and sex education show that all these subjects have ‘arrived’ in this way. Vocational education and industrial training became part of the curriculum in areas where pre-occupational training was unavailable informally. Work itself, the newest subject in the curriculum, has a similar history — though recent demographic and economic events across the world have speeded the historical process.

In the recent past the experience of work was indivisible from the experience of family, community and society. It is only during the past century and a half that work, for most citizens, has been taken apart from the day-to-day life of family and community and transferred to separate institutions — factories, shops, offices, workshops and warehouses. Such institutions are increasingly ‘closed’: for reasons of complex technology, security, privacy, hygiene or hazard they are only accessible to those who work therein and within their prescribed working hours.

Yet the twentieth century has seen a further development in the nature of the experience of work. Not only is it a separable part of human experience, but it is also one that is not being made available to all human beings. When twentieth century societies first experienced mass unemployment it was believed that this was but a temporary phenomenon caused by short-term ‘malfunctionings’ of the economic mechanism such as depression or recession. Now it is realised that unless effective alternative strategies are identified and adopted, such ‘malfunctioning’ may become a permanent feature: unemployment become structural.

Young people and work

In this new situation major problems arise for young people. By far the majority are beyond the reach of any school ‘remedy’ and it is misleading and dangerous to imply otherwise. But some have considerable relevance for the work of schools. One is that in many countries unemployment, especially for the young, co-exists with unfilled vacancies in many of the areas of work which require skills, understandings and attributes not generally possessed by school leavers. Thus there are shortages of young people for vacancies in the ‘servicing trades’ responsible for the maintenance of motor cars, television sets and other domestic appliances, building maintenance and even gardening and window cleaning. There are also recurring shortages of candidates for higher level work in computing, electronics and a range of scientific and creative occupations. Of course, not all of these shortages are ‘real’, some are ‘technical’, but there is little doubt that many do exist.

A second problem is that young people who leave school and do not experience work seem to find it increasingly difficult to obtain it. Potential employers believe that some kind of atrophy develops; just as the muscles in a broken leg lose their power, so a total lack of work experience is believed to diminish the capacity to satisfy the very requirements of work such as industry, responsibility and punctuality.

A third, and perhaps the most fundamental, problem is closely associated with the second; it is that work experience provides the basic contexts for ‘normal’ life. These include the use of time, the achievement of social ‘standing’ with its rights and duties and many of the attitudes and values that underpin participation in all the other human contexts offered by society. We may express the situation in two ways. One is that vocational identity is the key to social identity. The other is that work is the central instrument of social control in modern societies. Without the experience of work, how can the individual develop an adequate social identity and how can the society exercise the social control over its members necessary to achieve stability and continuity?

The experience of work

We have now come to the crucial nature of work experience. Like most human experiences, it has been taken for granted while its existence seemed assured. We have come to see its importance more clearly when its availability is at risk. It is necessary to notice, however, that work experience involves a dual context. One is the context of the specific job being done — with its skills, expectations, norms and values. The other is the context of the labour market with its organisations of labour and management, its norms of production, payment and security. Both aspects will be examined in the consideration of work experience provided by the schools.

Almost all young people see work as the key to the achievement of full masculinity or femininity. Willis’s study of working-class boys in an English comprehensive school in an inner-city area depicts the social pressures on the boys to take their place on the shop floor and so earn the acceptance of the community to which they belong (1978). These boys need to prove themselves amongst their work-mates as capable of facing and surviving the realities of the factory floor with its ‘hard and brutalising’ conditions.

Willis writes:

The lads are not choosing careers or particular jobs, they are committing themselves to a future of generalised labour. Most work — or the ‘grafting’ they accept they will face — is equilibrated by the overwhelming need for instant money, the assumption that all work is unpleasant and that what really matters is the potential particular work situations hold for self and particularly masculine expression, diversions and ‘laffs’ as learnt creatively in the counter-school culture. These things are quite separate from the intrinsic nature of any task. This view does not contradict, for the moment, the over-whelming feeling that work is something to look forward to … the lure of the prospect of money and cultural membership amongst ‘real men’ beckons very seductively as refracted through their own culture.

But as the ‘lads” attitudes clearly show, of even greater importance than specific occupational role is the set of understandings and the self-image that the individual brings to his roles. This identity with which the individual imbues his roles is crucial to the way he plays them, modifies them and develops them, and to his own personal future within them. A label, such as lathe operator, is but an incomplete guide to human behaviour in work — the identity with which the incumbent fills the role is the key component. How does he perceive himself as a lathe operator? He has chosen the work or is it a forced decision? If the former, what are his alternatives? Are they realistic or only based on fantasy? How does he adjust to the role in the absence of alternatives? What are the implications for his other social behaviour? Fundamentally, is the vocational identity, with all its consequences, compatible with his ego and his self-image? If it is not, how may greater compatibility develop within the role?

The development of vocational identities is complex in modern society. In early, labour-intensive industrialisation, when large numbers of workers were required to perform routine and repetitive tasks, individual identity seldom came to exercise a dominant influence on production. Their self-image was of relatively little consequence to most employers. Young people were fitted into their roles in conditions which Durkheim described as ‘mechanical solidarity’; the role transcendent, the individual subordinate.

The concept of identity alerts us to an alternative process. It is one in which young people may prefer to ‘contract in’ to both the specific job and the labour market generally rather than to accept them passively. This new approach is highly relevant to some aspects of contemporary social conditions. It is compatible with the expressed views of young people who wish to ‘count for something’ in society rather than to be ‘on the receiving end’ of ‘the system’. But it is also appropriate for the needs of some sectors of modern industry which calls for human beings not to act as ‘machines’, but to use their capacity to adapt, adjust and initiate. For such occupational roles an active vocational identity rather than a passive vocational role is highly preferable.

Unless an acceptable vocational identity can be achieved, then life for the individual is likely to be at best incomplete or compartmentalised; at worst, frustrating, enervating and incompatible. Problems are likely to arise not only for the individual, but also for society — which is likely to experience widespread alienation or disruptive behaviour if vocational identities are generally felt to be unsatisfactory. And if work is not available the problems are likely to occur in an even more serious form.

The achievement of work identity

We have already noted that, until recently, most vocational identities were acquired by predominantly informal means. The learning of occupational roles literally began in the cradle as the child saw his parents at work in homes, farms and workshops. The phrase ‘like father like son’ epitomised not only the informality of learning but also the predictability of the vocational role that awaited most young people. The circumstances of the parents determined the future role of the young and the learning appropriate to it. Such identities were strongly reinforced by the norms of the community which defined, often with great precision, such things as man’s work and woman’s work; noble work and base work. Definitions of this kind were sometimes strongly reinforced by initiation ceremonies as a prelude to entry to adult vocational roles and still feature in some apprenticeship schemes.

Informal mechanisms for achieving vocational identities are, however, not always appropriate in modern dynamic societies, where occupational structures are changing rapidly and in which it may be possible for young people to have sufficient knowledge of the available roles in sufficient time to learn them and identify with them in anticipation. A characteristic problem of all advanced industrial societies is the rapid growth of new occupational groups such as electronics engineers, motor car repairers and salesmen, advertising and sales personnel, which has meant that many young people enter work to undertake roles for which they have been able to achieve little or no preliminary identification. New generations of vocational identity may commence with each new initiative in technology and commerce.

School and vocational identity

Schools have usually played only a small part in helping young people to achieve vocational identity. Though in the past half-century they have come to exercise a major role in helping to identify talent through the examination and accreditation systems, there has been little attempt to assist the young in achieving the identities to accompany the examination qualifications. There has been even less success in helping those without examination qualifications to achieve such identities. This has led to many problems. Not only have many young people lacked an adequate identity for work, but also, for many, for the other aspects of life that are linked to work. There has, for example, been remarkably little preparation for such activities as leadership in the workers’ unions — roles that undeniably play a central part in modern societies. As a result, there are major problems in identifying leaders for these bodies at both local and regional level with important consequences for the day-to-day running of our occupational and economic systems. Political and community identities also have seldom received the attention they deserve; potential leaders here too are often in short supply.

An important element in vocational identity has commonly been the social background of the young. Many writers have drawn attention to the small part played by schools in orienting and preparing young people for work. Becker (1963) has suggested that school makes little impact other than to offer legitimation of the differences brought about by home and community. As Willis (1978) says: ‘The difficult thing to explain about how middle class kids get middle class jobs is why others let them. The difficult thing to explain about how working class kids get working class jobs is why they let themselves.’

Bourdieu (1972) sees this to be a consequence of dominance of social and cultural reproduction processes that schools reinforce but do not change. Many writers, such as Lazerson (1971) and Bowles and Gintis (1976), have come to see the growing potential importance of school as a transition institution into the labour force; an institution which ‘accredits’ young people with the various needs of the labour market (including unemployment) and achieves the necessary correspondence between supply and demand. Grubb and Lazerson (1981) demonstrate ways in which even new strategies of career education have, in practice, been used to stratify the school system, and to separate lower-class and ethnic minority youth from their white and middle-class peers.

Providing work experience in the schools

Yet despite the difficulties, the present-day economic and social systems compel schools to take an active role in the achievement of work identity and the provision of experience in which it may occur. Watts (1981) writes:

The world of work is central to our society, and to the generation and distribution of wealth within it. For schools to neglect the world of work behind rhetoric like ‘concern for the whole person’ — as though the role of worker was not an important part of the whole person — is abjectly to neglect a critical part of their educational responsibilities…. The need for schools to address the world of work, but to do so in a critical and dynamic way, is all the more important because of the crisis that is taking place in relation to the place of work in our society.

The new planned work experience schemes in schools take many forms. Essentially, they are interventionist strategies designed to provide a substitute experience of work when the ‘normal’ social forces fail to deliver ‘the real thing’. Work experience is, of course, a long way from the real thing: it can offer work tasks in work environments, but it cannot offer normal pay and tenure — essential adjuncts to identity as a worker.

There have always been some educators who have believed that work experience is too important to leave to chance — or just to be talked about in the schools. J.S. Mill, J. Dewey and Kurt Harm advocated this view strongly and in different ways it is embodied in the curricula of the German Technical High Schools and the Soviet Young Pioneers. But in present conditions, when work experience cannot be relied upon ‘just to happen’ for the majority of young people, its provision becomes an urgent social need. In some countries it has become a major focus of national politics. Australia provides a typical example. In November 1979 the Commonwealth and States announced a series of initiatives known as the School-to-Work Transition Programme. $259 million are being spent over the next five years on a range of technical courses, student counselling and special programmes for young people. The reason for the government’s action was obvious. Already one young Australian in five was out of work, and another 50,000 were due to enter the labour market with little or no hope of a job.

In Australia — as in the United States, Denmark, Britain and almost every other developed country, inevitably the issues are polarised in political debate. On the one hand, there is enthusiasm for ‘educational solutions’ — to offer the opportunity for the young to acquire more fully the skill, knowledge, attitudes and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Work experience and schooling
• 2 Two approaches to work experience at Netherhall and Comberton Schools, Cambridge
• 3 A first experience of work experience at Long Road Sixth Form College, Camberley
• 4 Transition year programmes in the Republic of Ireland – a case study of Newpark School, Dublin
• 5 Bush telegraph — work experience in educational theatre
• 6 Design and manufacture projects at Orangefield School, Belfast
• 7 A chemical company at Ynysawdre Comprehensive School
• 8 Case studies in work experience at Marion High School, South Australia
• 9 Work experience in Soviet and East European Schools
• Index