Event information
The University of Canberra, Canberra ACT
Career development for students in low SES or regional/remote high schools
The first workshop in the NCSEHE Building Legacy and Capacity Workshop series put a spotlight on career advice to students in low socioeconomic status (SES) or regional/remote high schools. Young people face a complex and uncertain landscape in trying to identify potential career paths. For equity practitioners, researchers and policymakers, there are a series of questions about the nature of the problem and the best ways to support young people during this critical time.
How do we ensure that young people have all the information and tools available to them to make informed and confident decisions about their post-school pathways? What additional barriers exist for young people in schools and communities that do not have ready access to relevant and high-quality information, experiences and resources about possible career paths, including those that lead into the most prestigious professions? To what extent do school-university partnerships help overcome these barriers? Are government policy and programs ideally designed to support informed decision making by young people in disadvantaged communities? Do policymakers and practitioners in schools and universities have comprehensive evidence of effective strategies and approaches to design successful interventions? What will the changing nature of work and the skills required for a new work order mean for the design and delivery of career advice?
In trying to resolve these questions and work towards evidence-informed advice to policymakers and practitioners, this workshop brought together a group of subject matter experts who approached the topic from different perspectives. These included researchers who have explored students’ decision making patterns, the kinds of career advice that young people find useful and the ways in which they navigate increasingly complex career choices and entry pathways.
At the same time, we learned from equity practitioners, and their school-based collaborators, who have designed and implemented school-university partnerships that aim to support young people in making informed and confident decisions about post-school options. The featured case studies have adopted different initiative designs, including place-based, embedded, blended (face-to-face and online) and near-peer mentoring approaches, which enable different scale and depth.
The insights generated during the workshop have informed a good practice guide to distribute across the sector as well as recommendations for policymakers and future research.
Summary of Outcomes and Good Practice Principles
About the Building Legacy and Capacity Workshop series
The Building Legacy and Capacity Workshop Series is a strategic initiative by the NCSEHE to explore in depth four topics chosen from the ‘Ten Conversations’ conducted during the NCSEHE Forum in November 2016. This new strategy aims to further extend the NCSEHE’s capacity in synthesising, codifying and disseminating learnings from equity research and practice and use them to inform future initiatives, studies and policy.
The objectives of the workshops are to:
- define a collective knowledge base informed by research and practice
- engage in strategic and action planning to guide institutional practice and future research
- develop evidence-informed policy advice.
Each workshop consists of a small group of about 10 participants, including researchers, practitioners, policymakers and community partners, who contribute their insights as subject matter experts. Taking recent research findings and case studies of good practice as the starting point, the workshops are structured around high-level questions which frame the group discussion. The outcomes of the discussion will be shared widely across the sector, including via a webinar, written materials and professional illustrations. All workshop resources will be made available on the NCSEHE website.
