In recent years, construction has put on its best clothes and gone back to school with its head held high. The industry offers something for everyone. If you’re looking for a hands-on, outdoor job it’s impossible to take home, construction’s for you. If you want professional status, to make a difference and a good salary, construction’s for you. If you’re creative, innovative, a free-thinker or a problem solver, construction’s for you.
Thanks to the efforts of hundreds of construction companies and their staff, that message is increasingly being heard in schools across the UK. Often, one-off visits or longer-term partnering arrangements form part of a Corporate Social Responsibility agenda, monitored and audited as part of a business’s “social footprint”. With the Social Value Act adding impetus to an already growing trend, schools and construction are in closer contact than ever before.
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Which is all great… but. Are we prioritising the schools next to major sites, or the contractor’s HQ, and leaving others untouched? How do we track which schools have had exposure to construction, and which have been ignored? And when a school is the beneficiary of a targeted effort, is it better to focus it shallow and wide, or narrow and deep? Should we address the 11-14-year-olds en masse, or the 15-16-year-olds who are undecided about their A-level options?
The answer, of course, is that different approaches will work best in different circumstances, and that the schools themselves are often in the best place to judge what will benefit their students. But when the industry’s approach to schools engagement is as much CSR-led as schools-led, there’s a danger that message and audience are mismatched and resources miss their target. To wake young people up to the opportunities that construction offers, there surely needs to be more coordination, more tailoring and more scale.
Looking at how schools engagement works in other sectors, the phenomenon of STEMNet stands out. It is funded by the Department for Education and BIS to put 28,000 STEM ambassadors into 90% of UK secondary schools. Its reach and impact – independently audited and measured – is equally impressive.
A Construction 2025 group is due to publish its recommendations on how the industry can get “more bang for its buck” in schools engagement. The answers, surely, have to involve asking employers to back just a few of the many worthwhile programmes out there, to communicate what they’re doing to a coordinator tasked with tracking what’s happening, and commissioning a study to evaluate what generates most impact. The industry’s future workforce depends on it.
Elaine Knutt, editor
