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What can schools do?

Planning career education across the whole school

A comprehensive school career education program provides a range of experiences and learning opportunities that supports all students to develop the skills, knowledge and attributes they need to successfully plan and navigate multiple and complex career transitions with increasing confidence.

A program that provides students with multiple meaningful opportunities to develop across all of the career education skills and attributes throughout all years of their schooling and in a range of settings will have the most success. These can and should be taught in combination with each other rather than as separate concepts. They are most effectively taught when they are embedded in high quality learning and teaching activities grounded in the Victorian Curriculum F-10. Read more about these skills and attributes at What do students need to learn? page

Schools may wish to use the question prompts on this page to inform their planning for whole school career education. There is no expectation that schools will explore all of these areas, nor do they need to be explored in any particular order.

 

Evaluating your school’s current career education practice and planning your program

  • What is our current career education practice across the whole school?
  • What are the positive features we want to continue?
  • What features do we want to improve?
  • What is career education best practice in other schools, and where can we find a comprehensive list of all the things that should be included in a good whole school career education program? (do we point them to this? – if we don’t we should delete the question)
  • How do we plan our change from current to best practice if we identify that change needs to occur?
  • What tools or resources are available to help us map or evaluate our current practice?

Planning for career education in your teaching and learning practice

  • What are all the components of career education that need to be considered?
  • How do we balance and embed the various components of career education in curriculum areas, dedicated career-related classes and other activities or events such as excursions, expos and subject selection processes?
  • How do we determine when, where and how the different skills and attributes are addressed?
  • What support will classroom teachers need for planning and delivering good quality career education within their teaching and learning programs?
  • What changes might we need to make to facilitate more collaborative work between teachers and career practitioners to plan and deliver career education across the whole school?
  • How will we address challenges that could arise from having no career practitioner in the school, or a career practitioner with no previous exposure to teaching?

Prioritising career education through strategic resource management

Staffing

  • How do we maximise the capability of staff member/s with career development qualifications and expertise?
  • How do we deliver good quality career education if no-one on staff is a trained careers practitioner?

Timetable

  • How do we balance dedicated career education classes with career education embedded in the curriculum?
  • What sorts of issues do we need to consider when making decisions as to how much time to dedicate to career-related learning activities?
  • Who delivers the content and when?

Financial

  • In what innovative ways can we maximise current resource allocation?
  • What funding does our school receive for career education?
  • What are the guidelines for allocating careers education funding?
  • Are there examples of schools who are using their career education funding innovatively?

Building a career education team

  • Whose role is it to map, plan and monitor a whole school career education program?
  • Who decides how the  career development program is implemented across the school?
  • Who will lead this process, and what are the specific roles of all the other people who are going to be involved?
  • How do we best engage staff members for whom this will be challenging?

Evaluating and managing the impact of career education

  • How does career education contribute to the school’s learning goals?
  • How will we know if career education teaching and learning in the school is effective?

Connecting career education to school improvement

  • How can career education contribute to the achievement of the school’s priorities?
  • How can career education contribute to school improvement planning, such as the FISO improvement initiatives in government schools? For example:
    • Building practice excellence
    • Curriculum planning and assessment
    • Building leadership teams
    • Empowering students and building school pride
    • Setting expectations and promoting inclusion
    • Building communities.

Connecting learning to the community and work

  • What do the terms “connecting learning to work” and “connecting learning to industry” mean in our local context?
  • How do we best make the connections?
  • How can we streamline procedures to make experiences with industry easier to organise?
  • What are the local networks we can tap into to help us identify or design suitable industry exposure experiences and engage more effectively with industry locally and elsewhere?
  • How do we support the career practitioner sharing their knowledge with teaching colleagues?

Empowering students and guiding expectations through career education

  • How can career education best be incorporated into the VCE  and VCAL?
  • How can we enhance the career-related learning of our VET students, including those for whom the course is being delivered by an external provider?
  • How do we ensure that our career education informs students about all the different pathways available to them besides tertiary entrance, regardless of their academic goals?

Examples of best practice

Content to come