Young people and work: 'Partnerships have a role to play in expanding horizons'

Alan Milburn’s interim report on young people and work makes for stark reading. As of March 2026, one million young people are classified as not being in employment, education, or training (NEET). Since the report was published most of the focus has – rightly – been on the millions of futures that are being curtailed in terms of aspiration and basic life expectancy, and what structural reforms are necessary to create jobs and incentivise working life.   

On the face of it, this is not a story about the independent sector. After all, our pupils are more likely to become graduates, not NEETs. As the Sutton Trust has recently shown, access to higher education tends to greater life satisfaction by any metric. Here, therefore, independent school partnerships do have a role to play, in ensuring that the horizon of aspiration is more expansive in our communities.  

Magdalen College School hosts several careers conferences, most recently our major biennial careers fair. At our most recent Careers in Engineering conference, over half the attendees came from MCS’s partnership schools, a pattern repeated at our Careers in Medicine conference.  

MCS also provides support to students at partner schools, arranging hundreds of practice interviews for applicants in mathematics and medicine, as well as hosting workshops and talks designed to strengthen applications across a wide range of subjects, including computer science, psychology, and international relations. 

Independent schools are also employers. In creating jobs, we boost our local economies. At MCS, we were in the vanguard of paying the Oxford Living Wage, and we are one of many schools who employ young apprentices, for example in IT and grounds work. We also support colleagues in HR to work while achieving professional qualifications.  

Some parents have pointed out that an independent school education gets in the way of developing a CV of paid work, with Saturday school and sport offered by so many of us.   

Activities like CSO (Community Service Organisation) provide an environment in which pupils can develop similar skills to those experienced by the traditional Saturday job: communications, team working and problem-solving skills. Events such as OxCOP enable our pupils to do this alongside those from partner schools – building confidence to work with people who are unfamiliar. 

There is also the reality that the labour market has moved on since the reforms to weekend opening hours of the late twentieth century: the idea of workers doing Monday-Friday then a young person filling in on a Saturday or Sunday has faded from reality and even from memory.   

Many pupils do in fact take jobs, though the reality is that finding employment has got more challenging in recent years. There is the trickle-down effect of massively overqualified older graduates who also want any kind of work, combined with changes to the minimum wage.  There is also what one MCS parent, who owns a number of pubs and restaurants, calls ‘perceptual red tape’: the lurking fear that employing under-18s and the need to supervise them is more onerous than it actually is.   

I was a teenage Avon Lady. It was the late 1980s, and some of my customers were a bit taken aback at first because they thought I should be old. It was a great gig for a schoolgirl, though: the hours were flexible, it was entrepreneurial, and best of all it involved free and massively discounted beauty products. At MCS, the more sophisticated and environmentally conscious Sixth Form equivalent now is probably charity shop upcycling via Vinted. Avon was one of many jobs I had before I left school: others included the shop floor and café at BHS, market gardening, and bar work (where I learnt how to make cocktails, another life skill). Entrepreneurial young people know that paid work can involve a lot more than a paper round, which is just as well given the revolution in print media we have also witnessed.   

Another evolving reality is that more university students now work alongside their studies, a change highlighted by HEPI last year. The reality is that there are many ways for young people to experience paid employment – provided there is a buoyant local job market to welcome their energy and determination.