Episode 1: Whose decision is it anyway?

More than half of school leavers choose a pathway to please someone else. That stat alone is worth a conversation.

In this episode, Marian and Liv dig into one of the most loaded moments in a student's school life — subject selection — and ask the question that might make us a bit uncomfortable: whose decision is the career decision, really?

They unpack what the research says about how schools are (often unintentionally) shaping student choices, why more information nights and expo brochures aren't as helpful as we think, and what it actually looks like when students arrive at that conversation already in the driver's seat.

If you're heading into subject selection season — or just starting to think about how your school designs that process — you'll leave practical takeaways to take back to your team. 

Plus: the F1 job that sounds amazing until Liv and Marian  actually thought about it, and it turns out there's a growing list of 'career heck no's'.

Research referenced in this episode:

Gleeson, J., Walsh, L., Gallo Cordoba, B., Mikola, M., Waite, C., & Cutler, B. (2022) — Young Women Choosing Careers: Who Decides?, Monash University https://www.monash.edu/education/cypep/research/young-women-choosing-careers-who-decides

Black, B. (2025) — Chances or Choices? The Influences on Subject Choices, University of Glasgowhttps://theses.gla.ac.uk/85338/1/2025BlackPhD.pdf

Behavioural Insights Team — Moments of Choice: How Young People Make Career Decisionshttps://www.bi.team/blogs/moments-of-choice-how-young-people-make-career-decisions/

OECD — The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation (PISA 2022 data) https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-state-of-global-teenage-career-preparation_d5f8e3f2-en/full-report/component-6.html

Anders, J., Henderson, M., Moulton, V., & Sullivan, A. (2017) — The Role of Schools in Explaining Individuals' Subject Choices at Age 14, UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CLS-WP-20179-The-role-of-schools-in-explaining-individuals27-subject-choices-at-age-14.pdf

Exploring Career Decision-Making Anxiety Among High School Students (2024), Multidisciplinary Science Journalhttps://malque.pub/ojs/index.php/msj/article/view/3157

Feel free to send us your thoughts, questions, and your own answer to the question we started with today: Whose decision is it anyway? via hi@thegreatcareersprogram.com. 

Get in touch

Find us on Instagram @thegreatcareersprogram and on Substack at thegreatcareersprogram.substack.com for episode recaps, research links, and the conversation between episodes. Got a question, a story, or something you want us to talk about? Email us at hi@thegreatcareersprogram.com.

Credits

The Great Careers Program is a collaboration between BECOME Education and Coherence Co-Lab, and is hosted and produced by Liv Pennie and Marian Wright, with production support from Bev Laing. Music by Chad Crouch.

Transcript

Speaker 0:02

Welcome to the Great Careers Program. This is a show for anyone who has ever sat in a meeting about student futures and career education and thought there has got to be a better way to do this. I'm Marian Wright. And I'm Liv Pennie. And between the both of us, we have spent a lot of time in and around schools. And the thing that we keep seeing over and over again is that the career education program keeps getting treated like an individual program that you can simply vault on. It's a box you can tick or a problem that you can hand just to one person to solve. And it's not. And this show is about what happens when schools take a whole school approach. So each episode will bring you one big question, we'll talk about the research behind it, and at least one thing that you can take back to your school this week.

I didn't know this was a thing: F1 Race Director

Speaker 0:57

Okay, at the end of the day, a great careers program really should lead to great careers, and it's those that get us and the students really excited. So in every podcast, we'll talk about a job that we didn't know was a thing. The first reason is to highlight just how many options there are out there, all the cool, weird, gross, niche things that we didn't know existed, and that as teachers, parents, and students, we don't need to know all the possibilities, but we should stay curious and get excited about them. We also want to model how a great career that someone suggests should be questioned and how we can get students to question whether a career is really great for then. Okay, so I didn't know this was a thing for this week. Comes from a teacher in South Australia when we're doing some professional learning a couple of weeks ago. The Melbourne Grand Prix was on and he stated, Wow, did you know that the person who presses the start button for the Formula One gets paid heaps and it's just one button? Uh and everyone's like, Wow, that would be amazing, amazing job. So, Marian, what do you think? Great career for you. Well, question, if I may. Why did everyone in the room think it was an amazing job? I think it was it sent a lot of money, glamorous on the face of it, and didn't sound like a lot of work. It's uh it was literally like the button. The traffic lights come on, not the traffic lights, I'm sure there's a funky name for the start lights, but it was uh the way it was positioned, whilst this is a lot of money for pushing a button. The first place my hair goes to is it more than just the button pushing, though? I think for the amount of money you'd get paid, is there a fair amount of pressure on that person to get that button pushing moment exactly right? What happens if the button fails? What happens if you press it too early? You press it. Before you've got all the clearance and yeah, the correct. I think there have been mass crashes on start lines, haven't there? Because also would you would you it have to be for someone who wants to travel around? I think it's the same person that starts them all over the world while they've got that job. Do you think there's a fair amount of stress in the job with the travel? Surely. Another question I had was how does one get into the button pressing line of work? Would one have to do Yeah, is it just like the starters and officials kind of progress from the grassroots, or would you also need the engineering side? It's not some celebrity zooming in and pushing a button and getting paid lots and lines for sure. When you talk about being a race engineer or in F1 world, often my perception of it is that it would be exactly that, that it would be so cool, so glabrous, so busy. You know, you'd be hanging out with celebrities at the paddock. But yeah, in reality, I imagine there might be technical aspects to their job beyond that that might require a lot more study, some more rigorous training than we've got. Certainly more knowledge of F1 than we've got. Most of my knowledge comes from actually, I did my first proper job in events, was in the UK. PG Tips is the big teabag person. Like technique here, and I dressed as a chimp at Silverstone for the Formula One for two days and handed out three boxes of tea. That's my F1. And watching Brad Pitt in F1. So that's my uh that's my knowledge. But I did find out that the F1 starter at the moment is the first female to have that job, the one that started in Melbourne. I think her name's Rebecca Taylor. Very cool. Her and the main engineer in the F1 movie, maybe uh doing the bit for uh female engineers and F1 roles. So, question for you would you do it? No, I don't think that's the world uh I'd like to hang out in. It's too noisy. So for me, it's probably a bit of a heck no, because I think I would die from the pressure of it all. I think I would be so anxious to make a mistake, I would feel like the whole start of the race is sort of riding on me. And personally, I'd just rather not have that as part of my responsibility. Question for you if you had a student come and speak to you in school this week who had heard the same story and was like, man, this is my aspiration, what would your response to them be? First one, I would say, where did you hear it from? Because well, after this teacher told me I tried to validate and fact-check before we talked about it, and there's certainly the salary quoted, I could not fact-check. Is it what you think? Where did you find out about it? Do you have any real knowledge? And is it Google or AI that's told you this? Why always would be why? What is it about it? Is it the travel? Is it you want to be in that world of cars and Formula One? Get to the root of it, and then ask is you know, how many jobs are there? All the big questions, how many questions can they generate about this to work out really is that the job, or did is someone just mentioned it to them? Question for you. I think the biggest insight there is that there's a heck no, so I think we might need a new section of the podcast called What's Your Hecno? I know of mine would be I live in Sydney, and when you go in the opera house or any of these horrible, like massive car parks that are underground, like 11 layers underground, Hecno would be the responsibility of being the civil engineer that designed that and go, Yep, this is safe. That was 100% my heckno, civil engineering. So much pressure. Yeah. And listen, my list of Hecnos is really long. Yeah. Um there are just so many things I think I would not be good at in a hospital. But students as well. Sometimes it's much easier if they've got no idea to go, okay, what's definitely not? Oh my gosh. So many things I'd be so bad at. Anything in a hospital, I feel I would be terrible at. I've been watching um Slow Horses at the moment, and great show would recommend. But yeah, like security services, special special agents. I'd be terrible at that. It just looks like a really hard and truthfully a terrible job. They don't look like they sleep well, eat well. What Slow Horses has done compared to Spooks, the show that was similarly popular about MI5, but about the ones in the main building that still had the cool jobs, not the ones that had been uh sent out to sleep out. There was a show called Spooks years ago, and that kind of triples the number of uh applications to MI5 because these guys are all young and sexy as Rupert Penry Jones, and he had a soft top sports car, and he was driving around London, and it was all really exciting. And so those two angles on the same role are really interesting. But yeah, I I think probably one of the most useful things I've ever figured out is all the things I'd be terrible at. Yeah, but I but I do like any time I've ever been in a hospital, I just look at healthcare workers and just think, you're all amazing, you're superheroes. Could never be that person in the corner dropping everything and apologizing for things that were sterile being on the floor and probably like crying over a patient because I just felt bad for them, you know. My 15-year-old the other day was on a sports pitch and someone broke their leg and it was like one of those bones sticking out, like on everyone else. And he's like it's kind of weird. He's never expressed any interest in anything health-related medicine, anything. He's just like, mm-hmm. But he said, really weirdly, everyone was grossed out and ran away. And I was like, fine with it. And I actually really like looking at like the the cross section of the flesh. I was like, oh, this is weird that we were something to dive into and go, what is that? And I said, Well, you know, what about pathology? And he was just like, Oh, I love that. See, that's that is something I'm fundamentally missing. So I applaud him. Yeah.

What always happens in Liv's PD sessions.

Speaker 8:50

So before we dive into the evidence for this week, why are we talking about this? Well, I think every adult that we talk to, when people say what do you do for a living, and we explain it, or every PD session we have with teachers or school leaders who are not necessarily in the career development space, almost every single time the reaction is the same. I wish I'd had something like this. 100%. I think I did the same thing having sat in one of your professional learning sessions. I remember thinking, why didn't I know about this when I was at school? Perhaps I would have made a different choice. Yeah, I mean, what what choice might you have made differently? Well, truthfully, my story in school was that I remember coming home from school one day and telling my parents that I wanted to do an arts degree. And my dad very kindly said, that's not a real degree, choose something else. And so I remember having all these aspirations and goals, but internally and quietly, without even noticing, just adjusting my plans and my expectations. It's so true. And I think a lot of that is that complexity and not knowing what's out there. And a lot of the time they almost reflect on it, like their decision making from what where they ended up was almost like this lazy river, you know, those rides where you just lie back and see where things take you. That their pathways planning was not intentional. They were passive in it. And there were some influences like your parent influence, things that just happened along the way that might have pushed you one way or the other way. They didn't really have any chance to push back or to explore broadly. When I think back on it now, I think I within myself probably didn't have the self-knowledge and the confidence with which to articulate and perhaps push back. And I think that this is where we come back to after working in schools a lot and seeing how young people across very, very different contexts are making decisions about the future. A lot of the time we're not seeing that the students are the ones who are driving the decisions about their own futures. And so that is what this episode is about. So now we're going to zoom into the data. And when we were choosing, hey, what do we start for our podcast? What's the insight

Zoom in: Why 55% of students choose careers to please someone else.

Speaker 11:00

that we should focus on first? Which ones should we zoom into? And we went back to of all the professional learning we've done with all different audiences of teachers, career practitioners, adults in general, parents. The one most photographed slide of any of our presentations comes back to this big stat, which is a piece of data from Monash Uni research, Dr. Joe Gleason led it, and it says that 55% of school leavers are choosing a pathway to please someone else. So more than half of our students getting ready to leave school are not choosing a career based on themselves and their own motivations. So can I ask a question about the data? What were some of the influencing factors? There's a mix, and as we said, as your example showed earlier, it is complex. And I think we can't just say it's very tempting to go, it's parents, you know, it's always parents because they're telling them what to do, and it's high-pressure parents. But there's lots of complexity in it, and it's different sets of influences for every person. So, yes, parental influence is right up there. Most of the time, parents say, I just want my child to be happy, but there's caveats underneath that. You know, what does happy look like? And it will be different for every person. For some people, it's I haven't really thought about it, I'm not coming here with an idea, I'm just going to take the path of least resistance. For some people, they might be really set on one path and have massive parental pressure or life needs that mean they can't do that path. Some people it will be really practical, you know, travel restrictions, constraints, or real life challenges. But at the end of the day, more than half of those people in the study are saying, this is not my idea. Now, the other thing that I've spent the last couple of weeks really working on with different stakeholders and tertiary pathways across VERT and unis is completion rates. Now, published completion rates are often more than around 40-50% non-completion of courses. So that decision they've made, they're

Why all the information might not be as helpful as we think it is.

Speaker 13:00

not sticking with it, it's not panning out. Um, and that 50% is not, I don't think, a huge coincidence when we see 50% didn't have the motivation to do that path in the first place. Another big stat that's that's often picked up is that more than a third of students are saying that school hasn't given them the confidence to make complex decisions about their future. So at school, most of the time we're teaching for a right answer, not how to handle complexity, ambiguity, how to critically evaluate different possibilities and pathways. And that's exactly what we need, those skills when it comes to steps about their future. So there's actually, how do I evaluate this in the first place? I don't know how to think about it. So that's the second one. And then we've got a third one, which is a little bit scary as well, which is more than a third saying they don't feel well informed about possible pathways. Now, for me, this is quite a tricky one because I do not believe that it's a lack of information. In fact, there's another study from the UK that talked about the amount of information, what do people need in terms of making these decisions? And young people overwhelmingly said, not more information. I'm daunted by information, there's too much. What I think we're seeing is a lack of engagement with that information. So we need the inspiration, the person piece before the information, because they've got no way to navigate it. I think when I think about this from a school point of view, I remember thinking, but I've given the information. We've consistently delivered career education programs, we've done information nights, we've engaged guest speakers who have also given a lot of information. And then when we get to those key decision-making points like subject selection, we see a lot of anxiety. We see a lot of those ideas articulated, like you were saying, about well, I don't have the confidence, I don't know what's out there, I'm not sure who I'm trying to please. And it can become a really overwhelming and emotionally quite an intense period for young people. And I'm speaking about that anecdotally. I would love to know, Liv, if you've ever seen in a school in your experience, where young people have come to the table fully informed, fully confident, and are making decisions that are really active and not from a place of just being in that lazy river. Yeah. It completely is possible. And it feels very different when you see it. And teachers and schools like it's transformed that decision-making process. And I think if I talk when you're talking about all the information coming at them, and we've done expos and we've done information sessions, we've had subject lectures on different subjects, I see the nayer that's missing as the career's education piece. It's almost like a force field, a bubble around the student, which is just for them for meaning-making, reflection, synthesizing all this information, and how does it impact me? How do I interact with it? Because a lot of the time it's information inwards, but no interpretation. No, how do I as a person and what I want from my life and my strengths and my interests, my values, my motivations, how does that affect me? It's not just choose from one of these, but how do I navigate this for me and have a future that's designed by me, not just pick something off the shelf that's the closest thing and look sounds like the easiest or the path of least resistance. Three thoughts I had while you were speaking about that. One was a memory of me organizing a TAFE speaker and just being so stoked that the kids walked away with brochures and just thinking, oh, I crush that. They are going home with a piece of paper that I told them to talk to their parents about and thinking that this was a really valid experience. And sure, you know, on the surface it is, but you're so right. With that one piece of paper and that one talk in amongst a series of talks and pieces of paper and a series of expos and information nights with no time to actively reflect on and decide what might be relevant to me, and also critically decide what isn't relevant to me at this point for a number of reasons. I can see how it was just information overwhelm. The other thought I was having while you were speaking was that so much of what you were speaking about, in terms of that synthesis, that meaning making, that sense-making that young people need to go through to get to a key decision-making point in high school has to be started way, way before that high-stakes decision-making point. And my experience has been in secondary schooling, and you know, I can't speak for other states and systems, but I know in my experience, we would often start that in year nine in preparation for a year 10 decision about senior subject selection, which also had this frame of post-school aspiration around it. And I know that many young people came to that table unprepared to have that conversation, unprepared to advocate for themselves when parents or even the school themselves push back on decisions that the young person was trying to advocate for. I think when you give students that time to go, okay, I've explored, I've got some possibilities. What are the questions I have to ask about those possibilities? How could I de-risk these ideas? What's going to be important in terms of working out whether it's the right path for me or not? How do I do active research for myself, not just take what's given to me? And then how do I present that information in a compelling way so that, you know, if there is pushback from my parents and I know that my ideas for my future might not be exactly what's expected, or you know, my school doesn't offer this course, it's going to be hard work for them to facilitate this. How do I present that in a way that feels not just like, oh, maybe, maybe, but actually I've thought this through, I'm articulating why. Here's my rationale, here's my research, backed up, and I'm in the driving seat for this. It's my life, I've thought about it, here we go. And that means when they when students are coming with that level of being that articulate and that informed, that means that the professional career guidance and careers advisors can lift it up to the next level. What else can we ask them? How far can we push them? How can we spur them into more action? So it is very different, but it takes time.

Zoom out: Subject selection as a system design choice.

Speaker 19:24

So we've looked at the data. Let's talk about what this means for school systems. And my day job involves working in systems thinking and design with schools. And we have all of these design decisions that were made about how certain things happen in schooling. We've gotten so used to them that I think sometimes we don't even question them or interrogate why is it that we've done it this way? Is there a different way to do it? Is this having the impact that we want to have? And so if we're going to change behavior, it starts with looking internally at the way we've structured things and making different design decisions. Just when you were talking, we see when you look at lots of schools' mission statements and what they want to put out there, it's often in total contrast to the structure. You know, the so many schools I talk to who want to do this work and put careers education, student aspiration and hope right at the core of everything. But it it just does that fight of the structures. Not that I'm here trying to plug my own business, but that's exactly why Coherence Colab exists. So let's talk about subject selection because I think this is a place where this shows up. Yeah, we almost need the the pain point of it because we could talk about the structures and the tensions forever. But I think when we get to those pointy ends where we can see it really tangibly, it's it's really interesting to start there. And I think in schools, this is the catalyst for a lot of career education design, right? Subject selection is like the pinnacle of all of the career education and development that we do in schools. But we prepare for what I think is essentially an administrative process. That could be a controversial statement. The first piece of research I wanted to talk about is actually a paper from Glasgow that talks about how subjects selection processes impact young people. I haven't seen that one. Yes. So the author

Being clear on intent in the subject selection process.

Speaker 21:20

is very black. And look in the show notes. Yes. The point that Black makes is that school subject selection processes across, and this was a region of schools in Glasgow that we're speaking about, in every single school, all subject selection processes have varying width, breadth, and intent. And I think the fact that, you know, schools aren't always consistent in how they do subject selection. I think the fact that the intent of it differs as well. There are times when it's kind of framed as more of a quasi career conversation rather than, you know, simply an administrative um tool. And I think we've got to keep in mind, again, a design factor. There's a lot of pressure we put on a 10 to 15 minute conversation. Are you saying it shouldn't? You don't think it should be a career conversation? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that sometimes when the purpose isn't clearly defined, we try and shove a lot of stuff in there that isn't spoken about in the depth that it deserves. Trying to speak about post-school aspirations, trying to speak about prerequisites and what might suit the young person in terms of skills, all of that in a 10 to 15 minute conversation that ultimately gets written up as a form. I do think that we should be really, really clear in our intent for it. And when we're clear on our purpose, then we design it differently. And an administrative conversation looks very different from a conversation about aspiration. Okay, I get your point. And you're saying if it is an administrative conversation where the point of it is a form is filled in and we know what you're planning to do next year, it's kind of the tick box, everyone has a plan and we know that plan and we've got it documented. And that's really easy to do. Now, I think from an administrative point of view, when we work with schools, particularly around the year 10 program, we will say, okay, what would success look like for you? A lot of them talk about that admin side and go, well, actually, if I'm really honest, I want to say that students have, you know, really thought about it, they're excited about their future, they feel really confident and optimistic about their future. But can we make sure that we're also really going to look at the amount of subject change requests we get in U11? Like the honesty is yes, let's mention that. And I think I'm I'm also being honest, right? Like, let's let's just call it for what it is. There is a good chunk of this that's directly related to how much of a nightmare school timetabling is. There is a world in which if we sat down and thought about what we really want from this process, maybe it's a series of conversations with young people over the year that results in this one administrative point. But those conversations look very, very different. I think something else from Black's research that's interesting is that students in making these decisions about subjects and post-school aspirations is that they bring to the table so much invisible um causes. So for example, they are bringing to the table how much they enjoy subjects, their perceived usefulness or perceived difficulty of certain subjects. They're bringing their own age, their own stage, their own social background. They're bringing to the table all of these spheres of influence. Like we said, you know, family in my instance, but teachers. How many times have teachers told kids, oh, you shouldn't do that, or you should definitely have science or no jobs in that? Or that would be terrible for that. You have to do you have to do this because you're really good at it. It'd be such a waste if you didn't. Yes. Yes, I remember hearing a senior science teacher say to a group of kids, unless you're seriously considering science as a career, you should not be doing senior biology or chemistry. And, you know, that that linear cause and effect thinking, right? Like we know that that science in the real world interacts with a whole bunch of disciplines to create new value and to create innovation and change. But these are influences that young people bring to the table, and often those are invisible. Those aren't and unexamined unless they've had the time to unpack them and and critically evaluate them. And that's when you say that series of conversations, that's exactly what we do with the year 10 program that we've designed is called Become Your Own Careers Advisor, which is like, okay, we accept that schools don't have enough time for this career for the professional careers advisor to have these conversations with every single person. That they're not we're not asking everyone to advise or be the professional career development. We're asking the students to have the time and structure to do it. It's not just the time, but also the scaffolding to how to think about it. How do I unpick? Or hold on, did I make these assumptions? We've actually got a piece of data from a set of year 10 cohorts that said that having done a bit more exploration and thinking in this in the 10 weeks leading up to their subject selection interview, so they were about to make a decision that closed off pathways without having the chance to explore broadly or think deeply. 74% said, I've come up with new ideas that are now in my top three possibilities that I wasn't aware of before. So they were about to make decisions with all of that baked in stereotypes, the influences, the assumptions they'd made, and without exploring more broadly to see what's out there first. 74% are just like, well, just in time, hey? But what about all the people that aren't doing that? That's where the shortcuts are coming in. And that that data doesn't surprise me for a second because I think one of the other things we implicitly do in subject selection is that we make the assumption that aspirations don't change and develop even over the course of senior school. I mean, I have worked with students who were on track to do health, and then at year 12 they have decided I'm thinking about a career in content creation. And too much alarm from family, but to me, I've thought, yeah, that sounds right. That's pretty normal. But there was this crisis of what do we do now? You know, this kid's on this pathway to do this, and that's a really important point, actually. When we talk about that big stat, the headline stat, you know, 55%. Can we, if we help them make their own idea and help them choose a career path to suit that's more suited to them, we're not going to achieve 50% completions because the motivation to do it at that point in time doesn't sustain, you know, same in all in all cases, and everything else changes as well. We're not we're not promising certainty if we do this right. We're promising the skills to unstick themselves next time they get stuck or change. And I think, you know, with this student in particular, I said we're learning something really important. You are sort of um restricted, and let's be honest about that. That schooling does restrict you. But where within what you're doing at the moment, in terms of all your qualifications about health and your schooling, is there a chance for you to explore that content creation? And so she ended up creating something just for fun and speaking to people about who are doing this kind of stuff in health because again, disciplines interact with each other, it's not like a one-track thing. I've been watching The Pits recently. Um, have you watched The Pit? I watched one episode, I couldn't watch more. So I'm so into it. But there was the young doctor there who is vlogging everything, and she's got actually got really massive TikTok following and and it's just doing it in a different way and combining those skills. Oh yeah, that's your heck now. Sorry. Listeners for the record, I would make a terrible healthcare professional. That's what Lib is alluding to there. The other thing I think that's interesting, so there's a piece of research from the UK, it is a little bit older, it's from 2017, but the authors say that the choices that individual students make about subject selection, they're actually shaped by the schools that the students find themselves in. I think that that's something that we need to be really aware of. The third piece of research that I think is interesting to factor into the bigger picture of how we do this is a paper from Vietnam that looked at the anxiety that young people experienced around career decision making and subject selection processes in schools. And when I when I read this, I thought a lot about the freakouts and the overwhelm. When we get to this point in year 10, then interestingly, this paper makes a point about gender in saying that females often experienced a greater degree of anxiety. But Monash paper saw the same. It is important to say that by and large the study was correlational, it's it's qualitative. There wasn't a single causal factor that the authors could point to that could show why students were experiencing anxiety in regards to career decision making. But what they did point to was the choice overload, the information overload, and the cognitive overload. And what happens when decisions are made under an information deficit about self and under time pressure. It's actually not about the decision itself. It's very much about how young people experience it. I remember a couple of years ago working with a school, they were really paying attention to these signals of overwhelm because that's what they are. Like they're they're signals that can impact how we design things and how we how we change things. And they were listening to their students who had had older siblings go through in Queensland, it's called the set planning process. And they were saying, wow, there's a historical connotation with this that's really negative. Some of them had had older siblings go through it, and they'd said, Oh, my sister had a big breakdown about it. And so I'm remembering some of that anxiety. And now I'm thinking, I'm feeling anxious about it. And so they made this decision to actually rebrand the set planning process as a result, call it something else, structure it differently so that the administration piece, like we were talking about, was smaller at the end of it. But they knew that that language could actually position the young person to see it differently. Yeah. And so, again, design choice. It's a design choice. Yeah.

The practical takeaways.

Speaker 31:27

I think there are three practical takeaways. First, I think it's really important for schools to have clear intent around subject selection processes. What is the intent behind them? What is the frame that we put around it? Secondly, what I would say is where in this process, um, and you know, in the years leading up to it, do we make space for students to uncover and bring to the table, as Black's research showed, all the various factors that made up aspirations? So where have students mapped and thought critically about and taken critical action about what they enjoy, what they find useful, what they think is difficult and easy, where have they taken into account the spheres of influence around them? And where have they looked back and decided with autonomy, this is my next step? And where do we allow them to talk about that in the context of this conversation? And then finally, I would say to schools, you know, for the teams who design and lead this process, how conscious are we about our power and influence in this process? And how do we make that visible? And how does that inform the design of our subject selection processes? But teachers and careers advisors, I think one of the things back to the big stats around, you know, 55% are choosing careers to please someone else. I think next time a student tells you an aspiration or mentions what they want to do in whatever context, to try slowing down the thinking a bit. We're testing for shortcuts. We need to ask, okay, why is that? And listen for the spark. And if their reason isn't super personal or there's no spark, then maybe this is a shortcut. Maybe it's I want everyone to nod and say this is the right answer and get off my back. We don't want to be able to go, okay, you've got an idea, we'll tick the box. We're interested in whether the plan they've got is their plan. Um, and everyone on the team can support that. Um, to support, you know, we're teachers are great at supporting that critical thinking, and and that leads to the decision-making skills about their future. Everyone doesn't have to be a careers advisor, everyone has to be able to support the process. And I think when you're looking at the subject selection and, you know, what's what constitutes all the factors of the career's uh education, career development program or the great career program at your school, um, consider the education piece, the careers education piece, because I think the the big takeaway for me is that informed decisions don't become informed through more information. We need the inspiration before the information, and that that comes from the inside. Well, put that on t-shirt. That was good. It was actually a school that you know, they were using a career platform. Um, they were using our become program, and they were using a uh another platform for the information guidance and the the practical side of it. And we're kind of like, oh, why why are you using both? And one school just said, Well, this is the inspiration before the information. And I was just like, awesome. So thank you, Amanda Patton. Oh, we love Amanda Patton. Well, that is it for the first episode of the Great Careers Programme podcast. We will be back with more. In the meantime, you can find us on Substack, Instagram, YouTube, and you can get in touch with us at hi at thegreatcareers program.com. Feel free to send us your thoughts, questions, and your own answer to the question we started with today. Whose decision is it anyway? The Great Careers Program is a collaboration between Become Education and Coherence Collab. It's hosted by Liv Penny and Marian Wright with production support from Bev Lang. Music by Chad Crouch. You'll find links to everything we mentioned in the show notes. And if you want to stay in the loop, you can find us on YouTube, Instagram, and follow us on Substack.