Episode 2: Where does a great careers program live in K-12 schooling?

Everyone agrees careers education matters. So why does it keep ending up on the periphery of school life and one person's responsibility?

In this episode Liv and Marian ask a deceptively simple question: what is a great careers program, and whose job is it actually? They zoom into the evidence on best practice, including the Gatsby Benchmarks from the UK and where Australia sits by comparison, and zoom out to a systems view of why this work keeps getting pushed to the edges even when policy and school vision statements say otherwise. Drawing on Donella Meadows' systems thinking framework, they make the case that if careers education is marginalised, that's not an accident. It might be the system working exactly as it was designed.

Along the way, Liv unpacks what "career," "career development," and "careers education" actually mean and why the distinction matters, and Marian traces the historical decisions that built the "grammar of schooling" and what Meadows would say about judging a system's purpose by what it actually produces, not what it claims. You'll leave with two simple starting points: a mapping exercise from Liv, and a walk around your own school with fresh eyes from Marian.

Plus, this episode's "I Didn't Know That Was a Thing" comes from an unlikely source: Marian's five year old son Hugo, who is keenly interested in deep sea research and isn't that bothered about how one goes to the toilet while on a submersible.

Head to the Substack for this episode's "Take This To The Meeting" resource where you can unpack the concepts of this episode with your school team. 

Research and thinking referenced in this episode:

World Economic Forum (2025) — Future of Jobs Report 2025
https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/

Career Industry Council of Australia / National Careers Institute (2022) — Australian Blueprint for Career Development(2nd ed.)
https://www.yourcareer.gov.au/resources/australian-blueprint-for-career-development

Holman, J. (2014, updated 2024) — The Gatsby Benchmarks / Good Career Guidance
https://www.gatsby.org.uk/education/activity/good-career-guidance/

OECD (2024–2025) — PISA 2022 Career Readiness Dashboard and The State of Global Teenage Career Preparation
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/teenage-career-readiness.html
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-state-of-global-teenage-career-preparation_d5f8e3f2-en.html

Schleicher, A. (2015) — Education in an Uncertain World, Project Syndicate
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/education-technological-skills-more-important-by-andreas-schleicher-2015-12

Career Industry Council of Australia (2025) — Australia's Youth Deserve Better Than a "Curriculum Connection"
https://cica.org.au/australias-youth-deserve-better/

Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995) — Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, Harvard University Press
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674892835

Education Council (2019) — Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration
https://www.education.gov.au/indigenous-education/resources/alice-springs-mparntwe-education-declaration

Meadows, D. (2008) — Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green Publishing

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 2 0:02

Welcome to the Great Careers Program. This is a show for anyone who has worked in a school and thought that preparing young people for their future is about more than them getting good grades and it's more than one person's job. I'm Liv Pennie

Speaker 1 0:13

And I'm Marian Wright. And today we're asking a question that seems deceptively simple, but it's an important one. What is a great careers program actually? And where does it live in a school? Whose responsibility is it? And if everyone agrees that the future of young people and their aspirations are important to us, then why does career education so often end up on the periphery of schooling?

Speaker 2 0:35

Because here's what we think. A truly great careers program has multiple layers of learning. It's a shared responsibility of all staff and shows up everywhere across the school years, throughout our systems and structures and our learning.

Speaker 1 0:47

And most importantly, if you are not a careers person, this episode is for you. Today we're zooming into the evidence on best practice, we're looking at whether government policy aligns, what different starting points are, and if you're a leader, we'll start to make the case for why career education is a really important lever for some of the most consistent challenges that we see in schools.

I Didn't Know This Was a Thing: Deep Sea Research, with special guest, Hugo

Speaker 1:14

I don't know this was a thing!

Speaker 2 1:16

At the end of the day, great careers education should lead to great careers, and it's those that get us and the students really excited. So in every episode, we talk about a job that we didn't know was a thing or hadn't thought about much. To highlight how many options are out there and how huge the world of work is, and to remind us also that as teachers, parents, and students, we don't need to know all the possibilities. Every day we're discovering new things, and we just need to stay curious and get excited about them. This episode's I Didn't Know That Was a Thing is brought to you by someone we know well, and Marian knows especially as well, and he's only five years old.

Speaker 1 1:52

That's right. It's actually brought to you by my son, who is five years old. His name is Hugo, and it started with a book that we found in a bookshop that I actually have here. Shall we do a little bit of show and tell for those of us who are viewing? The book is called Search for the Giant Squid, and it's actually a choose your own adventure book where you look at all the roles that exist on a deep sea research expedition. And I actually asked Hugo about some of the things that he learned from finding this book. So we'll hear from him. Hugo. Yes. Hi. Yeah. Welcome to the Great Careers Program. This is a podcast that I host. What do you think we talk about on this podcast?

Speaker 2:34

Um I've got no idea.

Speaker 1 2:36

Are you happy to be here?

Speaker 2:37

Yeah.

Speaker 1 2:38

Are you kind of just doing this because I said you had to?

Speaker 2:40

Yeah.

Speaker 1 2:40

Cool. Well, I appreciate um I don't want to do it because I love being with you and I wish to be in a poncast in my life. If you had a podcast, what do you think it would be about?

Speaker 2:51

Maybe like ve like how to make vehicles.

Speaker 1 2:54

You um you are into vehicles. It's true. So, Hugo, on our podcast, we have a segment called I Didn't Know This Was a Thing. And today's I Didn't Know This Was a Thing actually comes from a book that you and I read together. And the coolest thing about this book is that it tells us the story of a whole bunch of people that all go on a scientific expedition. Now, I kind of knew that this happened, but one of the things that I learned is that deep sea explorations or scientific expeditions take a long time to plan and they take tons and tons of people to make happen. So we've got a marine biologist, an ocean technologist, an engineer, a medical officer, an oceanographer, an electrician, a research vessel captain, a geochemist, a marine archaeologist, and a submersible pilot. You get to choose a submersible and a pilot, and then you get to pretend that you actually go on the expedition to see if you find the giant squid.

Speaker 3:50

So should I get a control something? What for? I'm just like to pretend we're being in a submarine or something.

Speaker 1 3:57

Do you want to pretend we're in a submarine?

Speaker 3:59

Yeah, but we need a controller.

Speaker 1 4:00

How many times did we actually manage to find the giant squid? I don't know, maybe like two. A few times. And then do you remember you were so curious about this? You asked me to find you a documentary. Yeah. Yeah. In the doco, we followed a team of people who were doing a scientific expedition as they planned and as they went out to

Speaker 4:21

Can I tell them something?

Speaker 1 4:22

Please. From the documentary. Um, the back launching pad got broken. So guess what happened? They had to do some welding and chop off the wall. Okay, this is the craziest thing ever, right? They get this like giant vessel, I think it's called an A-frame. And at one point, the crane arm that's supposed to be lifting the submersible off the boat and into the water breaks. And so they have these engineers on board that literally are welding this thing in real time, and then the mission gets delayed. So there's a whole bunch of people on board. They might miss their family, they might miss their friends.

Speaker 4:59

Um, yeah, they could be staying on the ship for a really long time. Like this Lyles put a picture on the window of the summary, and she said, That's my son, he's only five months old. Oh my gosh, that's right. I forgot that. Might have something else. Yeah. Um, did you know there was these type of ocean creatures that were surviving in hot water? Yes. And one of the people driving the submarine said, How would they survive in that hot water?

Speaker 1 5:31

Yeah, there was some kind of hot spring pool that had just sort of formed there. I also remember we were watching some of the scientists and researchers pilot the submersible, and I said, uh, here you go. How do they go to the toilet in there?

Speaker 5:45

In the submersible? Yeah. There's no toilet on board, so the best way to do it is swinging into a bottle.

Speaker 1 5:52

Crazy. Yeah. So question for you. Because we learned about a lot of different jobs, right? Of all the jobs that you learned about, which looked the coolest to you?

Speaker 6:00

Um, when they just weld them off the fence.

Speaker 1 6:04

So the question that we always ask at the end of I didn't know this was a thing is, would you do it? No, I'd miss my kids. Did you just say you'd miss your kids? Yeah. So what I hear you saying is that you probably wouldn't do it on account of you'd be away for a long time and you might miss your people.

Speaker 6:21

Yeah, I'll miss Georgia.

Speaker 1 6:23

Do you want to tell the listeners who Georgia is?

Speaker 6:25

So Georgia is one of our friends. Yeah. I really like her. She's like 10 out of 10 best friends.

Speaker 1 6:32

So in the future, you think you'll probably be a bit sad about leaving her?

Speaker 6:37

So I'll just stay with her?

Speaker 1 6:39

Yeah. Anything else you want to say to the listeners before we finish up today?

Speaker 6:42

No. Okay. Thanks for coming on the show.

Speaker 2 6:44

Would you do it?

Speaker 1 6:46

No. Um, I will say that this one probably gets added to my list of heck no's. I think part of this sounds absolutely incredible. It is such an important thing to do for the world, and I applaud and celebrate and value every single scientist who is doing this important work. But fixing a crane arm in the middle of the night while you're freezing out in the middle of the ocean. Heck no. Peing in a bottle mid-submersible time. No, thank you.

Speaker 2 7:17

See, I don't think that bit would bother me that much. I'm with Hugo. I could pee in a bottle. It's definitely easier for males though. You can get those special um female urinals now.

Speaker 1 7:27

The ones something else I didn't know.

Speaker 2 7:30

Yeah, I didn't know that was a thing. I think it would be a hard pass for me as well.

Speaker 1 7:41

So, Liv

Zoom In: What Career Education Actually Is (and Isn't)

Speaker 1 7:42

today, we are talking about where career education sits in K-12 schooling. But before we do that, I think we actually need to get on the same page about something. How do you define career? And is it just about paid employment or is it about something more?

Speaker 2 7:57

I think part of the problem is the word career itself. And we've talked about this a lot of times, even coming up with the, you know, how how much is having career in the Great Careers Program as a podcast title a bit of an issue because people kind of say this is not my job. So I think we need to clear up that definition of career in the first place because I think part of the reason why we're struggling to move this work from the periphery kind of tagged on something at the end back into the core of education and why we do any of it, we need to lay out the definitions we use. So from a career development perspective, career is the individual's journey through life, learning, and work. And that includes paid and unpaid roles, and it constantly evolves. It's not a job, it's not an occupation, it's your career as an individual. And so if that's the case, then career development is the ongoing process of managing your life, learning, and work over the lifespan, including all those transitions. So again, that piece is a process. It's not a choice. Career development is the process of managing it ongoing. And then we layer down to okay, what's the role of careers education then? And that is to learn how to manage that process. So again, not a decision. So if we work with those as definitions, it's your life, learning, and work. We know that this thinking has already started in primary school. This is already actively, the development is already happening, just as every other form of development is already happening. Young kids are going, okay, where do I fit in the world? What could I try out? Just as we were talking about earlier with Hugo, there's this kind of natural curiosity about where do I fit? What are all those adults doing? We naturally role-play the jobs that we see around us, the things we see on TV. So this process of working out where you fit and where you don't fit is already happening. And as anyone who's worked in a school or um with young people at all or a parent has had conversations where those assumptions and influences are right below the surface. And we can start to see how that thinking is connected to their behaviour and their engagement with school. Whether it's keeping them in their lane of, you know, people might like me have lives like this, so what's the point of me trying? I'll leave at year 10 like everyone else I know. Or, you know, stopping them from trying, so putting themselves in a box early, like I'm just I'm just not a maths person, which is such a common one. Or alternatively, spurring them into action. So those aspirations and thoughts about their future that sit right below the surface can actually be a real motivating factor. All of those different things are sitting right under their behavior and engagement as thinking that's happening. But in general, in a school, we see career as something we do after learning. So when we look at the future outlook for the world and we look at the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report that was published last year, there is an increasing need for everyone to keep learning and relearning, upskill, reskill. The estimate is that 39% of skills will need to be either adjusted and reskilled or upskilled or will be redundant within the next five years. So you'll have to pick up other skills to fill in those gaps. It becomes really obvious that this is a process that is going to be essential. That lifelong learning, and that's right up there in the course skills that are going to be in demand. Adapting, changing course as you and the world around you changes. Now that's the learning, the process, but it's not a natural, nobody has that naturally. It's really hard for people to think about. And if we spend no time focused on it, it's no surprise that kids are getting to the end of school, not confident about how to make decisions about the first step, let alone how to navigate this lifelong learning. So starting with their learning at school, we have to plug the future back into that because it is how they make sense of what they're learning. The future lens and that line of sight to the future is why they're there, but they often don't see it. And that influences whether they make the most out of the time at school. So from an engagement perspective and what's in it for teachers to do this work and create, bring careers education and this futures thinking into the core of education. It helps students make sense of why on earth are we learning this? What am I here for? Where's this all going? And can it be going somewhere that I'm excited about? Or am I just, as we talked about in the last episode, just on this lazy river? I think Andrea Schleicher, the um the education directorate at the OECD, said, you know, every decision they make at school is a career decision. They just don't know it. So although there are really obvious career decisions towards the end of school, you know, in Australia, year 10, the senior subject selections in the UK, what A levels are you going to choose? And then in year 12 and 13, you know, what are you going to do post school? All of those micro decisions are already happening. And they have a massive influence on how your adult life will kick off. So actually the question shouldn't be where does career development fit into school? Where can we squeeze it in? The question should be where does school fit into their career development?

Speaker 1 12:39

It's an absolute game changer of a question. So is what you're saying that students while they're at school.

Speaker 2 12:46

Their career has started.

Speaker 1 12:47

Their career has started. It's not something that they're preparing for in a post-school scenario. It's something that's actively happening in the moment. Can you tell us a bit about what is the current state? What does career development currently look like in schools?

Speaker 2 13:03

I would say the if I was gonna sum it up in one word, it would be inconsistent. So I would say most schools uh have a very different experience and going as a student, you could have amazing support, careers education, the chance to explore lots, to test out different ideas, to have lots of experiences and meaningful discussions, or you could have absolutely nothing until a 15-minute discussion in year 10, where you're expected to know how to make decisions, these complex decisions for your next steps. Often in those conversations, students haven't even done the thinking or been structured through the thinking of what might my ideas for my future be and what might I need to choose in terms of subjects for this. But that pointy end was almost like we said in the first episode, that subject selection is often the pinnacle of it. That's often where all the focus is. And I think a lot of career development work in schools and career guidance is supported around that transition, those transition points that we can see. Whereas the careers education piece, learning that process, how do I really master that process of managing my career ongoing is missing. Often in schools we can point to the careers program. It might be, you know, a week of awesome experiences, it might be a weekly newsletter chock full of info that we hope someone reads or they'll read when it comes to the most important time, but not until then. In reality, a proper great careers program encompasses multiple complementary components of career education, career-related learning within a subject, experiences and real meaningful experiences and exposure to different ideas and um workplaces, guidance, counseling, and information. Now often schools will say, We've got this platform, and it does one of those, probably one of those really well. But what you have to make sure is that the career's education piece isn't missing because that's the bit that will sit within the person and help them have that process for life to thrive beyond the school. That's the hardest bit to do, and it's often the piece that we skip because there's time pressures.

Zoom In: The Evidence, the Gatsby Benchmarks, and Why Australia Falls Short

Speaker 1 15:03

What are we sort of guided by in this space? What does research, what does best practice, evidence, policy even say about how we should be doing this in schools?

Speaker 2 15:14

I think the there's there's two things here. There's what does the evidence and and best practice tell us? The OECD PISA data tells us generally that we're not doing it deeply enough. Um, especially when we look at the what the future of work is going to need in terms of those skills. The most underdone part is the how do I think about the world of work and how do I put myself together with the world of work. The evidence is there, and but from a career development perspective, the evidence for doing this work earlier has been around for years and years, but there's a massive gap between evidence and practice. You know, we can put pages and pages of references in the show notes about the evidence for doing this more deeply and earlier. The problem is that from a school's perspective and as a society, we expect this to be quick. We expect it to be simple. So, you know, Gatsby benchmarks in the UK are probably the most comprehensive, and there's a few other European countries who have this comprehensive approach, which is shifting it more to the mainstream. You know, they've even got funding tied to achieving these benchmarks, which I think is phenomenal.

Speaker 1 16:19

I actually didn't know that other countries had legislative requirements for schools to deliver career education. So for those who might not be aware, can you explain what the Gatsby benchmarks are in the UK? And can you speak to whether Australian schools have a legislative requirement to deliver career education in the way that a country such as the UK does?

Speaker 2 16:44

So for our UK listeners, I'm gonna do a really bad job now of summarising the Gatsby benchmarks, so I apologise for that. There's people who know them far more deeply than me. But as a summary, they are eight simple but consistent benchmarks with implementation recommendations underneath that all schools must follow, and they are benchmarks that all schools must meet.

Speaker 1 17:03

They have to, as per the requirements for being a school to get funding, have to in some way deliver career education.

Speaker 2 17:10

Yeah, and it's across these eight benchmarks. Now in Australia, we have the Australian Blueprint for Career Development, which really breaks down that thinking, but we don't have the gatsby, we don't have the framework and the mandate in schools to do this well. And that's the problem, you know, around the world we've got so many decent frameworks, not any of them have the perfect mix as far as the evidence goes. They often move it forward in a the way that it's possible to do. But I think in general, the challenge and the barrier is that we all expect this to be easy. We've grown up, for most of us, going, oh, this is something you do at the end. You don't have to be able to think about it, something you do late, and it's 15 minutes. And again, you know, if you're a student looking at the school day and what's important, um, you're going, that doesn't matter. Because as long as I get this knowledge. And another quote by um Andreas Schleicher, back in 2015, he said, education was once about teaching people something, and it must now be about whether they can do something with what they know. And I think it's that lift up to the meta cognitive, you know, this is about lifelong learning. How am I going to apply this knowledge and these skills in a way that suits me and the world? And that's the bit that's been missing. So I think from a policy perspective, you know, here in Australia, we recently had the a review of it, and the recommendation, which was not warmly welcomed by the career development community, was that careers education would be a curriculum connection, not even a curriculum priority. Which means that inevitably we'll move a little bit towards that integrated piece. So seeing careers education within the subjects and that connection which is subject first. So, okay, I get why maths is important, what pathways it can lead, and how the skills might be applied in different connections. But it doesn't give them the how do I think about it for myself? What's that self-awareness piece? So I think we're still going to end up within that recommendation with a massive gap, which is what the OECD Career Readiness Project has said is the gap.

Speaker 1 19:04

And so can you also explain the difference between explicit and integrated career education? Do we need to have both? Is it enough to just have one? And what does evidence say about what we need in schools to have an impact?

Speaker 2 19:20

Like I think in terms of having an impact, anything is better than nothing. Anything is better than the test and tell and then do a 15-minute chat. But what we need to actually do careers education, to have young people leaving school with the confidence to make their own career decisions and to navigate a lifetime of learning, as we've said, is the whole purpose of career development and you know, having young people being able to step into the world and flourish in their lives beyond school. We need those layers. It's not enough to do one or it's not a menu of options. This is all important learning. Just to be really clear, explicit, as we say, is creating that time and space, then saying to the student, this is about you having the time and space to explore and learn how to design careers that suit you, how to navigate them, to test things out. It's student-centered. It starts with them. Integrated on the flip side is often subject-centered, is giving them the relevance. So we need both. And we need the exposure, the experiences, and all those great things as well to bring it to life. I mean, I think for schools not in the UK, it's definitely very valuable to look at the Gatsby benchmarks and start to see how do you measure up? If we're saying that's best practice, or if it's as close to best practice as we can see at a whole national level, then use those as the, you know, where are we at? How do we map this? Both are really important. Integrated is much easier to do. Explicit obviously needs us to create that time and space, not just as a one-off, but have to give the students the chance to have that repeated engagement with their future so they can acquire and master those skills. How do I think about this? What's my idea right now? How have I changed? How do I test and de-risk these ideas I've got? You know, we often see that when we have that inquiry cycle and we create that time and space for them to test their ideas out, we see around 50% change their mind and go, oh yeah, that's definitely not what I want to do. I need to tweak it, but I've learned something about myself and the world through action. And that's the most powerful way of doing this work is to actually let them do something for themselves to learn through action, not by sitting so yeah. That's the difference between the two.

Speaker 1 21:22

I think you've touched on this already, but schools experience a number of challenges and barriers and gaps. Can you summarize some of the most common ones that you've seen?

Speaker 2 21:32

Well, where we see where we see this work really well is when school leadership or system leadership understands where it fits strategically and how how it contributes to the broader vision for what they want for their students and the types of students who are going to graduate with which skills. So that really smooths the challenges. You know, more than anything, I think it's that that strategic link, that strategic line of sight to where does this fit. And that means we can create the measures. How do we evaluate this? And how do we justify the time and space for it? Because ultimately, the if it's not um mandated, it's a choice to create that time and space for this work. It's it's a school leader saying, actually, this is really important. We know the benefits are going to outweigh this, you know, ten lessons that we're going to give to it. And that multiplier effect of doing this work is going to be felt across the school in all areas of engagement, of well-being, and of academic outcomes. So leadership and strategic understanding of where this fits is probably the the easiest, the the first thing to get across, the first the biggest boost. Once we have that, everything else kind of falls into place. But the other challenges would obviously be curriculum on a very practical level, and it is possible to create the time and space. You know, we we have the compliance issues, but lots of schools are doing this really well and they're finding the time and space for it. It's possible, it's not easy. I think that's the problem. A lot of people think this should be easy, it should be something quick, but it's not. It's actually one of the most fundamental things we can do. There's obviously also, you know, for pre-teacher training in in some countries includes career development and the role of all teachers in student futures. Uh, we don't have that here, so a lot of teachers think quite rightly, it's not my job. Um, this is how I teach the curriculum. So that's a big barrier we have to get across with schools and systems. And actually, we see lots of the time when we've done that professional development that teachers go, oh, this, you know, this is just about how do we help every student achieve their own potential, and that's why I got into teaching in the first place. So, yes, of course it's my job. I mean, that's how do we miss that gap? How did we miss this?

Speaker 1 23:34

I remember this story you told me about a school you were working with, and the school had decided as a team that this was gonna be at the core of everything that they did. And I was wondering if you could tell that story about being on that call with that leader, and someone on the team asked, What is the risk of making this our core priority?

Speaker 2 23:54

Yes, yeah, someone basically said, From other school from other schools and systems, you know, what are the risks? What's what's likely to go wrong? And the the actual principal of the school just stood up and said, We know what the risk is. We know from everything we do that it is about us as leaders embedding this strategically. If we stand up and say this is important, the rest falls falls away. And I was about to say, you know, getting teachers to come on the journey is the biggest thing. But he just stood up and said, That is our bag. That is not a program responsibility. If we choose the program and an evidence-based program that we know has impact, we as leaders have to go, this is important strategically. You must, as teachers, you are expected to deliver it with the same attention and professional application as any other subject that you're timetabled on to teach. Because he recognised that that tendency to go, this is not my job, and this is just a kind of a DOS subject, and bring their own perceptions of what careers education is to those lessons, whereas actually they're going to be the best conversations those teachers have with students. And we had a year nine leader who was very reluctant to have to take on this work and teach careers education in that explicit form. And two weeks later he said, actually, this is hands down my favourite discussions of the fortnight with my students. But it is that leader standing up and going, our decision is strategically important, it's a priority for us. If if

Zoom Out: The Historical Decisions That Built Schooling As We Know It

Speaker 2 25:23

we understand then what career education is, what research is telling us, what best practice looks like, we've got evidence frameworks, etc., why is it still such a challenge for schools?

Speaker 1 25:34

What a question. I think both you and I have said that this work, you know, optimizing our school systems for futures and for careers is hard work. It's slow work, which is also sometimes unappealing. It's complex work, but we know it's possible. We know leaders who have done this, who have put this at the core of everything that they do. And they understand the constraints of compliance and the external facing metrics and the need for enrollment numbers, the need to be attractive in the commercial market. But they also know how to prioritize certain things. You know, when we when we talk about optimization, it's not something that's that's spoken about in the educational context. But if you want to know what you're optimizing for, look for the things that you're protecting. Look for the things that you're repeating, look for the things that you're giving time to, look for the things that you're reinforcing with your structures. So we know that it is possible to do it. You might not see the fruits of the effort straight away because it is it's slow, deep change. But we know that it's incredibly important and we know that it won't just have benefits for young people in the present, but also for the life that they will live and our, I think our society as a whole. I think an interesting rock to turn over is looking at how we got here in the first place. To your point about with pages and pages of notes that we could post about what we know career education does for young people. Why does this remain a challenge? And part of my wondering has to do with what I refer to as legacy system design, which really is about the historical choices made about how schooling is structured. There's a book I often talk about. It's called Tinkering Towards Utopia by David Tyak and Larry Cuban. I would highly recommend it. It's not a long book, it is a bit of an older text. But what these authors do when they are speaking about the American context, but what they actually do is paint a picture of how choices made throughout history actually dictated the design choices that were then made about schooling. So, for instance, at one point in history, totally normal for a bunch of students different ages to go to school every day in a schoolhouse with a teacher that managed everybody. All the students progressed at their own pace. You know, the curriculum was by and large localized. The students learned bookkeeping with the local bookkeeper in town. And it was only throughout the late 1800s with the rise of factories that actually we created much more structured schooling. And so in the late 1800s, I think is when there was a committee that decided that curriculum should be standardized. And this is kind of where the school date was born. This is where knowledge began to be chopped up into blocks. English, maths, history, sciences. This was a decision made by people who were administrators. And so they had to come up with this standardized unit of measurement for learning, something called the Carnegie Unit. This unit was something that you would get once you had completed 120 hours of classroom contact time. And it was typically a 50 to 55 minute period, five days a week for 24 weeks over a year. And this completely institutionalized a school's schedule. While these administrators couldn't really quantify what you learned in maths, what you learned in English, what you'd learned in history, they designed a whole metric depending on how many hours you sat in a seat for. We can probably see that this is why in schooling we have sort of handcuffed our idea that a school day is split up a certain way and that knowledge is fragmented into certain blocks. It's why we think that English happens here and why career education happens here. I think one of the unintended consequences is that in schools we optimize for compliance. You know, our syllabus documents have indicative time allocations.

Speaker 2 29:25

So... So basically, all the all the challenges we talk about in terms of, you know, when you talk about that local, they would learn with a local bookkeeper. Yes. Um, and every student would be learning at their own pace. It sounds a lot like the personalised pathways and flexible schooling that that so many schools are aiming for now. Yes and the challenges we face. So so you're saying a lot of the challenges that we face at the moment in terms of personalised pathways, bringing careers education back into the core of schooling is about decisions that were made a long time ago for a different context and different outcomes.

Speaker 1 29:57

Yes.

Speaker 2 29:58

They just made them really well and that stuck.

Speaker 1 30:01

And the well, yes, and the reason that they stuck, it created a norm. What happens as a result is that the more parents go through this process, teachers go through this type of schooling, school leaders go through this type of schooling, all of it becomes a culturally normal way to see and experience school. The decisions made in the past weren't accidental, but they weren't necessarily chosen because they were the best for what humans needed, right? It wasn't necessarily governed by how is it that young people thrive. To really, and I think if I zoom out further, I think philosophically, and we've talked about this a lot, you and I, we have to really look at like why do schools exist and what is the point of schooling? You know, yes, we're here talking about career education, but all of that works hand in hand.

Speaker 2 30:48

I love the point you

Zoom Out: The Purpose of School: Rhetoric vs Reality

Speaker 2 30:49

make about like, okay, we've got the historical context and then we've got the what is the purpose of school. And I think, can you what do what do you think now? If the purpose of school has been this and is now this, what do what are we working with now?

Speaker 1 31:01

If in 2026 we really want to talk about what is it that we're here to do, the the place that I actually went back to because we're in Australia, is actually our declaration on education. Our education ministers signed a document that sets out the vision for education systems in Australia and they agreed to two goals. And so these goals are that the Australian system promotes excellence and equity. That's goal number one. And goal number two is that all Australians become confident and creative individuals, lifelong learners, active, informed members of a community. And Liv, I'm actually gonna read out a part of the preamble. Our education system must do more than this. It must also prepare young people to thrive in a time of rapid social and technological change and complex environmental, social, and economic challenge. Education plays a vital role in promoting the intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual, and aesthetic development and well-being of young Australians. And in ensuring the nation's ongoing economic prosperity and social cohesion, they need to deal with information abundance, navigate questions of trust and authenticity. They need flexibility, resilience, creativity, the ability to thrive, to keep on learning throughout their lives. We know of the two of us, I am not the career development practitioner in the room. But to me, that sounds a lot like career education, does it not?

Speaker 2 32:25

Yes, it is. Like, how have we how have we moved so far and taken all of that? How are we expecting to achieve any of that with no time to teach it? I mean, it's yeah, it's it's kind of mind-blowing.

Speaker 1 32:38

Now, I'm gonna say something that is potentially controversial. Maybe we need a new segment called controversial opinions with Marion. I think I think a lot of schools will say that they do this. I think a lot of schools will say this is exactly what we do. You can have a look at it on our website. We've got the beautiful strategy and vision. We are creating future-ready students, we're future-proofing the next generation. Our young people are experiencing everything that they need to become resilient, confident, lifelong learners. I think that the reality of that is sometimes just rhetoric. It's as you speak. Sometimes the reality of what we produce is actually very far away from what the declaration says. Danella Meadows, who was one of the early thinkers and writers in the fields of systems thinking, actually said it doesn't matter what we put on our walls or our documents. The true purpose of our system is actually found in how the system behaves and what it produces. She even said, show me how a system behaves and I'll tell you what its true purpose is. If we have, I know, right? Sure, we've got our metrics around attendance and performance and all of that other stuff. But what are we observing about our student? Are they approaching decision making with confidence? Are they really autonomous? Are they exercising agency in the classroom? Are they approaching assessment with that agency? You know, from a global view, like you said, if we look at those behavioral signals of what the PISA data set actually says when you have students who are experiencing increased anxiety about the future and who are struggling to connect what schooling is with life beyond school. Yeah, I would say if we were to surmise what the purpose of education is, is potentially you'll leave school with less agency than when you came in.

Speaker 2 34:21

So you're kind of judging by the case. Yeah, no, I think you're right. I mean, you know, there are schools that have the most beautiful vision statements, and I don't want to, you know, I think everyone would like to be doing this. But it's they come up against the system constraints of, oh, but we also, you know, as soon as results are published and and the newspapers will publish here's the ranking of the best schools, and it's based on those narrow definitions of success, they're kind of caught in a trap. But let's so let's first give schools the benefit of the doubt that given given freedom and to well, obviously the there's freedom there is is to write the strategic vision statement and mission statement for what they want to do. So let's go, okay, the intention is there. But then if we would start with the outcomes and look at what we think the strategy was, to your point of uh that, then it might be, you know, our core purpose is to um get great English grades. Our core purpose is certainly in Australia to get a high ATAR, lots of band fives or sixes. We could also look at the OECD data and say, like, our core purpose is to make sure our students don't explore their future beyond really narrow pathways that they can see already. Um, more uncertain about what you're going to do for that first step and totally unprepared to unstick yourself when the next step doesn't work. Oh, yes. Ready to step into something untested that you're 50% likely to drop out of and feel like a failure.

Speaker 1 35:43

But we'll report that you did it and it'll make us sound great. I think that's brutal. It's brutal, and it's actually kind of scary. So I think that key to really knowing if we're doing what we say we're doing is really found in the signals and the behavioural patterns of our young people. You know, we might say on our walls, our young people have agency, but actually, if internally we don't give them any say about what happens and we don't let them exercise that, then you know, not really doing what we intend to.

Speaker 2 36:17

Yeah, completely agree. I think that is scary and it's brutal, but I think those those conversations are happening. I think, you know, every school leader, system leader is grappling with this tension between what we're required to produce and what the kind of the market is is asking for and what we know the future of the world is asking for and what our students will need going forward. There is this massive compliance tension um and what this what the system is rewarding, which we have to break in order to move forward and put the young people at the heart of it and actually give them what they need to manage their life, the learning and their work in a good way going forward. But uh as you know, I will advocate for even doing small things and putting the future back into the core of education and core of schooling is a massive step forward that we know works.

Speaker 1 37:07

Yes.

Speaker 2 37:08

Um to do a little bit of balance

Zoom Out: What Are We Actually Optimising For?

Speaker 2 37:10

for that.

Speaker 1 37:10

And I think at the end of the day, it comes back down to what as a school, as a complex system, do we optimize for? You know, we've got to be honest here, and you and I have both been in and around schools, loads of innovative, you know, future-focused schools. Most of our organizing elements in schools really are optimizing for specific things. Where if we've got a literacy initiative that is taking up the headspace of our teachers and our students, then then we're optimizing for an increase in our plan results. If we're investing into a science of teaching or another, you know, pedagogical framework, we're optimizing for for for something specific to be happening in our classroom. So if we're gonna do this, if we're gonna put careers, the futures of young people who they are and who they are developing, and we want them to own their learning and the learning that they will, you know, experience after school, but then we don't actually optimize for it, then we will perpetuate the problem. And to your point, you know, something is better than nothing. It can become really overwhelming and you think, oh my gosh, I've got to like burn it all to the ground and start again. But true to systems thinking, some of the most powerful points for change are often the smallest ones. They are the things that have the capability to shift the whole system and how it works. And coming back to core purpose and really looking at whether this is at the center of it and whether we optimize for it, might seem like an overwhelming task, but it is a really small shift in seeing, which is critical to then the decision making and the choices that we might make in resourcing and the choices that we might make in organizing the elements of our school system.

Speaker 2 38:52

I agree. That's a yeah, it does sound huge and it sounds overwhelming. And it's certainly, if you're sitting listening, going, uh, my role is huge, there is no way. It can be really small. It and we know that there are simple ways to put put this work back at the core of it that has a massive multiplier effect on a lot of the things that we are facing and a lot of the challenges that stand in the way of getting to that bigger purpose. You know, the attendance, the engagement, the behavioural issues, that actually when we can switch, get a student to lock in by using their future and seeing the point of it, a lot of those challenges go away without focusing on them head-on. Because we're we're changing the student's perspective and giving them that line of sight to their future and and telling them, you know, this is your future, this is your career, and it has already started, it's yours. It's not like we're gonna ditch teaching literacy to do it, but small increments and small shifts, as you said, can make a massive difference to how students perceive how important they are in the whole process.

Speaker 1 39:57

Um yeah, the assumption is easy to make that we need to ditch then everything else that we're doing, but I think it's coming back down to what are the behavioral indicators that we want to see from our young people while they are in our community, while they're in our classrooms, and then structurally, how will we reinforce that? How do we structure for confidence? How do we structure for agency? If we've got this explicit career education where we're giving young people that time to engage in sense making, that meaning making, that testing, that experimentation, where do the threads of that show up? In the classroom. We never actually let them rehearse that in the school community, in just everyday decision making.

Speaker 2 40:38

We don't let them own and we don't tell them it matters.

Speaker 1 40:46

What are

The Takeaways

Speaker 1 40:47

some of our practical takeaways, Liv? We've talked about a lot.

Speaker 2 40:50

From everything we've said, for a careers leader or teacher in school, I think the key takeaway is simple, is to to look at the vision or mission statement of a school. What are we what does our positioning say about what we are optimizing for? What do we want for our students in the future? What does our education promise for students? And therefore, is teaching them the skills to navigate? Is doing careers education important? And then if it is, where are we doing that? So I think the first step would be to map out are we doing explicit across the years? Are we giving it time and space across the years? Are we doing it from within subject areas? And do we have a shared culture of understanding of what does that look like? That incidental piece. You'll have to go over to the Substack and there's a little worksheet you can use to map this in a s in a team meeting. But I think that's the first point, and then you work out the starting point because you don't have to bite off the whole thing. It's maybe it's saying, actually, there's space, we're gonna test it in the middle years, we're gonna do some time and space for it in the middle years because we know we can see the benefits there and the real need. Or you say actually, every faculty, as the other school did, every faculty in the next all staff planning day is gonna spend two hours creating those curriculum career connections and what are the resources we've got for that. How can we bring the careers leader in to help and support that work? So that'd be my takeaway. Map the strategic line of sight. Is this important and where are we doing it?

Speaker 1 42:08

Very good. My practical takeaway is really to ask you to see things differently in your school. After you listen to this episode, I want you to walk around your school and I want you to consider what are the things that were historical decisions that were made in a different time. And I'm just asking you to see, not asking you to do anything about it. I want you to just consider that what happens in the school around you might be shaped by the past. I wonder how that classroom came to be. Or I wonder how it is that we organize staff rooms this way. And the second is to remind yourself that even though we work in a system where the constraints are real and the expectations are high and the work is complex, as leaders, we still have agency to make different decisions in the present. It's creative, complex work. We have the agency as school leaders and educators to make different decisions about how we structure schooling so that we produce something different in our young people and by and large for our society.

Speaker 2 43:14

Love that. Agency in the students, agency in the leaders, then I think that that would be a transformation. And that is it for today's episode of the Great Careers program. If this one made you think the best thing you can do is to share it with someone else in your school who needs to hear it, we'd love your help in getting this to more people and helping more people find us. So if you've listened and found this valuable, leave us a rating or a review wherever you listen and share it with your staff room, your friends, your network.

Speaker 1 43:42

And you can also find episode recaps, research links, everything that we talk about in the episodes over on our Substack. It's the best place to go deeper on everything that we cover here. Liv, do you want to tell the listeners about the take it to the meeting resource that we designed?

Speaker 2 43:57

Yes, so every episode we have committed to doing something that allows you to take it further. So if you want to take the insights or ideas from these podcast episodes and turn them into real action for your school or system, head over to the Substack and you can download a 10-minute team meeting activity. Just as we zoom in to practice and zoom out to the system's perspective in each podcast, there's always one resource focused on developing practice with students for any team meeting and another one for looking at the bigger picture to take to leadership meetings. So pick and choose, choose your adventure.

Speaker 1 44:27

Or do both. Do you remember that? Or do both.

Speaker 2 44:29

Do you remember that?

Speaker 1 44:30

Taco ad? Why not both?

Speaker 2 44:32

Porque no.

Speaker 1 44:36

Listeners, we want to hear from you. If you know a job or a career that nobody's ever heard of, something weird, niche, cool, surprising, something that might even add to my "Heck no" list. Please send us an email over at hi @ thegreatcareers program.com. We'd love to feature it and we'd love to have you tell us all about it.

Speaker 2 44:59

The Great Careers Program is a collaboration between Become Education and Coherence Co-Lab. It's hosted by me, Liv Pennie, and my co-host Marian Wright, with production support from Bev Laing. Music is by Chad Crouch, and you'll find links to everything we mentioned in the show notes and on Substack. And you can follow us on socials, on Instagram and YouTube. We'll see you next time. Bye.

Speaker 1 45:18

Bye.