The relationship between educational establishments and the businesses they feed has always been a rocky one, with companies blaming the curriculum or schools themselves for the poor quality of candidates approaching their first job without the relevant knowledge or appropriate skills.
Many employers believe that schools have a responsibility to ensure students are prepared for the world of work, not only with academic qualifications, but also with knowledge of how their personal strengths can be applied to their career. Earlier this year we launched Thomas Education, a sister company to our world-renowned psychometric assessment company Thomas International. Thomas Education enables schools to provide practical career guidance and helps fulfil one of the job market’s most pressing requirements – the need to find school leavers with not only the right qualifications on paper, but also an awareness of their strengths and limitations and an understanding of which jobs they would be most suited to. The idea behind Thomas Education is to work closely with employers, schools and students to utilise psychometric assessments in a new way.
Psychometric assessment has a tried and tested reputation as a recruitment and business tool but the full potential of using these assessments in schools hasn’t previously been explored. Thomas Education was launched to bridge the gap between the education system and the world of work by giving students realistic expectations of their own place in the workplace and giving employers the reassurance that students understand where their natural strengths lie and have a high level of self awareness.
Even with the right academic qualifications for a particular role, recruiters can find themselves faced with poor communication skills, poor self knowledge and, often, a poor attitude from young candidates. Anny tool that can give students greater, and more accurate, self awareness and a realistic knowledge of their strengths and limitations is a valuable one to introduce to schools.
One of the first projects we undertook with Thomas Education was a pilot study to help disruptive and disengaged students using psychometric assessments. The study showed that behavioural assessments generated impressive results in increasing students’ academic performance and improving the behaviour of challenging pupils.
St Benedict’s, a secondary school in Suffolk, felt that some students weren’t achieving their potential as a result of disengagement or poor behaviour. Sharon Ferguson, one of our Thomas International consultants, a mother whose daughters attended the school, thought that using psychometric assessment could help teachers to engage with these disengaged students. Over the years, Sharon had come to notice a disparity between how her two daughters approached their school work and, using her knowledge as a Thomas International consultant, decided to profile her daughters using the Thomas psychometric assessments tools. ‘What I realised,’ Sharon told me, ‘is that my youngest daughter was just as intelligent and talented as my eldest, but processed information very quickly so was bored in lessons. As a result she was disengaged and wasn’t applying herself.’ By helping her daughter understand her own aptitudes, Sharon began to see the value in using what had previously been seen as purely a business tool to help other students gain a better understanding of their own cognitive preferences.
The six-month project at St Benedict’s saw a more than 90% reduction in external exclusions, internal inclusions, removals from class and negative referrals, and a 10% increase in GCSE results.
Assistant Head, Andy Watts, tells us: ‘Once the students received their feedback their behaviour quickly changed. Helping students become more self-aware empowered them to manage their own behaviour better and enabled them to resolve issues and problems themselves.’
‘For example, a student who was aggressive in class and spent a significant amount of time in the inclusion unit transformed his behaviour after receiving his assessment feedback. Understanding the reasons behind his anger helped him modify his behaviour and calm himself down.’
‘Another student who tended to be disruptive in maths and science classes struggled with the GIA Number Speed and Accuracy test. This meant he had difficulty processing numerical concepts quickly. The student needed to slow down and give himself more time to assimilate numerical information. Once the student and his teachers understood the cause of his behaviour they were able to deal with it more effectively, resulting in an improvement in his behaviour and his grades.’
Fifteen schools across the UK are now benefiting from using psychometric assessment with students. In Suffolk, the LEA were so impressed with the results from St Benedict’s, they are now funding a trial of these methods in two other Suffolk schools over a two year period to replicate the success and carry out independent evaluation.
This study showed how powerful psychometric assessments could be when used with young people and how open the students were to learning about the drivers behind their behaviour and how to understand themselves more fully, which will benefit them throughout their career.
To expand on that idea, we decided to develop our psychometric assessments as a career guidance tool. This means we’re able to give students the same insight and knowledge of their own abilities, competencies and reactions as they would learn in a professional role.
Traditional career guidance given in schools fails to make the final link between education and work or help young people identify a career for which they are suited. This lack of self awareness is frustrating for both HR professionals and school leavers as both sides waste valuable time and resources narrowing the field. With psychometric assessment’s evolution into this area, a mutually beneficial solution can be reached if schools better equip students for the working world by helping them understand the objective of school is to step successfully into the working world, not just to leave with a qualification.
In the past six months, Thomas Education has worked with over 30 organisations to offer students practical and realistic careers advice. All our advisors come from a business background, predominantly HR and Recruitment, which means they know exactly what employers are looking for and have interviewed thousands of job seekers. They have an understanding of the job market, how to get a job, how the recruitment process works and what employers are actually looking for.
When psychometric assessments were used at Woodhouse Grove School in West Yorkshire, 76% felt the assessment results reflected them strongly or very strongly. 87% of students said they would recommend the experience, with the majority of them stating that completing a PPA behavioural assessment and the subsequent feedback made them feel more confident, more sure of their career choice and gave them more ideas about possible career options.
What our work shows is that schools need to make sure they don’t shy away from taking a more business-like approach to helping students. At present, many schools lack the commercial experience to give students the necessary understanding of the business world and impart the knowledge that the skills required by employers are very different from the skills required by exam boards. Working with an external agency such as Thomas Education brings a fresh perspective and offers students career advice from the ‘real world’. Implementing a business tool such as psychometric assessments in an educational setting not only supplements the usefulness of an improved examination system, but also reassures employers that school leavers are starting work with a clear idea of their strengths and limitations and an idea of how their behaviour will impact on an organisation – a win/win solution for all involved.
