Careers provision in most school systems rests on a set of beliefs about when children decide things and what they need in order to decide well. Two large studies, one from the OECD in 2020 and one from the UK charity Education and Employers in 2018, undercut several of them.
1. That the decision happens at sixteen
It mostly happens earlier. The OECD’s Dream Jobs? report found that the career aspirations of seven-year-olds already carry the imprint of gender stereotypes and social background, and that these shift very little by seventeen. Provision aimed at year eleven is arriving after the shortlist has been written, not before.
2. That more information solves it
Students have access to more career information than any previous cohort and are still choosing from a handful of options. What is scarce is not information but context: the ability to picture the work from the inside.
Elizabeth Tweedale, founder of the online coding school Coco Coders, put it this way: “They don’t even start looking at life after graduation until they are 16 or 17. By then, they are faced with an overwhelming paradox of choice and almost zero context.”
3. That children hear about jobs at school
Drawing the Future asked more than 20,000 primary school children in 2018 about the job they wanted and where they had heard of it. Fewer than one percent had learned about it from someone who came to their school. The rest drew on television, social media and family occupation, which is a filtered and self-reproducing sample of the labour market.
4. That technical education is for the technically inclined
The children who most need to see the technical layer of an industry are the ones who will not work in technology. A student who loves animals gains something from knowing that a regional shelter network runs on scheduling software. A student interested in cities gains from knowing that traffic flow is an algorithmic problem. Neither is being recruited into engineering; both are getting a truer picture of the field they already like.
5. That interest and aptitude are the same thing
They are frequently confused, particularly in computing, where children who arrived with a head start in gaming and tinkering read as gifted while children without it read as beginners. Tweedale encountered that at university, where she was often the only woman in the room, and built the Coco Coders curriculum with two entry points as a result: one through game mechanics and back-end logic, one through narrative and interface design, both arriving at the same technical literacy.
What a better model looks like
Coco Coders runs ten-week foundation blocks followed by four-week deep dives on a real piece of technology. An ocean conservation dive studies Mr. Trash Wheel, the solar-powered interceptor operating in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, then asks students to design their own response.
The structure is doing something specific. It replaces the abstract topic, which produces observers, with a solved problem, which produces designers.
Questions
How early should careers work start?
Earlier than most systems begin it. The OECD’s finding that aspirations are largely set by seven is the clearest available benchmark.
What is the single highest-value intervention?
Contact with people doing the work. It is the one Drawing the Future found to be almost entirely absent, at under one percent of children.
Does this require timetable space?
Not necessarily. Much of it is framing: naming the technical and operational layers of jobs children already know about.
Where can Coco Coders’ curriculum be reviewed?
Programme information is at cococoders.com.
About Coco Coders
Coco Coders is an online coding school founded in 2016 by Elizabeth Tweedale. It teaches Scratch, Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to school-age children through live interactive classes in group and private formats, and works with students in the United States, the United Kingdom and internationally. Course information is published at cococoders.com.