Social Advantage, Access to Employers and the Role of Schools in Modern British Education

This chapter explores the relationship between social advantage and a particular aspect of career guidance as it manifests in modern British secondary schools, the use of school-mediated employer engagement to provide career-relevant experiences and insights to young people in full-time education. The chapter argues that unmanaged employer engagement risks reinforcing inherited distributions of social capital, as highlighted in three small-scale, highly focused studies of employer engagement: in English fee-paying schools, in access to the medical profession and in a series of state-funded schools in the West Midlands. By contrast, managed employer engagement has the potential to make up for social disadvantage, as highlighted by new analysis of a longitudinal dataset.