Motivated to Achieve – report shows power of volunteers

This month the ELBA schools team had the pleasure of attending the launch event of a new report by the Education and Employers Taskforce (EET), ‘Motivated to Achieve’.

Along with brilliant guest speakers Geoff Barton (Association of Schools and Colleges Leaders) and Adrian Lyons (Ofsted), the EET shared their research findings around the power of career talks for students.

The findings, which point unanimously to the beneficial power of interactions with volunteers, strongly align to the data ELBA have gathered around our work on these interactions in the past few years. Although we know anecdotally the power of a volunteer sharing their story with a young person, to have preliminary research outlining the changes in students’ attitudes and motivation to revise was inspiring to hear in a formal setting.

Over the past couple of years, the ELBA schools team has gathered some similarly astounding research about the effects of these types of meaningful interactions, which showed that 94% of students we worked with agreed that the session had improved their understanding of how a business works, and 86% agreed that the session had encouraged them to consider other opportunities, careers and pathways*, which would have a substantial effect on their perception of school and opportunities following their school life.

Only by raising aspirations of the next generation to learn about and be inspired by the career paths open to them, will we then be able to show today’s employers the shining bright talent pool we have on our doorstep.

*From a sample of 1182 unique students over 32 sessions through academic year 2017/2018