But today’s exam results reveal first drop in pass rates
The majority of the country’s “driven and ambitious” GCSE students have already chosen a career path, new research has suggested.
The findings come as 600,000 teenagers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland collected their GCSE results this morning.
The overall A-C pass rate has dropped to 68.1 per cent from 69.4 per cent – the first fall in the exam’s 25-year history. The proportion of A* or A grades also dipped from 22.4 per cent to 21.3 per cent – falling for the second year in a row.
Head teachers said changes to exams had caused “a lot of turbulence” in grades.
However, KPMG’s latest study revealed that 70 per cent of GCSE pupils had already decided on their career, and that one-quarter would like to run their own company.
When selecting a career path, obtaining a competitive salary was the most important priority for 66 per cent of respondents, compared to helping people (35 per cent).
Six in ten of the 300 GCSE students polled would also only pick a job that could accommodate a good work-life balance. Just 35 per cent were keen that the company they worked for was socially responsible.
In a worrying result for some sectors, many respondents wanted to focus on creative skill sets, with only 7 per cent predicting that numerical and analytical skills would be needed by employers in thirty years’ time.
KPMG said that employers should take advantage of the entrepreneurial drive exhibited by these future workers.
“Unless employers recognise key differences, such as a rising entrepreneurial energy, they will fail to effectively engage their future employees,” explained Robert Bolton, partner and co-lead of KPMG’s HR global centre of excellence.
“In order to attract and retain some of the most talented and ambitious youngsters, employers must harness this entrepreneurial impulse in the workplace by financially rewarding new ideas and explicitly recognising it from a performance management perspective.”
The CIPD also encouraged organisations to improve their strategies for engaging young workers.
CIPD chief executive Peter Cheese said many organisations were creating apprenticeship opportunities or school leaver programmes.
“However, there remains a significant proportion of employers who are not doing enough to engage with young people to help them to build the work skills they will need, and at the same time to build the future workforce their organisations need,” he added.
“Business has a key role to play in developing our young people in order to bridge employability gaps and skills mismatches. We cannot simply expect governments or education systems to churn out off-the-shelf employees.”
Meanwhile, official figures released this morning revealed an annual drop in the number of NEETs in the UK – people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training.
There were 1.09 million young people classified as NEETs in the quarter from January to March 2013, down 104,000 from a year earlier.