Not Going to Uni's national school tour reveals that nearly 30% of young people still think that apprenticeships are the route for those with no academic skills.Between Feb 2014 and March 2015 Not Going to Uni visited over 80,000 young people in nearly 700 schools, sixth form colleges, SEN schools and young offender institutions. Through a series of interactive and inspirational events we challenged misconceptions and provided young people with the information that they need to research learning and training options and careers.Not Going to Uni visited nearly 700 schools across the East Midlands, Greater London, the North East, North West, South East, South West and West Midlands, speaking to more than 80,000 young people.Interactive handsets were used to engage young people, to gather their views and to assess their understanding of the pathways and resources available to them. This is what we found –
34.9% of the young people surveyed said that they look to their parents for help with making career choices and the majority of them preferred to receive guidance face-to-face.
24.2% were looking at going to university on finishing school, with 28.7% believing that this offered the best chance of getting a high paying job. However, nearly 20% said that the huge debts incurred by full time university study put them off the university option.
More than half of those polled said that they liked the idea of going to university, but encouragingly a quarter were positive about undertaking an apprenticeship as a method of beginning their career. You can compare the degree and apprenticehip routes here.
Fantastically, 94.7% of the young people visited had learned about apprenticeships and half of these had learned about apprenticeships via a careers adviser or a teacher.
Sadly, just over a quarter of the young people polled still harboured the misconception that apprenticeships were the route for those with no academic skills, which tells us that there is still more work to be done in educating young people as regards the fantastic highly-skilled and academically rigorous apprenticeships that are available.One really interesting piece of information that emerged from these visits was that young people are leaving it very late when considering their future. 75% of the young people visited said that they still had no idea what to do after school. Given that the young people visited were in years 11, 12 and 13 this indicates that many may be studying courses and qualifications already which are not aligned to a future educational route or career option.Not Going to Uni's Results Day Guide goes live 3rd August
