CognateUK Insights

A report in The Times on 5 September looked at how Sandy Secondary School in Bedfordshire is trying to intervene earlier when young people begin to disengage from education.

One of the pupils featured, Kelsey Fleming, had been struggling with attendance, behaviour and relationships at school. She spent one day a week for six weeks at Whipsnade Zoo, experiencing different parts of the organisation, including conservation, animal care and marketing.

What happened afterwards is interesting.

Kelsey described beginning to think differently about her future. Her behaviour and attendance improved, relationships at school became better, and she developed a clearer ambition to work with animals.

But the placement was not an isolated intervention.

Her teachers already knew about her interest in animals and helped connect that interest to the opportunity. Afterwards, careers guidance at school helped her understand the qualifications she would need and see a possible route from school to college and eventually into animal care.

The experience appears to have started something. The school then helped her make sense of it.

One young person's experience cannot tell us whether the same approach will work more widely.

Nor can a school's NEET rate be attributed to work experience alone.

It does, however, raise an important question:

What is it about a meaningful encounter with the real world that can change a young person's relationship with learning and with their own future?

Work experience is often explained in terms of careers awareness. That matters. Young people need to know what different jobs exist, meet people who do them and understand the possible routes into employment.

But Kelsey's story suggests that something else may sometimes happen.

For a young person who is struggling in one environment, entering another can disrupt an established view of themselves.

They meet different adults. Different things are expected of them. An interest that may have seemed peripheral at school suddenly has a practical context. Learning can begin to connect to something the young person can imagine wanting to do.

That distinction matters when we talk about young people who are not in education, employment or training, usually described as NEET.

NEET is a broad labour-market status, not a single explanation for why a young person is outside education or work. The latest House of Commons Library figures show that young people within the category include both those actively looking for work and those who are economically inactive, with many different circumstances behind that status.

This article is concerned with a narrower question: young people who begin showing signs of disengagement while they are still at school.

For those pupils, the opportunity to intervene comes earlier.

Persistent absence, deteriorating relationships, loss of interest or a weakening sense of where education might lead can appear well before a young person leaves school. If those patterns can sometimes be interrupted while the relationship with education still exists, prevention may be both more effective and less demanding than rebuilding participation later.

The question then becomes what kind of intervention matters.

Simply putting a young person into a workplace does not necessarily create a developmental experience.

They can observe adults working, complete prescribed tasks and return to school knowing more about an occupation without necessarily thinking differently about themselves or about learning.

Kelsey's experience points towards several possibilities worth examining.

One is context. Something previously encountered as a school subject or abstract requirement becomes connected to people, roles and consequences in the world beyond school.

Another is relationship. Adults encounter the young person outside some of the expectations and history that may have accumulated around them in school.

There is also agency. The learner begins to connect effort with something they themselves might want, rather than something an institution has told them they should achieve.

And there is the connection back into education. In Kelsey's case, the experience did not replace school. The school helped translate what she had encountered into a pathway she could understand and act upon.

That last point may be particularly important.

Perhaps meaningful real-world exposure works best not as an alternative to education, but as something that can change what education means to the learner.

At CognateUK, this connects with a wider question we are exploring about capability formation.

We distinguish between producing a successful output and developing the underlying capacity to interpret a situation, reason through uncertainty, make choices, respond to challenge and learn from what happens.

As AI makes polished outputs easier to produce, those underlying processes become increasingly important to notice and develop. The environments around learning may therefore matter as much as the tasks themselves.

Real-world contexts may offer one such environment. Not because young people should be given adult responsibilities before they are ready, but because appropriately structured experiences can allow choices, questions, feedback and consequences to feel real.

We are also beginning to ask whether courage belongs somewhere in this picture.

Confidence and courage may not be the same thing. Confidence can involve expecting that we will be able to act successfully. Courage may be needed when that expectation is absent: entering an unfamiliar setting, asking a question, admitting uncertainty, trying something difficult or continuing when there is a possibility of being wrong.

We do not yet know what role that plays in capability formation. It is a question to test, rather than an outcome to claim.

The Sandy example should not be asked to prove any of these propositions.

What it does show is why meaningful exposure to the world beyond school deserves closer attention. Kelsey's placement gave her an experience connected to something she already cared about. Adults around her then helped translate that experience into a possible future and back into a reason for engaging with education.

That is more than simply showing someone a career.

If early real-world experience can sometimes change how a young person understands learning, effort and their own possibilities, then the important question is not only how much work experience schools provide.

It is what kind of experience we are creating, and what happens around it.