Work Experience in Secondary Schools

Work experience schemes were becoming an ever more central part of the curriculum in secondary schools in the early 1980s; indeed, ‘work’ had become a new subject in many. Fundamental changes in the nature of work and in its distribution and availability for school leavers made it particularly important that young people had experience of the kinds of work that may have awaited them in the outside world. A wide range of schemes were developed to meet this need, including work study, simulation, link courses and pairing. Yet schools and their teachers found it difficult to obtain information about these schemes and their results. This book, originally published in 1982, solved the problem by bringing together accounts from Britain, Australia, Ireland and the USSR, with an extended editorial introduction which examines both the reasons for providing work experience in schools and the underlying social economic issues.