Sheffield children must be encouraged to pursue their career dreams for city to thrive, say councillors

Members of Sheffield City Council’s children, education and families policy committee discussed their See It Be It in Sheffield campaign at a meeting yesterday (June 10). The campaign, which has been running for a year, aims to raise aspirations of city children.

It works to heighten children’s awareness of career choices open to them in Sheffield. Over the past academic year, 5,903 young people have benefited from support with help from 150 volunteers.

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Secondary school students in 16 participating ‘Pride of Place’ schools will experience “a minimum of one meaningful employer encounter for every year they are in secondary education” and take part in business and social enterprise competitions.

There will also be a focus on children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in eight specialist schools and pupils in the Sheffield Inclusion Centre pupil referral unit.

Visualise

For young people aged over 16, more employers will be involved in raising careers awareness and work readiness for young people in education, particularly for those already on vocational or technical courses such as the new T-levels.

The overall aim is to give children and young people from all backgrounds the experiences that will help them to visualise themselves in careers they might not have believed to be open to them or had not known existed in Sheffield. The aim is for them to “go far and stay near”, a report to the committee said.

Committee chair Coun Dawn Dale said: “Children are born with aspiration and they are born with ambition – it just gets lost along the way with everything that goes on and they kind of get it beat out of them by the system.”

Coun Ann Whitaker said: “I run a playgroup and some of our very young children know exactly what they want to be – they want to be a vet or drive a bus, or as one little girl wants to be a mummy.

“They know exactly what they want to be and along the way they lose those aspirations. This is an excellent piece of work.”