Welsh schools need about six employer events a year — that is your social value

Every autumn a school rings a local firm and asks for someone to come and talk to Year 9. Most contractors say yes, send a site manager for an hour, and never write it down. From this September that phone call gets more frequent — and the hour is worth more than most firms realise.

Why the calls are coming

Careers and work-related experiences (CWRE) is a statutory cross-cutting theme in the Curriculum for Wales for learners aged 3 to 16. Schools have to plan it, deliver it and be able to describe it — it is not an optional extra bolted on at the end of Year 11. The Welsh Government CWRE guidance and the Careers Wales statutory guidance set out what is expected.

The rollout also finishes reaching the top of secondary. Curriculum for Wales has been working its way up year group by year group since 2022 and reaches Year 11 in 2026–27. That means the exam-year learners who were previously outside it are now inside it.

Schools cannot deliver CWRE alone. They need employers in the room. The Careers Wales operational plan sets out an aim of, on average per mainstream school, one multi-employer event, three single-employer events and two curriculum-specific sessions. That is roughly six employer touchpoints per school, per year, across Wales — and someone has to turn up to them.

What counts as a good one

Turning up is not the same as being useful. The Gatsby Benchmarks — used across the UK as the quality yardstick for careers provision — were updated to sharpen what a meaningful employer encounter looks like: learners should meet employers of different sizes and specialisms, the session should focus on real workplace skills, and there should be time afterwards for learners to reflect on what they took from it.

Careers Wales publishes a practical step-by-step guide for employers designing work placements on Hwb. It is short, and it is the closest thing to a spec sheet for getting this right.

The bit contractors miss

Here is the pattern we see across Welsh SME contractors. The work happens — the site visit, the careers talk, the mock interview morning, the apprentice going back to their old school. Then the tender lands eight months later, the social value box needs filling, and nobody can say how many learners were reached, on what date, by which staff member, or what it was worth.

That is not a delivery problem. It is a recording problem, and it is the cheaper of the two to fix.

Two members of staff giving a two-hour session, plus travel, is a real contribution of time. Costed against a recognised proxy value and stamped with the rate and the date it came from, it becomes a line of evidence a buyer can read — not an anecdote in a bid. Do that six times across an academic year, and you walk into your next framework return with a year of school engagement already on paper.

Welsh public buyers now have to report on socially responsible procurement annually, and community benefit commitments flow down to subcontracts. The firms that record as they go will not be scrambling.