During 2022, The Switch (formerly Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnership) is celebrating 30 years of delivering employment education programmes across East London. I’ve personally worked with the charity for 20 years and have been its Director for nine. I love my work, but it’s with some sadness that I acknowledge our charity’s need to exist. Tower Hamlets is an area of high deprivation. Despite having excellent schools, many young people here do not have the knowledge of how to access the career opportunities or networks that are available to their more privileged peers. Through our various school employability programmes, this is exactly what The Switch aims to remedy.
In July, we held our official 30th anniversary celebration. The event was a coming together of pupils past and present, teachers, business volunteers and representatives from our wider partnerships. This included the Edge Foundation, which generously funded The Switch’s virtual work experience programme during the pandemic. The programme helped Tower Hamlets students maintain contact with employers when face-to-face work experience was impossible and it remains an invaluable part of our offering.
Attending the event, Edge’s Employer Engagement and Education Manager, Cassie Cramer, described it as:
“an amazing opportunity to recognise The Switch’s important role in transforming the educational offer in Tower Hamlets”, adding that, “96% of schools in the borough are now rated ‘Good’ by Ofsted, partly due to the employer engagement and aspiration building that the Switch has provided.”
Feedback like this from valued partners like Edge is wonderful. It shows that after all these years, we’re still doing something right!
However, the event was much more than just a celebration of the past. It was also an opportunity to reflect on where we’re going. Because while schools in Tower Hamlets are thriving compared to 30 years ago, poverty is still a huge problem. We don’t want that to define us, though. One reason we changed our name to The Switch was to create a more dynamic story – to quite literally ‘switch’ the narrative from Tower Hamlets being a borough steeped in poverty and disadvantage to one full of talent and employment opportunities.
This isn’t just wishful thinking. Digital and creative sectors are springing up all over the area and London’s financial hub is located nearby at Canary Wharf. With businesses increasingly focused on equality, diversity and inclusion, and schools in Tower Hamlets exceeding national standards, the talent match seems obvious. Yet the borough still suffers from high graduate and youth unemployment. Why?
Many big companies nearby – from Barclays to KPMG – often hire new starters via assessment centre days. These events attract talent from all over the world. This includes many individuals with practice, polish, experience, and buckets of confidence. It’s also these young people who walk into a room and shine. Then, next to them, you’ve got local talent like ours, who are very academically bright but lack the same enrichment opportunities. Yet they are still expected to make their voices heard. This is not an equal playing field.
We realised that our local youth – despite being extremely bright – are not accessing the specific skills and real world experience they need to compete in the local jobs market. That’s why, as part of our 30thanniversary celebrations, we’re fundraising for our new Alumni Programme. Working with 18-25-year-olds for the first time, the Alumni Programme will provide the extra support young people need to navigate the tricky landscape between formal education and the workplace.
The Alumni Programme will build young people’s confidence, helping them see (and, most importantly, believe) that the global jobs market on their doorstep is as much for them as for anyone else. With funding from Foundation for Future London, we’re now developing a jobs portal to advertise school leaver and graduate-level roles specifically to young people in East London. We’ll supplement this with hands-on support – a mixture of practice exercises, coaching, mentoring, and mini-assessment centres. They’ll then be ready to go in and hold their own during these corporate recruitment days.
The expression ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ applies so much to what we do. The whole community has to pull together to make a difference – we can’t work in isolation. Although we live in a competitive world, it’s only through collaboration with organisations like Edge, great links with the community and local employers, and constant, targeted parental engagement that we can break down barriers and affect real change in these young people’s lives. Academic achievement is important. But as the young people in Tower Hamlets illustrate, it’s not everything. To really thrive, they need workplace experience and real world learning opportunities. Only then can they walk into a workplace with everything they need to smash it!
While there’s still very much a need for our service, I hope that by equipping young talent with the employability skills they need, there will eventually be a day when the cycle of poverty ends. Perhaps then, organisations like The Switch will no longer need to exist, and we can celebrate organically thriving, connected communities instead.
Helen Sanson is the Director of The Switch, an East London charity that facilitates positive engagement between education and employers.