The career is the context. The curriculum is the learning.

For years, I’ve worked at the point where employers and education meet. Both sides generally want the same thing: better opportunities for young people. Making it happen is harder.

Through my Careers Hub work, I worked with Enterprise Advisers and other business volunteers who wanted to give something back and bring their experience into education.

But schools are busy. Employers are busy. Teachers don’t necessarily understand the demands of business, and businesses don’t always understand the realities of schools.

My colleague and friend Carrie Childs once described bridging the two as attaching a speedboat to a tugboat.

Neither is going in the wrong direction. They just move very differently.

That got me thinking: could we make it easier for employers to contribute in a way that genuinely helps teachers too?

Start with the curriculum

That’s the thinking behind The Site Challenge™.

Instead of starting with “How can we get an employer into a school?”, I started with:

What are students already learning, and how could the workplace give that learning a meaningful context?

The Site Challenge is a KS3 English resource built around a construction scenario.

Students read workplace information, identify a problem, decide what matters, discuss a response, deliver a 60-second briefing, answer a question using evidence and write a concise recommendation.

They’re practising retrieval, inference, selection, synthesis, oracy and writing.

But they experience those skills through a real-world problem.

The career is the context. English is the learning.

Give students a reason to learn

I remember sitting in school with the concentration span of a gnat. I was easily distracted and learned much better when I could see a purpose to what I was doing.

That’s stayed with me.

Rather than telling students they’re going to practise inference and synthesis, The Site Challenge gives them something to solve.

Only afterwards do we reveal:

You’ve just been doing English.

That connection between learning and its application is what interests me.

Employers don’t always need to be in the room

It’s also designed around the reality of employer engagement.

For an SME, giving up staff time to repeatedly visit schools can be difficult. But that doesn’t mean their expertise can’t be present in the classroom.

An employer can help shape the scenario, provide authentic workplace insight and show where people in their organisation use these skills.

That knowledge becomes part of a resource teachers can use repeatedly.

The employer can be present in the classroom without always having to step over the threshold.

And a curriculum resource can become the beginning of something bigger: an employer encounter, a visit, work experience or another activity as the relationship develops.

Instead of isolated activities, schools and employers can build a progressive partnership.

This is just the starting point

AI makes developing resources like this considerably quicker, but the important work remains human: understanding the curriculum, understanding the employer, designing meaningful learning and making something teachers will actually use.

The Site Challenge starts with English + construction.

But the same principle can work across different subjects, occupations and sectors.

Through True North, I want to help employers turn their knowledge into curriculum-connected engagement that is useful to schools, relevant to students and connected to their future workforce.

Start with what schools need. Bring in what employers know. Create something valuable for young people.

The Site Challenge is the first.