I didn’t know what to expect coming into this experience, but this has surpassed all my expectations by a lot. I have learnt a great deal about the work that goes behind making Parliament work and it has made me appreciate the different areas of PDS
We recently we had the pleasure of welcoming six young people – A-Level students – to Parliament to spend a week with us on a work experience scheme.
For most of the young people, this was their first experience of coming to Parliament. It was also a first for us in a different sense. The week was a pilot scheme – an initiative from our PDS Inclusion and diversity strategy. We decided to focus on this age group as it’s such a formative stage where experiences like this can shape young people’s decisions and opportunities, and springboard the next steps in their education and career. With that in mind, we wanted to make it the best possible experience for them.
Planning the week
The scheme was planned and coordinated by a small core team (including myself) of PDS and Parliament colleagues, volunteering alongside their usual roles.
In our small team, many of us had a story of a not-so-great work experience in our youth or early careers – repetitive weeks that didn’t centre our interests, needs or aspirations. We really wanted to do the opposite – to give the young people joining us an engaging and useful experience. We wanted them to come away with specific experiences and examples which they could use for job applications or learning opportunities. For us, PDS is an exciting and rewarding place to work and digital careers can offer huge opportunity and variety, so we also wanted to excite and inspire the young people about the possibility of working in Parliament, the public sector and in a digital team.
We started planning and designing the scheme back in January, working with a third party who specialise in connecting schools and young people to organisations and opportunities like ours. They provided us with advice on designing the programme, worked with schools to offer the opportunity and select students, and provided safeguarding expertise as the young people were all under 18.
The week
Every day has been amazing and informative, everyone has been really helpful and lovely from the beginning - as if we had known each other for a long time
We created a timetable which, throughout the week, introduced the students to several key teams within PDS, giving them the opportunity to learn about our work, ask questions and work on some mini tasks. The students developed a project proposal throughout the week (focused on rolling out one of Parliament’s websites) and presented this at the end of the week. They also had some guidance from our HR team on job applications, aimed at helping them whichever route they take next.
We were keen to give the students a flavour of the wider Parliament. They had a tour of the Houses of Parliament with our engagement team. We secured them some much sought-after tickets for Prime Ministers Questions in the House of Commons. We also managed to arrange a meeting between them and the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle. The Speaker has one of the most important and busiest roles in Parliament so it was a real honour for the young people to meet him. But equally Parliament and the Speaker place great importance in engaging with young people and widening access to Parliament, so it was a great pleasure for the Speaker to meet these students too.
Everything was well organised and the fact that everyone introduced themselves at the start really helped to get to know everyone
About 40 people in various roles across PDS volunteered in different ways during the week to support the programme. We wanted the students to get to know our people, to see the diversity within PDS, and to know that there are different routes to join an organisation like ours. So each of these PDS staff members made sure to introduce themselves, with some detail about their background and journey to working in Parliament. The students heard from someone who joined at 18 as an apprentice, someone who joined after university through the fast-stream, someone who started in the music industry before changing careers to IT and a Director who started out in a admin role, to share just a few examples.
Evaluation and future plans
I want to thank you all for everything, making me at home and giving me such a wonderful experience
The week was a huge success. We had great feedback from the students themselves who all reported they had really enjoyed the week and felt comfortable throughout, helping them to experience had helped them grow in confidence. They would all highly recommend the scheme to others and gave us some useful feedback that will help us to make the scheme even better in future.
It was a joy for us to meet such an engaged and inspiring group of young A-level students, and to see their confidence and knowledge grow throughout the week.
We’ve had hugely positive feedback about how much our staff enjoyed supporting the week and how rewarding they found it to meet the students and to support their early careers.
Our team are pulling together the pilot learnings now and will be proposing next steps for PDS to continue supporting young people and those in their early careers. We’ll be working with our HR teams design to plan and deliver future work experience schemes to build on what we achieved this year.
*The quotes in this blog are from student feedback.