UUK’s work experience target forgets that most students already have some

I am, I’m afraid.

Universities UK’s Future jobs roadmap, published with support from Pearson and the British Chambers of Commerce, is the sector’s response to a graduate jobs market in which young people struggle to find good work while employers struggle to find the skills they need.

Among seven recommendations for England, the eye-catcher is that every undergraduate should have the opportunity to access work-based learning by 2035, with a milestone of 50 per cent by 2030. DK has a write up of the rest elsewhere on the site.

The recommendations follow a national listening exercise whose participants are described in considerable detail, but students appear only through existing surveys and a passing reference to graduates’ recruitment frustrations.

Had students been involved, they may well have said some things.

Silver bullets

The work-based learning target covers sandwich years, paid placements, live briefs, job shadowing, and virtual experience – activities the report collectively describes as “the closest thing to a silver bullet in addressing work-readiness”.

It’s a broad category to load into a gun. A paid year in an organisation with structured supervision and a recruitment pathway is a different proposition from watching someone at work for an afternoon, even if both end up in the same participation return.

The report’s confidence comes from employers, who want graduates with better timekeeping, professional communication, resilience, and problem-solving, and it says universities have heard the message “loud and clear”.

The 2026 Student Academic Experience Survey finds that 65 per cent of full-time undergraduates are already in paid employment during term, with those who work averaging nearly 14 hours a week and combined study and employment commitments reaching 44.2 hours.

Plenty of students already have a manager who expects them to turn up on time, customers who expect professional communication, and colleagues who expect them to solve problems when someone misses a shift. Not every student job supplies everything a graduate needs, but it’s odd for a report whose solution is more work to say so little about the work students already do.

At Newcastle, students can bring an existing part-time job or volunteering into a 20-credit Career Development Module, with teaching, structured reflection, and assessment attached to at least 50 hours of experience. For students whose supposedly spare time is already sold, that’s a decent starting point.

Two law students

Recognising existing work leaves another problem. Take two law students – one can afford to select an internship for its relevance to the profession, the contacts it supplies, and the possibility of a training contract, while the other needs care-home shifts because those are the wages, hours, and location available.

The care work can involve real responsibility, judgement, and communication – the attributes employers say they want. But the two students’ freedom to choose their work, and the access it gives them to their intended profession, can be very different – and a participation target could count both and declare the problem solved.

Back in April, I looked at the Department for Education’s attempt to explain rising student employment through enthusiasm for work experience and career exploration, and once the figures were broken down by background, the story became rather less reassuring.

Working for experience or career exploration rose by 15.2 percentage points among privately educated students, against 6.3 among state-educated students, and by 15.3 points among students with a family history of university, compared with 2.1 among first-generation students. Meanwhile, working to supplement living costs had increased more among students from low-participation neighbourhoods.

Those figures measure reasons for working rather than types of job, but they raise a fairly obvious question about whose choices are governed by future opportunity and whose by this month’s bills.

UUK acknowledges that students from disadvantaged backgrounds should be able to “meaningfully engage” with opportunities, but doesn’t explain how it will examine who gets which experience, how places are allocated, or whether it helps students reach the careers they want.

Crediting a student’s existing job could recognise substantial learning, or it could leave them in the work financial necessity has already allocated them while better-resourced peers collect professional contacts elsewhere.

The landlord problem

A full-time unpaid placement can remove the paid hours that keep a student enrolled while adding travel, clothing, childcare, or accommodation costs, and while academic credit can make room in a course, the landlord is unlikely to accept it as rent.

We already know what happens when universities require placements without resolving that – the Student Working Lives research described students trying to combine inflexible placements with employment and academic work. One participant spelled out what that meant:

It’s not just academic time, it’s also literal work time. At one point, I was doing nearly 75-hour weeks with my job and placement. I’ve been burnt out, I’ve been really ill, and I’ve been admitted to hospital.

That’s one student’s account rather than a prevalence estimate, but it’s a better starting point for policy design than assuming students can rearrange their lives around an opportunity. The roadmap specifies no payment floor, maintenance guarantee, or entitlement to expenses alongside its target – students’ ability to participate gets a sentence, while how they’ll pay for it goes unresolved.

Nor does putting a placement into the curriculum settle pay, because required work experience of up to a year on a UK further or higher education course can fall within the minimum wage exemption. We can create an educational opportunity that stops students earning without any entitlement to be paid for the work we require – as nursing, teaching, and social work students have been explaining for some time.

Counting the employers

Paying students raises the next question, which the roadmap comes close to answering itself.

Universities cannot scale up work-based learning without increased capacity within, and commitments from, employers.

It also reports that some employers’ recruitment is limited by their capacity to train new recruits, and that a year-long paid placement is beyond the reach of many smaller businesses.

The reassuring number is that 79 per cent of employers could help provide work experience – except that’s 79 per cent of the 70 per cent who said mandatory work experience would make them more likely to recruit graduates, or roughly 55 per cent of the sample. Even that measures willingness to help, with no number of paid places, no duration, no supervision, and no commitment to places where students live.

The existing sandwich system suggests that adding placements to courses and getting students onto them are two different things. Between 2022/23 and 2024/25, the number of undergraduates enrolled on courses offering an optional or mandatory sandwich placement rose by 9.4 per cent to 386,870, while the number of students recorded as actually out on a sandwich placement fell by 4.7 per cent to 43,035.

The first figure counts students in every year of their course, so the two don’t produce a take-up rate, and placement reporting had teething problems in the first year of HESA’s new student record – although better reporting since would have pushed the later numbers up. Either way, more courses are offering a placement without more students taking one, and nothing in the roadmap explains why a target would change that.

Maybe there will be enough capacity, but the report hasn’t demonstrated it – and widening the category to shorter activities eases supply while making it more important to establish what students are entitled to receive.

Committees and campaigns

Committees, course representation, student media, campaigning, and community projects barely feature in the recommendations, despite involving budgets, negotiation, conflict, responsibility, and leadership.

The Social Market Foundation’s work on first jobs associates development opportunities, training, and leadership with later outcomes, which suggests that responsibility, feedback, support, and a next step deserve more attention than the mere fact of having taken part.

The roadmap could have recognised those routes, with universities and SUs developing assessed learning around them, although it would then have had to confront the familiar problem that students who need every paid shift may struggle to find time for an unpaid leadership position.

What counts

UUK offers examples of integration – Leicester builds 100 hours of work-related learning into degrees, and Westminster’s Zone29 students earn credit – but the headline recommendation doesn’t say whether every student’s experience will replace part of the normal 120-credit workload or be added to it, which matters for both students’ time and universities’ income.

Under the Lifelong Learning Entitlement rules, qualifying placements of at least 13 weeks in a course year attract lower fee limits, with exceptions for required professional training, while shorter credited activities don’t automatically reduce fees – and declining to award credit doesn’t automatically avoid the placement rate either.

A university that adds an employability portfolio to an unchanged degree, while expecting a student to keep their paid job and find another workplace, has created more work – whether it has created a better education depends on the design.

Students could have helped with that design before the recommendations were written, explaining which jobs they already do, why they chose them, what they learn, what they can’t afford to leave, and which professional opportunities remain beyond their reach.

The report says universities will work in “partnership” with students to deliver the recommendations. I’d tentatively suggest that it might have been wise to work in partnership with students to design them.