When you are young, it can be difficult to see the relevance of many of the things that you are taught at school — integral calculus, French irregular verbs and Henry VIII all seem so far removed from your world.

John May, chief executive of Career Academies UK, a charity encouraging links between schools and employers, says: “I sense that education is still a broad, slightly woolly thing that is about making young people feel good about themselves and the love of learning, and I would agree with all of that, but ultimately I think that education is about preparing young people for adult life.

“And for the vast majority of young people, that actually means the world of work. So we shouldn’t be afraid of having relationships with the corporate world and employers to help young people understand the realities of what that involves.”

Mr May, whose Career Academies UK office is provided by Citigroup at Canary Wharf, East London, says: “We work with employers to give young people a set of experiences that help to take what they are learning in the classroom into the real world.”

The Career Academies programme, in which schools act as franchises paying £100 a pupil a year, revolves around partnerships between more than 100 schools and 750 businesses to provide mentoring, internships and access to business leaders for pupils aged 16 to 19. As part of the scheme, Hector Sants, chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, recently visited a school to explain the credit crunch to a group of sixth-formers.

The academies’ programmes can be based around a number of themes: IT, marketing and communications, finance, business administration, sports science, creative and media and, from this summer, engineering. The common theme is that there must be real-world opportunities in the form of mentors, internships and jobs.

Mr May said: “What I don’t want is hundreds of schools to approach us saying, ‘Our young people really love media studies, so we would love to do a media studies academy’, without them looking around to see if there are actually jobs available. We are trying to twist things on their head a little bit. Our programme is employer-led and not learner-led.”

Career Academies is not another vocational educational initiative aimed either at the disenchanted or at the gifted. Mr May, a former headmaster, says: “We focus our work on areas of social need, where young people don’t have the sort of networks that people in more privileged situations might have. We don’t limit our work to areas of social need, but we focus it on them.

“We are aiming, at what I describe as the forgotten middle . . . working with ordinary, enthusiastic, but perhaps slightly directionless, young people.”

The strategy is bringing results. More than 2,000 sixth-formers have participated since the scheme’s launch in 2002, of whom 40 per cent had originally been expected to go to university; after doing the course, 71.5 per cent did so, or 92.5 per cent if degree-equivalent work-based training is included.

The aim is to increase the number graduating from the programme to 7,000 a year and to increase businesses and organisations involved in it from 100 to more than 200 by 2012. For businesses, involvement in the programme ticks three boxes: corporate social responsibility, staff development and recruitment.

Mr May said: “Often [staff are] mentoring somebody who is going to exhibit a load of views and challenges that you wouldn’t necessarily normally come up against with a co-worker, just because of their age and lack of experience. It is experience you can pull back into your everyday work.

“And increasingly there are a number of firms who see internships as a way of talent-spotting, either because they want to diversify their workforce or because actually getting young people to come and join their particular sector is a challenge.”

Mr May is especially keen to enrol public sector organisations in the scheme. Last year 15 local authorities, five hospital trusts and a few government bodies offered internships. “I think there is an interesting challenge, particularly for councils at the moment to present careers within the public sector as being something that young people might aspire towards,” he said. “If one looks at the age profile of people working in councils, it is going up and up. One of the things that we are quite keen to do is to help councils to show that there are a whole range of careers that young people can go into.”

There is also some way to go before students appreciate the opportunities. Mr May said: “If you talk about financial services, they think about working for a bank. They don’t realise that if you have got a finance background you could be working in a local authority or for a big corporate in their treasury department.”

He added: “I don’t think we make the most of what business has to offer in helping young people to understand what adult life is going to be like. Right the way through my teaching career, I worked really really hard with employers because I felt that bringing the real world into the classroom was something that, even for small children, was quite important.”

If Mr May has anything to do with it his approach will be rolled out across the UK education system.

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