Improving careers recommendation needs to be a prime precedence, says MAGGIE PAGANO

As Jeremy Clarkson likes to remind us at this time of year, getting lousy GCSE and A-level results doesn’t necessarily land you on the scrap heap.

After all, some of the UK’s top businessmen and women either flunked their exams, like Clarkson (a C and two Us), or couldn’t bear to waste another nanosecond at school.

Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson is perhaps the best-known entrepreneur who escaped the classroom as soon as he could. 

Nearly a third of the 2,000 school leavers interviewed regret career choices. Two thirds said they are not doing what they dreamed of while studying

As did mobile phone tycoon John Caudwell, Dragon Den’s Deborah Meaden, and X-Factor’s Simon Cowell. For truly aspirational leaders who avoided higher education, think Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.

Yet these are the exceptions. So too are those who know exactly what they hope to achieve in life. 

Most youngsters don’t. Careers advice in Britain is notoriously hopeless, and in many schools almost non-existent. 

I’ll never forget the look of pride on the face of a young apprentice I met at the Bentley factory in Crewe. 

He had left school at 15 to work in a garage because he liked mucking around with cars. But he hated it. By chance, he managed to wangle work experience at Bentley.

By the time we met, he was one of Bentley’s advanced apprentices and studying for an engineering degree part-time at college. 

And, as he remarked, he had no debt. He was also one of Bentley’s ‘ambassadors’, visiting schools telling students what they were missing out on. Genius.

Why don’t more businesses run schemes like this? Most teachers are time-poor. They also don’t know enough about apprenticeships or the job market – especially cutting-edge industries like artificial intelligence – to advise their pupils.

A study from Saatchi & Saatchi to coincide with exam results shows how bleak the situation is. 

Nearly a third of the 2,000 school leavers interviewed regret career choices. Two thirds said they are not doing what they dreamed of while studying.

More worrying, around half said school had not prepared them for their jobs. And over two-thirds say they don’t have the right skills for what they are doing.

There was also an astonishing gap in satisfaction between those at state schools and their peers at private and specialist schools.

Around half of state pupils say they like what they do. Yet more than two-thirds of private school leavers – and 70 per cent at specialist schools – say they are satisfied.

That’s not a surprising gap. Teachers at private schools are more likely to be more engaged with pupils. 

Parents tend to put their offspring more readily in touch with contacts and prospective employers. Call it nepotism if you will but, like it or not, we are nothing if not tribal creatures.

Saatchi & Saatchi undertook the research because of fears that state schools are failing students, and that they know next to nothing about the creative fields. 

Which is daft as the creative industry is big business, worth around £100billion annually employing two million people.

Improving careers advice should be a top priority for Labour; contented people tend to be happier and indeed healthier. 

Instead of destroying private schools with its vindictive VAT hike, the Government should find out how and why pupils at private and specialist schools are so much more satisfied in their jobs – and why their results are consistently higher.

And it’s not just money, as the off-the-scale results at the state-run free Michaela school in Wembley, north-west London, have shown. Heaven forbid, other teachers might want to poach their methods.