Higher Education and Careers

Careers learning plays an important role in a Mayfield education, complementing the School’s aim to develop independent, self-sufficient, outward-looking, reflective, informed, and compassionate young women who are well equipped to ‘meet the wants of the age’. We encourage our pupils to challenge stereotypes, promote equality and diversity, raise aspirations, and make informed and considered choices about their futures. We do this by promoting and engendering both self-awareness and opportunity awareness, and by developing decision-making skills and transition skills.

The School’s approach to careers education is three-fold:

  • Career happiness – finding purpose or vocation in life, developing positive relationships with others, accepting self and others, realising personal growth and potential
  • Career resilience – career adaptability ie. the ability to adapt approaches, manage risk and develop strategies for success based on their own and others’ prior experience
  • Career growth – occurs when the above are in balance.

Knowledge about careers is built and developed through interaction with a range of people: teachers, parents, alumnae, peers, employers, representatives from business, universities in the UK and overseas, and career professionals. From Years 7 to 13, Mayfield girls follow a comprehensive and structured age-appropriate careers education programme which ensures that all are inspired and able to fulfil their potential. This programme provides initial careers information and advice, access to personal career guidance, promotes subject teaching linked to careers, and facilitates encounters with careers professionals, employers and with education and training providers through lessons, talks, visits, activities, careers fairs, and newsletters, and supported by careers-based IT programmes and work experience via the parent body and alumnae. Together these provide the opportunities, information and support to enable the girls to make considered choices about their future, to develop the skill of enterprise, and to understand that ‘career’ is values-driven.

Girls are always encouraged to be aspirational, to challenge stereotypes, to build on their strengths and to use their skills in the service of others, on both a local and global stage. To this end, the ‘soft’ or transferable skills – which are developed through co-curricular activities such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards Scheme, the Actions not Words programme, or the National Citizen Service (NCS) programme - are as important as hard knowledge.

Pathways Careers Bulletins

Useful Careers Websites

Careers Education Policy


Head of Department

Mrs Mary Saunders