Part 2: What We Want to Do
In the first post in this series, I talked about why I started Waypoints Education and what I believe education should look like. This post is about the practical side of that belief: what we're actually trying to do, for the two groups we think a better education system has to work for - students, and the staff trying to support them.
Two sides of the same problem
It's easy to talk about "helping young people" as if that's the whole job. It isn't. Every young person figuring out their next step is surrounded by teachers, careers leads, pastoral staff and support teams trying to help them get there - often with less time, fewer resources, and less institutional backing than the job actually needs.
We don't think you can meaningfully improve one side without paying attention to the other. A student can't get better guidance if the person meant to give it has no capacity left to do it well. So Waypoints is built around two equally weighted goals, not one with the other bolted on.
For students: real opportunities to find their voice
On the student side, our work is about giving young people chances to explore who they are and what they want, not just what they're expected to want. In practice, that means:
Youth-led events where students plan, organise and run things themselves, rather than sitting through something built entirely by adults on their behalf.
Public speaking support, because the ability to stand up and say something clearly and confidently is one of the most transferable skills a young person can build, and one of the least taught.
Careers-focused workshops that go beyond a single careers fair or a worksheet about job titles, and actually help students connect what they're good at and what they enjoy to routes they might not have considered.
The common thread is agency. We're less interested in telling students what to do next, and more interested in giving them the tools and the platform to work that out for themselves.
For staff: capacity they don't currently have
On the staff side, our aim is different but connected: giving educators and school staff access to support, resources and expertise that most schools can't provide on their own, especially smaller schools or schools without the budget for extra specialist capacity.
That could look like:
Delegated support on a specific challenge - a member of staff leading on something like transition between key stages, attendance, or wellbeing, but without the team or budget to properly resource it, being able to draw on people and resources through the Waypoints network instead of doing it alone.
Research made usable - taking existing evidence and education research and helping translate it into something a school can actually act on, rather than leaving it in a paper nobody has time to read.
Connections across schools - putting staff working on similar problems at different schools in touch with each other, so solutions don't have to be reinvented at every school individually.
None of this is about Waypoints taking over a school's problem. It's about a member of staff staying in the lead, with a network behind them that can move faster and reach further than they could on their own.
Why this dual focus matters
We think an education system genuinely gets better when both sides of it are supported at the same time. A student with more agency and a clearer sense of direction still needs staff with the time and resources to notice and support that. A member of staff with more capacity still needs students who are engaged enough to make use of it. Treat either side as secondary, and the other one ends up doing more of the work than it should.
That's the version of "better education system" we're building toward: one that works for the people learning in it and the people running it, at the same time.
What's next
In the next post, we'll get into why we think this matters right now - what's actually happening in schools and to young people that makes this more urgent, not less. After that, we'll lay out how we're actually planning to build all of this, starting with the event we're using to prove the model works.
- Rahul, Founder, Waypoints Education