Early Years

In January 1980, John Mainstone was Head of Careers at Gresham’s School in Norfolk and had developed a system of assessing pupils’ interests, abilities and personal qualities in establishing their future careers and degree course choices. He developed a series of questions revealing an individual’s academic and occupational interests which became very popular with pupils and their parents. John converted this system of ‘in-depth 1:1 interviewing’ which took between 2½ to 5 hours per pupil, into a questionnaire which could be completed on a computer in around 40 minutes. 

The first program was named ‘OASIS’ (Occupational Analysis, Skills and Interests Scan) and was originally developed to a 19 point interest profile with the help of an American computer student who was spending a year at Gresham’s in the early 80's. John arranged for other Sixth Form students to further computerise the development work and by 1986 was producing career reports for Gresham’s, Sheringham High, City of Norwich School, Oundle, Runton Hill and other schools in East Anglia. 

From one of these, Oundle School, the Headmaster, Dr Barry Trapnell, had recently retired. Barry had previously been John’s Tutor at WorcesterCollege, Oxford University. A chance meeting led to Barry being offered and accepting the Chairmanship of COA, which was soon followed by the incorporation of COA as a limited liability company in August 1986.

Building COA

Barry and John wrote brochures introducing OASIS to Head Teachers and Heads of Careers, mounted a whole series of nationwide demonstrations of OASIS, inviting Heads of Careers to attend these, and their client base of schools rapidly grew.

The OASIS and Preview programmes were originally based on the BBC ‘B’ computer, which was then being distributed to schools free of charge by the government of Mrs Thatcher. The limitation was its very low 32K (later 128K) of RAM creating the need for constant rationing of RAM space – but despite this ‘OASIS’ was soon able to:

1. ask 300 questions on screen – which could be answered Y (Yes), P (Possibly) or N (No) and store the answers.   COA later moved on to paper based questionnaires which were found to be easier to administer with large groups of pupils
2. produce a profile of 44 of a pupil’s occupational and academic interests, work preferences, academic performance and relevant skills
3. print out a personal report for each pupil suggesting good careers group matches for pupil/student investigation and research
4. produce a system of careers analysis forms, to enable pupils to assemble relevant information on potential careers which brought out important points of comparison.

During these developments, the emphasis was always upon pupils' self-analysis and eventual career or course selection.

The OASIS and Preview programmes were continuously adjusted and updated to produce more accurate comparative interest scores. Later on these have been regularly assessed by Dr Charles Johnson to establish their psychometric characteristics and reliability.