As Director of Career Mark (a Licensed Awarding Body of the Quality in Careers Standard) and as deliverer on two of the national Careers Leader training programmes for the Careers and Enterprise Company, I am fortunate to meet many Careers Leaders throughout the country. I am also fortunate to know and liaise with a number of Careers Leaders on a regular basis throughout Lincolnshire and the East Midlands. In this blog I want to share my thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of current careers policy and practice.
First of all I think is vitally important to start with the strengths:
- We have a national Careers Strategy
- We have clear statutory guidance for schools
- The guidance is based on international evidence (Gatsby research)
- We have a mechanism to support schools to improve employer links (Careers and Enterprise Company)
- We have a system to self-assess progress against the statutory guidance (Compass Tool)
- We have national occupational standards, a professional body (CDI), code of ethics for careers practitioners and a professional register
- All Careers Leaders have access to quality training
- All schools are ‘strongly recommended’ to achieve the Quality in Careers Standard
Wind back the clock to 2015, ironically when we decided to set up a careers company, this is a huge step forward. Careers is now very much on the agenda and much of this is thanks to Gatsby.
The statutory guidance clearly states that every school should have a careers leader and publish their details on the school website. There are many new careers leaders and most are taking advantage of the Careers Leader training. Being involved in the delivery and training over 100 Career Leaders to date on the programme has enabled me to meet some dedicated, creative and passionate individuals all keen to make a difference. The main observation I have though is of the pre-course knowledge of the Careers Leaders.
Naturally the new Careers Leaders have turned to the Statutory Guidance, Ofsted and the Compass Tool to learn more about what they ‘should’ be doing to be compliant. My issue is purely that the current national focus is all on what schools should be doing and not on the knowledge, skills and attitudes learners should be developing in order to be effective career planners and prepare for their transitions.
This in my opinion is a fundamental omission of policy. How is it possible to have a ‘stable careers programme’ without clearly defining the aim of the programme and the learning outcomes you want your learners to achieve throughout and as a result of your provision?
The vast majority of Career Leaders enrolled on the national training programme, through no fault of their own, have no idea there is a best practice framework for careers, employability and enterprise education produced by the CDI and updated in March 2018. This contains 17 learning outcomes from key stage 2 to key stage 5 under the following broad aims of:
- Developing yourself through careers, employability and enterprise education
- Learning about careers and the world of work
- Developing your career management and employability skills
These outcomes are not perfect and need to be adapted to meet the needs of each school, but they are an excellent starting point and are underpinned by decades of occupational choice theories.
I can’t think of any other subject are in education where there isn’t at least recognised guidelines for what to cover in the curriculum/syllabus, but that is what is happening with careers. The focus of inputs for schools of quantitative encounters and experiences creates a ‘splattergun’ approach of unconordinated careers activity. There is a real danger that multiple encounters may instead confuse the issue unless learners are afforded sufficient opportunities to make sense of the encounters and apply to their context through a planned programme of careers education, underpinned by learning outcomes.
It also proves difficult to successfully measure the impact of a careers programme without starting with an aim of what you are trying to achieve and outcomes detailing the knowledge, skills and attitudes you want your learners to develop. Impact measures of destination data is far too subjective to be meaningful and should always be triangulated with monitoring of career learning, review using feedback from all stakeholders and evaluation of all factors to ensure continuous improvement.
With so many strengths and positives about the focus and provision of careers at present I find this issue so frustrating. A simple and effective change to Gatsby benchmark 1 ‘Stable Career Programme’ to fully embrace careers education would have such an impact. Especially in a new Ofsted inspection era of depth and breadth of the curriculum too.
For more information about anything in this blog please contact me at john.ambrose@complete-careers.com
John Ambrose
Strategic Director
Complete-Careers LLP