16th May 2023
Last month Complete-Careers LLP Director, John Ambrose was invited to Westminster to give oral evidence to the Youth Affairs APPG on Skills and Youth Employment.
The oral evidence followed the written evidence Complete-Careers submitted before the end of April. The inquiry was led by Jo Gideon MP with a secretariat provided by the British Youth Council and the YMCA.
John took the opportunity to feedback on the following core themes that act as barriers to skills development and youth employment:
- Broaden the curriculum – reforms to GCSE and A Levels, as well as changes to the inspection process have led to less time in the curriculum for careers and personal development learning and opportunities for enrichment. As a result, young people are not afforded the opportunities to reflect, personalise and plan their journeys through education. Many young people have a distinct lack of self-awareness of their overall skills, interests, vocational personality and work values.
2. Extend the focus of careers – The Gatsby benchmarks are now well established and the CEC provides extensive support to schools towards achieving the benchmarks through hubs, compass/compass plus etc. Although we have encouraging learner data on ‘career readiness’ from the Future Skills Questionnaire, there is emerging evidence from early Local Skills Improvement Partnerships and from the Edge Foundation that suggests that learners are confused about the language employers use and can’t demonstrate an understanding of their skills/strengths. We have the existing CDI framework as the recommended learning outcomes framework to help schools and colleges build careers programmes to develop the leaners’ knowledge, skills and attitudes. We also have the Quality in Careers Standard which is ‘strongly recommended’ by the DfE which provides quality assurance standards. Achieving the standard requires evidence of leaner competence identified from learner focus groups. The problem though, is that the benchmarks are referenced 41 times in the current statutory guidance, but the CDI and Quality in Careers Standard are each cited only twice. Addressing this imbalance could improve the learner outcomes considerably.
3. Social Justice and Social Capital – careers education and guidance is at the heart of addressing social justice and social capital. Mounting evidence suggests that young people’s values and assumptions about themselves, their place in the world and their aspirations are set as early as age 7. We therefore must continue to build on the work the sector has started to promote career-related learning in primary education.
4. National Shortage of Career Guidance Practitioners – the sector is experiencing difficulty in recruiting trained Career Guidance Practitioners. In education, pay and conditions are poor often resulting in practitioners leaving, after they are qualified, to work in HE, prison services and the Job Centre Plus, which all generally pay better. We also have data suggesting that a quarter of existing Career Development Practitioners are expected to leave the profession within the next two years due to pay and conditions or retirement. We urgently need a strategy to recruit Career Development Practitioners.