Vocational Guidance

(asked on 23rd November 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of the Careers Strategy: making the most of everyone’s skills and talents, published on 4 December 2017.


Answered by
 Portrait
Lord Agnew of Oulton
This question was answered on 5th December 2018

Working closely with the Careers & Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service, we are making good progress in delivering the commitments in the careers strategy.

We have created 20 new Careers Hubs, each with a Hub Lead and central hub fund, the majority of which are coordinated by the Local Enterprise Partnership or Combined Authority. We recently announced that we will create a further 20 Careers Hubs, bringing the total to 40. We have also brought in a requirement for all maintained schools to publish information about their careers programme on their website, including the name and contact details of the Careers Leader. Additionally, we have selected 14 high quality training providers to deliver Careers Leaders training. We have offered the first 500 training bursaries to fund Careers Leaders to attend this training and we recently announced new investment to increase our offer to approximately 1400 training bursaries for schools and colleges.

We have also launched a £2.5 million investment fund to invest in personal guidance for young people and Continuing Professional Development for careers guidance professionals. We have procured a new National Careers Service, which will provide high quality bespoke support for those who need it most, including people with low qualification levels and those with learning difficulties and special educational needs and disabilities.

The Careers & Enterprise Company recently published their ‘State of the Nation’ report which measures school and college careers programmes in relation to the eight Gatsby Benchmarks of Good Career Guidance. This evaluation mentioned that Compass is a free online tool for schools and colleges in England to self-assess against the Gatsby Benchmarks. For the 946 schools that have completed Compass more than once, the average number of benchmarks achieved has increased from 1.9 to 2.9. Approximately 600 schools matched with an Enterprise Adviser and completed Compass in both the period of 2016 to 2017 and the period of 2017 to 2018. For these schools, performance against Benchmark 5 (employer encounters) has increased from approximately 40% to approximately 55%.

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