The careers support provided to young people and adults is far from perfect, argue Aveek Bhattachrya and Niamh O Regan. But a new Education Select Committee report, drawing on the Social Market Foundation's research, shows there is growing consensus on the way forward.
If you speak to enough different people about careers guidance, you start to notice something funny. Those above a certain age are more likely to be cynical and dismissive of the exercise, seeing it as unhelpful or unresponsive to their needs. But younger people who have been through the education system in the last four or five years tend to be much more positive. Far from seeing careers guidance as a waste of time, the main complaint of students today is that they don’t get enough of it.
A report from the Education Select Committee, published yesterday, concludes that when it comes to careers provision in schools, “the right framework is broadly in place, but there is a lack of overarching strategy with stated outcomes”. We agree with that diagnosis, and most of what is in the report – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it draws substantially on research we have done at the Social Market Foundation.
Having been largely neglected in the early years of the Coalition government, careers information, advice and guidance has come on leaps and bounds since the 2017 Careers Strategy. Schools are now required to have a named careers leader, to see how they measure up to good practice as distilled in the Gatsby benchmarks and the majority of them participate in mutually supportive careers hubs that connect them to employers and labour market information.
