Education Committee
Oral evidence: Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance (CEIAG), HC 54
Tuesday 25 October 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 25 October 2022.
Members present: Robert Halfon (Chair); Apsana Begum; Miriam Cates; Kim Johnson; Ian Mearns; Angela Richardson.
Questions 66 - 110
Witnesses
I: Chris Jeffries, CEO, DevClever; Paul Warner, Director of Strategy and Business Development, Association of Employment and Learning Providers; Katharine Horler, Chair, Careers England; and Philip Le Feuvre, Chief Strategy Officer, NCFE.
Witnesses: Chris Jeffries, Paul Warner, Katharine Horler and Philip Le Feuvre.
Q66 Chair: Good morning and thank you very much for coming today. For the benefit of those watching on parliamentary television, could you please introduce yourselves and say your titles?
Paul Warner: Good morning. I am Paul Warner, the director of strategy and business development at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers.
Katharine Horler: Good morning. I am Katharine Horler, chair of Careers England and chief executive of a careers guidance charity called Adviza. With that hat on, I need to declare an interest: we deliver the National Careers Service as a subcontractor.
Chris Jeffries: Good morning. My name is Chris Jeffries, the CEO of DevClever plc. We are the development company behind launchmycareer.com, which is a careers guidance platform through which we are transforming careers education across many countries around the world.
Philip Le Feuvre: Good morning. My name is Philip Le Feuvre and I am the chief strategy officer of NCFE, which is a national awarding organisation.
Q67 Chair: Could I ask you all to be very concise with your answers? We have a fair bit to go through in a short amount of time.
The Careers & Enterprise Company was started in 2015 to co-ordinate schools, colleges and employers to support the provision of careers education. It was also meant to introduce a careers passport and was supposed to be self-funding, hence the name the Careers & Enterprise Company. In your view, how effective has the Careers & Enterprise Company been in delivering measures to further careers in schools and colleges?
Philip Le Feuvre: The first thing I would say is that something is better than nothing, and it has definitely been an improvement. I think the Careers & Enterprise Company itself would recognise that there is more work to do. I know they would say that in relation to technical and vocational education and making sure that is a priority.
Clearly, this is a challenging area. I have been involved in research that has looked all over the world at careers advice and guidance. It is difficult to get this right. There are lots of factors at play here. Self-funding is an area that lots of countries have looked at and found difficult to create, particularly when one of the priorities is focusing on the most disadvantaged first and foremost. However, it is our belief that we need greater co-ordination behind a single entity that is responsible for careers advice and guidance.
Q68 Chair: I am trying to find out the impact of the Careers & Enterprise Company. Has it really made a difference, or is it a lot of money that could be spent in a different way?
Chris Jeffries: Likewise, the Careers & Enterprise Company has done a good job in certain aspects of what it has been trying to roll out, particularly with things like the career hubs. However, the inability to assess the impact for individual learners and the lack of a consistent measure is something that could be dramatically improved through some centralisation of how it delivers that and much more of a focus on youth-centric opportunities to give better access to young people who will enjoy the experience of careers guidance and development.
Q69 Chair: What has its impact been? What has it done?
Katharine Horler: Its impact has been moderate. It has created careers leaders; we did not have careers leaders before—we had a very fragmented picture. It has set up hubs and engaged employers. There are some aspects of its mission that it has done really well. It is worth remembering that when it came there was an absolute vacuum and it has had to catch up on the vacuum. There is a lot still to do, but there are some significant benefits as well.
Q70 Chair: What are they? None of you have said anything so far about what it has actually done.
Katharine Horler: It has established careers leaders and careers leader training.
Q71 Chair: Has it made a difference to the careers of young people in school?
Katharine Horler: Having leaders has made a difference in schools. There were no leaders before. What you found before was that there were not people sitting on the senior leadership team of schools championing careers by making sure that it was on the curriculum and young people were getting guidance. Having careers leaders has been a significant development.
Paul Warner: AELP is primarily a representative body for independent training providers, which were generally very poorly served over several years. The change of leadership with Oli de Botton coming in has really been transformative in terms of the impact and engagement CEC has had with our sector. That has primarily been about delivering apprenticeships, which are vital for the economy. To have that level of engagement, that impact and that connection with independent providers is a significant difference from where we were two or three years ago.
Q72 Chair: We know that disadvantaged children struggle to get the most resources in terms of careers provision. They are unlikely—this includes children with a special educational need and free school meals—to get information, advice and guidance on careers. What are the barriers that exist to providing effective careers information to disadvantaged groups? What needs to change? Would starting proper careers provision in primary schools make a difference?
Paul Warner: Do you mean specifically with regards to special educational needs?
Chair: For disadvantaged children, what barriers exist? We know disadvantaged pupils benefit the least from careers advice. What are the barriers for them? What needs to be done to improve it? Should we start significant careers advice in primary school?
Paul Warner: The biggest single barrier across all of those areas is a lack of aspiration or a lack of belief in the ability of those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds to achieve anything. I have a particular interest in special educational needs. Everything is a fight for them.
A lot of it is about the belief. There is a barrier, to begin with, that the needs need addressing. There tends to be a view that that is the primary thing and that once you address the needs everything else will fall into place. It does not work like that. You have to have the belief that they can go further.
Specifically, we have noticed a massive drop-off from level 2 to level 3 provision, particularly for those with special educational needs. The progression rates are absolutely dire for that particular group. I believe a lot of that has to do with the aspiration for these groups.
Katharine Horler: I would agree with what has already been said. For these groups in particular there is a lack of knowledge of what the system means. They do not have family and friends who can explain it to them. Often, they need more than one intervention to help them. They often need support to think about funding, travel and the different opportunities they might be able to access. You cannot do that in a one-off careers interview.
With SEND, young people who are within the EHCP scheme are better served than the others, but there are so many young people with ADHD, for example, or with dyslexia or dyspraxia, and those sorts of issues, who do not come within the EHCP system. They get very, very little support at the moment.
Chris Jeffries: One of the main things we can improve in the way we address people with special needs and people who are not in traditional educational formats is to give them better visibility over their possibilities—over what they can achieve and aspire to become. Currently, we lack the ability to deliver that consistently to people in various fragmented pockets of education.
To mention primary as well, we need to introduce good career aspirations from a primary age. That is potentially not about looking at what kind of job a young person in primary school will eventually be doing, but helping them to understand and challenge different stereotypes in professions is super important.
Philip Le Feuvre: To build on that point on the connection to families, we know that 68% of 13 to 16‑year-olds get most of their information from their families. When it comes to 18 to 19-year-olds, 90% is families, relatives and friends. It is a huge influencing factor. We do not invest enough in family learning. There are organisations like Campaign for Learning, which does a brilliant job supporting families with things like money advice and wellbeing. More could be done to improve the base understanding of families about careers advice and guidance.
Q73 Chair: How would you do that in practice?
Philip Le Feuvre: You would leverage the network of family practitioners, providing them with support and training to deliver careers advice and guidance, at a basic level clearly, to families, and with more information about existing services that are out there.
I used to be a primary school teacher. If I take my sample class of 30 children of year 4 age, most of the young girls wanted to be beauticians and most of the boys wanted to be footballers. There is nothing wrong with those career pathways, but that was the awareness of what jobs were out there and available to them because of the family environment they were exposed to. We can and should do more to improve that flow of information to those families and their wider networks.
Q74 Chair: Rather than have all these different organisations, such as the National Careers Service and the Careers & Enterprise Company, and giving them money to do X, Y and Z, would it not be better to have a careers premium, ring‑fence funding and give it directly to schools and colleges, which could then spend it on family services or whatever they need? Of course, you could then judge the schools and colleges on the outcomes. You could perhaps have tougher Ofsted marking, for example. What do you think about that, Philip?
Philip Le Feuvre: Conceptually, it sounds great. There will certainly be some schools that excel at that. We can already see some of those schools. However, the reality is that some schools and teachers are overwhelmed already with their responsibilities. Take something like the importance of labour market information, which is set out in one of the Baker clauses. There is a huge variability in how schools are delivering on local labour market information. If you completely devolve that responsibility, you are likely to get even greater variability.
While an accountability regime, which does need to be strengthened from where we are today, might get there over time, what is happening over the 10 years between now and then, when schools are left to do what they will? There needs to be a balance between the degree of school autonomy and accountability over what they spend on and the support that is provided.
Chris Jeffries: I agree with a lot of what Philip said there. The problem for me is that, if we attribute the budget directly to the school and the school alone, we will create even more inconsistency in how we deliver careers guidance programmes nationally. There needs to be centralisation of a standard for how we deliver a specific careers curriculum.
Q75 Chair: We could centralise a standard and have guidance from the centre, but if you gave the schools money, they could appoint careers people within the school to do it.
Chris Jeffries: Again, careers delivery is very interpretive. They take the Gatsby benchmarks and other principles and create their own careers curriculum. That is a barrier to allowing us to assess the success of how that is being delivered and the outcomes from it. What we really need is a centralised digital system that can help people deliver—
Q76 Chair: A careers premium and a centralised digital system are not contradictory things.
Chris Jeffries: No, absolutely they are not.
Katharine Horler: The main issue with that—it is not a bad idea in principle—is the amount of funding that is in the system at the moment. The CEC budget is £25 million. You have to pretty much discount the National Careers Service money because very little of that is spent on young people. If you divide that by the number of secondary schools, it is about £5,000 per school.
Currently, schools report that they are spending about £2 per pupil on careers work, which is presumably less than the price of a school dinner. My real concern would be that you have to put some significant funds in for them to be able to do something effective. For £2 per student, you cannot provide proper careers provision.
Q77 Chair: The National Careers Service does offer some guidance.
Katharine Horler: It offers no guidance. It offers information and advice by phone and by web, but nothing else. It does not offer careers guidance because schools have the statutory responsibility for delivering careers guidance. The National Careers Service cannot do it because there is a conflict; otherwise, it would be taking the statutory responsibility from the schools.
Chair: It is still an offering to—
Katharine Horler: It is, but nobody knows about it.
Q78 Chair: No. We are spending loads of money on it and no one knows about it. That is exactly my point.
I will pass over to Paul and then bring in Ian. After that, we will not be able to go through every single one of you for each question because it will take too much time. We will just pick one or two of you to answer questions.
Paul Warner: There are two things here. First, we should use what is there and not build more. We have some very effective careers systems. There is a multiplicity of systems, going down to the individual schools, but, as has already been said, that can be incredibly inconsistent.
What is needed is not necessarily one body at the top, but we do need an energetic, proactive and strategic approach to how these things happen. If you look at the approach the CEC takes, for example, compared to the approach NCS takes, NCS does some very good work with adults, but NCS is more inert. It is signposting, whereas CEC engages much more. It is building much more of an infrastructure and a support framework around what goes on. From the point of view, for example, of independent providers in particular, that has allowed the building of an integrated approach that is consistent across a number of areas.
Chair: I am going to bring in Ian now. As I say, we will just bring in one or two of you to answer the rest of the questions, rather than all four of you. I just wanted to do that for the opening questions. Your family answer was really important, Philip, if you do not mind me saying.
Q79 Ian Mearns: I could not agree more. The big conundrum from this perspective is how we compensate for the lack of social capital that exists so greatly in so many of our schools and affects so many of our pupils. It is also interesting, Katharine, that you celebrated the emergence of leaders in schools—true champions on careers—but they have only £2 a head to spend on careers education. It is hardly something to celebrate from that perspective.
The other thing that strikes me about the way in which it is sorted at the moment, if it is sorted, is that we do not have access in schools to a whole range of labour market information by locality, region or the wider country. We also do not have a range of destinations data for where students end up, in order to hold schools to account in the long term.
It is all a bit fragmented and thin, isn’t it? That is the problem. We still do not have across the board regular, open and continuing access to independent, impartial careers information, education, advice and guidance. Am I not right?
Philip Le Feuvre: You are right.
Q80 Ian Mearns: Thank you very much. Okay, I just wanted to get that on the record. It is important that we accept that that is the ground we are on. I hold my hands up: I used to chair Tyneside Careers years and years ago. I was the chair of the board for the entire existence of that organisation. There was never a golden age of careers information, advice and guidance, but I am afraid to say that it was better than the vacuum we are trying to recover from now.
What is your best estimate as to how much funding goes to careers education, information, advice and guidance provision in England in total? We have heard the figure of £2 per pupil. What is the total amount that is being spent across the board? Does anybody know?
Katharine Horler: Within DFE it is around £100 million: £25 million to the Careers & Enterprise Company and the balance to the National Careers Service. You then have pockets of funding across all sorts of other Departments. The Ministry of Justice does careers work; the DWP does it in its employability programmes; the MOD does career transition work.
Q81 Chair: The local authorities spend money on it; BEIS spends money. This is what I mean: there seem to be all kinds of different moneys sloshing around.
Katharine Horler: The Committee could recommend looking across Government at what is spent on careers across all these different pots, because it could be brought together. From a Careers England perspective, what we feel is lacking is any kind of coherent strategy across Government. It is fragmented and bitty, and it results in what you have talked about, Ian—the lack of independent and impartial careers guidance. I would really argue for trying to look forensically at what money is spent on careers activity across Government. If you brought it all together and you started with a blank sheet of paper, you might create something that would look different.
Q82 Ian Mearns: Just for context, Katharine, because I have a long memory, Connexions was invented by bringing together all the careers companies. That was started on £110 million, which was the existing budget, plus about 10%. You ended up with £125 million or something of that nature. That was back in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
Katharine Horler: At the time Connexions was disbanded, it was reputed to have about £200 million in its budget.
Ian Mearns: That was just after Michael Gove came to the DFE in 2010.
Paul Warner: I completely agree with what Katharine has just said. If we are to bring it into one place with a departmental responsibility, we would strongly advocate that it should go into the Department for Education rather than, particularly, the Department for Work and Pensions. What we are all talking about is the means to progress within a career rather than just the ability to find and secure a job. It is rather more nuanced than that. It would be better suited within one Department, DFE, rather than anywhere else.
Q83 Ian Mearns: There is one thing that we forget when we talk in general terms about this whole subject. The bottom line is that this is about setting young people on a path that is best suited to their needs and to their abilities, rather than getting them to fill in somewhere just because there is a place.
Far too much of what we have seen happening in schools for quite a number of years is that the advice and guidance going to young people comes from the perspective of vested interests. In other words, “There is a place that needs filling here. We will guide young people into the places that need filling because of bums-on-seats funding regimes.” How are we going to get around that conundrum? It still seems as though there is a significant lack of adherence to impartiality and independence in the careers advice and guidance that is going on in schools and colleges.
Philip Le Feuvre: Alongside having a national strategy for careers and having it centralised in a single body, part and parcel of that would be agreeing what the right outcomes are that you are looking for and a commitment to measure against them.
To be clear, we do not have great answers to a lot of the questions you are asking about impact measurement because there is not a decent body of evidence about what has worked. There is in some areas, but not in aggregate.
Chair: That is my whole point. We have had years and years of these organisations. We have asked them this every time they have come to the Committee and we still do not know what the outcomes are.
Q84 Ian Mearns: From my perspective, the bottom line is that if young people get the wrong advice and guidance, and end up on the wrong course, they have a much greater potential for dropping out. That is wasteful from their own perspective, but it is also wasteful from the perspective of the institute they are being educated in. We need to prevent that because it puts young people, many of whom have significant levels of need, back into a place where they really should not be. That is the big question: how do we get this right to prevent that from happening? Should there be funding going directly to schools and colleges for the provision of careers education, information, advice and guidance? If so, should this replace or be in addition to the funding that currently goes to the NCS and CEC?
Philip Le Feuvre: The introduction of careers leaders is a really positive thing: it puts the accountability in a single person in a school. If I go back to my time teaching, we had someone who was responsible for safeguarding. Everyone in the school knew that was a really serious responsibility. We need to invest in those roles.
The evidence will tell you—we have heard it—that careers does not get a huge amount of funding made available, and they probably do not get the time out required to focus on the role. In that sense, we should be investing directly into schools with the right accountability over the top of that. This is one of the issues we have. We have the Baker causes, but only 7% of schools are delivering on all of them at the moment.[1] We have an issue at the minute around proper accountability for what is happening in schools.
Q85 Ian Mearns: Do not worry; it is only 93%. That is nothing to worry about. Only 93% of schools are not adhering to it properly. That’s fine.
The big question is about how schools are held accountable for what they are not doing. From the discussions we have had in this Committee, it seems to me that Ofsted does not give it that importance or that seriousness. That is really quite wasteful in so many respects. How do we get that, Paul?
Paul Warner: We have always advocated for Baker clause compliance and careers to be a limiting grade within Ofsted. We have had many conversations with Ofsted about this. I know it is a live conversation. That has happened in other areas. I believe it happened with Every Child Matters—there was a limiting-grade aspect in that. This is incredibly important for schools and we believe it should be central to their overall grading.
Q86 Ian Mearns: We have careers leaders in most schools. I am sure that some of them are real true champions, but they have very little resource. How are we going to get around this conundrum of the lack of social capital for so many youngsters in schools? Can beefing up careers education, advice and guidance be a way of compensating for that?
Chris Jeffries: Some of the success we have had has been outside of the UK, in other countries. We have a huge deployment in India, and we work with the governing body over there, the National Independent Schools Alliance, which represents 100,000 private schools. In working with them, we identified, as Philip said, that it is important to bring the family members into the ecosystem as well so we can educate them and broaden their horizons in relation to different careers and what the future landscape of careers is going to be. They can offer more support for their young people as well, so the onus is not just on one careers leader in the school to deliver that kind of guidance.
Q87 Ian Mearns: It has to be said that, where families are treading water to stand still, it is difficult to get that level of engagement.
Katharine Horler: I want to say a little more about social capital. This links back to Robert’s point about primary schools: if you want to engage families in the career journeys of their young people, you have to start back at primary stage. Parents have such a huge influence on their children and they need to understand what the opportunities are. They are different to when they were young.
Years ago, we had a project that was working with Aimhigher. We used to take primary-age children and their parents to universities. The parents were blown away by it—they said, “I never thought my child could go to university.” Opening up their eyes to those opportunities is how you deal with some of the social capital issues, but you have to start young and keep doing it consistently.
Q88 Ian Mearns: Can you remind the Committee what Aimhigher was, Katharine? That was a £40 million programme. I understand it was abolished by Michael Gove; is that right?
Katharine Horler: I had better not comment on that. It was a programme designed to get more people into higher education, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds. It was very, very effective and it did some great work.
Philip Le Feuvre: There is a point about having careers leaders, but there is also a broader issue around the confidence of teachers to deliver information, advice and guidance. The data shows that 80% of teachers do not feel confident delivering it. There is something here about the basic training that teachers need, at primary school as well, to feel confident in delivering information, advice and guidance.
Q89 Chair: Is there any careers training for teachers?
Ian Mearns: There is very little.
Philip Le Feuvre: It was over a decade ago, but I received little to none.
Katharine Horler: There is very little. It is also important to remember, coming back to Ian’s point about independent and impartial careers guidance, that careers leaders are not careers advisers. Teachers are not careers advisers. Sometimes you need a professionally trained careers adviser who can give independent and impartial careers guidance, which sometimes a teacher cannot do and a careers leader is not trained to do either.
Q90 Kim Johnson: Good morning. Picking up on your point about disadvantaged communities, Katharine, in your experience what can careers advice do to help pupils in deindustrialised and left-behind areas where there are no meaningful career opportunities and where 55% of 16-year-olds come out of school without basic maths and English?
Katharine Horler: Good careers guidance done well—I would accept it is not always done well—can be truly inspirational. It can open up people's minds to all sorts of things that are possible.
You have to work with the whole community. There is no point inspiring one young person on their own. They have to be supported by their families and by the communities they live in. It is about helping them to see people like them, having role models of people who have achieved career progression that was not expected from their communities and opening their eyes to different opportunities.
Now we have technology, there are ways of exposing people to careers they might never have thought about using digital tools. Through the pandemic, we started to use virtual work experience and things like that, which is great. If, for example, you are in rural Lincolnshire, where you are quite disadvantaged in a rural community, you can show young people opportunities in businesses they would never see. You can raise aspirations by showing people what careers look like in professions they might never have considered before.
It is about doing it well and not expecting that it will be a one-off. It is not a one-off. When you are working with disadvantaged communities, it is about the cumulative effect, little and often, with exposure to lots of sources of information and lots of exciting opportunities. You then build all of that together around the young person to help them to look at career ideas that are aspirational.
Q91 Kim Johnson: How does that happen while we are seeing a significant widening of the education attainment gap? How can we provide that level of aspiration to young people who are starting off in a much more difficult position?
Katharine Horler: The answer comes back to funding. It is not happening because of the amount it costs. It is probably worth the Committee noting that an awful lot of European social funding has underpinned those sorts of activities. Some of the projects that we and other Careers England members are delivering are funded by the European Social Fund, which comes to an end next year. We will see the bottom fall out of some of that work around disadvantaged communities, family engagement and that whole-life career exploration. An awful lot of that is funded through those schemes at the moment.
Chris Jeffries: One thing I find truly inspirational is that it is not always about helping young people to become the best at doing a singular thing in the world; it is about using the right tools to inspire people to understand what they do best and what their passions are, so we can then show them how they can apply their passions towards success in their careers and their future.
We have seen many times that, when young people are inspired and engaged in what they are ultimately working towards, their levels of learning, engagement and participation all increase in line with that, as does the encouragement they get from their community, peers and family members. Introducing more of that engagement to young people is a critical part of what we should be planning in the future.
Q92 Kim Johnson: What does good career information, advice and guidance looks like? Who should deliver it and at what age?
Chair: We will just go to Philip because of the time.
Philip Le Feuvre: It has to be independent, and it should be lifelong, from primary right the way through all age categories. There needs to be a separation between up-to-19 and 19-plus, for obvious reasons around work, et cetera. It needs to be really high quality, and that quality needs to be assured independently. Ideally, you would have it as a one-stop-shop that was connected. In lots of ways, we are not there.
Kim Johnson: That is not available at the moment.
Philip Le Feuvre: No, it is not.
Q93 Apsana Begum: Good morning. I have a couple of questions about the structure of how careers advice and guidance is delivered. In addition to CEC and NCS, we know that advice is provided by a wide range of bodies—the DWP, work coaches, some local authority programmes, Jobcentre Plus advisers, school advisers and so forth. The “Skills for Jobs” White Paper sets out an ambition to improve the alignment between the CEC and the NCS. Do the proposals go far enough to reduce duplication and overlap within the current system?
Paul Warner: There is a bit of a divide between NCS and CEC in terms of approach, as I mentioned earlier. That is one of the difficulties in bringing them together or saying that they duplicate. As I said earlier, NCS is very much an information-giving service. It says, “If you are looking to do your own research, here are the tools to do it.” The CEC tends to take a much more engaging approach that builds the infrastructure and can guide you towards where it is you need to go. It has a much more active procedure. There is an absolute place for both of those things.
I am not sure the two organisations completely overlap at the moment because it is very clear to me at least that NCS does it this way and CEC does it this way. There is a little bit of a gap between the two. There is a lot that could be done by bringing them together and merging them, but it is not quite there yet.
Q94 Apsana Begum: The White Paper talks about four recommendations. We do not know what those four recommendations are. It sets out a plan to make sure there is greater alignment. It talks about a clear all-age careers system. That is something we are going to continue to explore in the Committee.
Chris Jeffries: All of that is very important in looking at how those two companies can work or even fully align together.
For me personally, I still do not see enough focus on how users consume careers guidance and information over the period. There is a lot of focus on how we deliver it to schools in terms of resources and access to information for the people who will deliver it in the final mile. I do not just work in the careers sector; I am a father as well. I see my 16-year-old daughter and my son, and I watch how they consume information. I definitely do not see enough importance put on the way young people are going to consume that information. That should be a really big part of how we plan our strategy moving forward.
Katharine Horler: On the point about alignment, there is a lack of governance across the two organisations. Perhaps bringing them together at a governance level would help to have more coherent policies between them.
It comes back to the point I made earlier about strategy. There is no strategy at the moment. The last strategy ran out years ago. There has been nothing since. All of this has been happening in a vacuum. You could say that it is not their fault that they are not aligned, because there is no strategic overarching framework within which they need to operate. I would go back to the strategy point and say that we need a clear and coherent strategy; then those organisations would know what their place was within that and what they had to deliver.
Q95 Apsana Begum: Should careers advice and guidance be brought under one body, whether it is an existing body or a new body?
Katharine Horler: You could look at other models around the world where it is. You might argue that those are more effective.
Q96 Apsana Begum: Why are those models effective?
Katharine Horler: Look at Skills Development Scotland, which is widely held to be one of the best in the world. There are three elements that are particularly impressive: first, it has a very strong digital offer; secondly, it is all-age and it is completely integrated; thirdly, it has very high-quality careers advisers, who are all trained to a master’s level. You see the effectiveness of that as a service.
Q97 Apsana Begum: Paul, is there an existing or new body that should oversee and have responsibility for careers advice? Your organisation’s submission talked about local authorities and local labour market needs; could you expand?
Paul Warner: As I said earlier, our approach is very much underpinned by the idea that we should use what is there and not necessarily build more. There is not necessarily a need for one overarching body; there is a need for one overarching approach that sets standards and what should be expected.
There are some very innovative and exciting careers and IAG initiatives out there, there is the ASK programme and there are amazing apprenticeships. These are all doing exceptional work in their own way. They are engaging children all over the country. You have provider networks and college networks waiting to work within communities. We can engage much more cleverly than we do at the moment. It is absolutely in their interests to make sure young people are given the correct guidance to move on to their own courses, if nothing else.
You can argue that that may not be impartial but, coming back to that point, if we are looking at performance league tables, for example, there should be much more emphasis on vocational destinations within league tables. That would start to move it away from this constant thinking that academic destinations are the primary focus the whole time.
Chair: Hearing you say that is like hearing a beautiful orchestra; I completely agree.
Q98 Miriam Cates: Good morning. I have a question for Katharine first. We have talked a lot about the inputs and we have had some good suggestions about centralisation, co-ordination and those kinds of things. I am interested in the outputs. As much as we can all value good careers advice—there are obviously better ways and worse ways of doing it, better ways of funding it, et cetera—is there a body of research or evidence that shows the difference that good career services and good careers advice make at the macro level? What is the difference in society in terms of the number of people making it into a number of productive jobs and staying there for a number of years? Is there any evidence that shows that value? What are the metrics of careers advice?
Katharine Horler: That comes back to the point that Robert was making earlier. One of the problems with measuring the outputs and outcomes of careers guidance is that we never look at it over a long enough period. It is always very short term. The impact you might make in, say, six months is very different from what it might be over one or two years.
What we really want to know is whether the British economy is getting the skilled workforce that it needs for us to be successful moving forward. That is it at the highest level. Then you drill down from that to ask, “How are we filling skills gaps? How are we encouraging disadvantaged people to get into professions they have not been in before?” That is one of the problems. A lot of the measurement is very short term.
It is quite difficult to measure. I asked our staff before I came today for some examples, and they said that one of the problems is with the way the system is structured. At the moment, it sees somebody as a one-off. It is a bit like a sheep dip: they go in, they see them—boom, done, next one. It is quite hard to track the outcome and what impact that made.
One of the reasons why careers work is hard to measure is that it is like a snowball rolling down a mountain. It is an accumulation of lots of activities: raising aspirations, finding out about different areas of work, LMI, careers guidance and experiences of the world of work. All of those come together, so it is very hard to say which is the bit that makes the impact.
A lot of research has been done by some of the people you had on your previous panel. People like Chris Percy and Tristram Hooley have done lots of research at that higher level. It is probably better to ask them than me, but those are just some thoughts about the challenges of measurement.
Q99 Miriam Cates: There is no published data or review of the evidence as to what difference it actually makes.
Katharine Horler: There is, but it is quite focused on the short term. For example, there has been research done on things like the return on investment, which Chris Percy did.
Q100 Miriam Cates: What does that show? What is the quantum of ROI?
Katharine Horler: It shows that for every £1 there is a £4.4 return to the Exchequer and a £9.5 return, I think, to the individual.
Philip Le Feuvre: I would agree with what Katharine has set out. The OECD has probably done the best collation of evidence on what works internationally. That is definitely worth looking at. That was published in 2021.
This is something that a few of us have said and that you have heard before. We think there needs to be a longer-term commitment to evidencing what works. That would draw on things like the LEO data and connect with the individual learner records. At the moment, we are constrained because we are not collecting that outcomes data over a longer period. We need to put that emphasis and onus on someone, potentially the providers in this market—whether those are the schools, independent training providers or colleges—but support them to do that as well.
Q101 Miriam Cates: Philip, I just wanted to pick up on something you said about family. Katharine, you mentioned social capital. Some children grow up in families with a lot of social capital. For whatever reason, they know people across a broad spectrum of society and of careers and jobs. They might be part of a membership organisation like a faith group, a trade union, a brass band or something like that. That is the best route into finding out about careers. Would it not be better to focus the amount of money that is spent on careers very narrowly on the children who do not have those advantages to help them to build up their social capital?
I do not know whether you are aware of the work of Professor Hilary Cottam, who has done some social experiments. One of hers was published in the book Radical Help. In Brighton, she took children from very disadvantaged backgrounds and arranged for them to have work placements in loads and loads of different types of businesses, careers and jobs. It was just a Saturday here and there. She then reviewed it with them, went through learning points and tried the next one. That almost replaced the social capital or intervened in social capital. Would that not be a much better use of resource than the one-size-fits-all £2-per-head approach we have now?
Philip Le Feuvre: I would like a different vision where we genuinely support all different types of learners. However, if we are talking about having a restricted amount of money that we can spend, it does stand to reason that you would focus it on the most disadvantaged. Your point about work placements is incredibly important. We have not talked enough about that.
Chair: I was going to come on to that.
Chris Jeffries: There is one thing we have to be careful of. We talk about the social capital of existing families and communities, and supporting those who have access to that. We cannot lose sight of how rapidly changes in the careers landscape are happening because of the adoption of technology. When they leave school, 65% of primary school children will be applying for jobs that do not even exist today. It is very unlikely that their families and communities will be able to support them in modern careers moving forward.
Q102 Miriam Cates: I would push back on that: that is not necessarily true. Is one of the problems not that, with the decline of membership organisations and the decline of strong communities, children and young people have lost access to a wide range of people from a wide range of ages? If you know somebody in lots of different types of jobs who can guide you through the changes there have been, you have access to those routes. The problem is that, with declining families and declining communities, fewer and fewer children have that kind of social capital.
Chris Jeffries: I definitely agree with that. The more we can encourage connections between families and communities, the better that will be. It is just the speed and the pace with which things are changing; it is hard to get ahead of that.
Q103 Angela Richardson: Towards the top of this session we talked about funding and how it is in different departments and local authorities for careers education, information, advice and guidance. Can I talk about responsibility? It seems obvious that funding and responsibility should go together. Philip, you have suggested that it should be managed jointly by the DFE and DWP; how would that work in practice and what would the benefits be?
Philip Le Feuvre: First and foremost, we are suggesting that there is an independent body that is accountable for careers advice and guidance for all ages. The reason we suggested it has dual accountability is that up to 19 it is very clearly the purview of DFE, particularly schools in that environment. Clearly, DFE has a responsibility for HE and FE.
There is a connectivity to the world of work and therefore to DWP, and we do think they need to have a say in that governance arrangement. How the balance of that is controlled needs to be really clearly set out. I would not want to suggest that here. If you leave DWP out of it entirely, you are missing that connection to work.
Paul is right in saying there are different incentives that can perhaps lead to perverse outcomes. Those need to be factored into the policy arrangements.
Q104 Angela Richardson: With the DFE introducing the lifetime skills guarantee, there seems to be a real focus on and a move towards making sure that adults have chances all the way through their lives. Could DFE take a broader role perhaps beyond 19?
Philip Le Feuvre: Yes, absolutely. Particularly for adult FE and higher education, it makes sense that it would be a DFE responsibility.
Q105 Angela Richardson: To the rest of the panel, how could the DFE and the DWP work together on a more joined-up approach to achieve this?
Katharine Horler: We need to see the strategic and operational impact of them working together. You do not see that at the moment. We are told that at a strategic level there is a lot of liaison between DWP and DFE and that things are all aligned, but that is not the experience on the ground. You tend to find, and quite rightly, different Departments trying to meet their own internal targets.
A good example was in the Plan for Jobs. The DWP had an agenda to get people affected by the pandemic into jobs. That is fantastic, but it did not include the careers guidance bit. This was the message we were getting on the ground: “I cannot refer somebody for careers guidance on the National Careers Service because I have these targets to meet, and I have to get X number of people on X number of programmes.” My argument would be that if you had done the careers guidance bit first, you might have got the right people on the right programmes, so we would make better use of the funding we have.
You do not see that tie-up at an operational level. We are told it is happening strategically, but it has to happen better strategically so that you see it on the ground as well.
Paul Warner: Likewise, I am not really convinced that cross-departmental responsibility would be the way to go. DFE and DWP have a lot of overlap in their various remits. Over the years they come together and move apart, come together and move apart, depending on who happens to be in charge there at any one time.
As I said earlier, I am absolutely convinced that good CEIAG is about understanding the means and mechanisms by which to progress your life and to develop skills, which may be in work. Just coming back to the earlier question, it is not just about economic metrics: some of the impact of CEIAG is about how to make good choices and how to develop yourself as an individual. That is a very much more difficult to measure.
DWP does a lot of good work, but it is measured on very hard metrics. DFE is too, but there is a far greater element of soft skills development underpinning a lot of what DFE does. We firmly believe that it would be a mistake to make it cross-departmental.
Chris Jeffries: My very nutshell point would be this. We have spoken a lot about how we measure the impact of careers guidance over the lifetime learning and careers journey. For me, it is an obvious collaboration. If the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions can work more closely together, that is really where we can start to understand that longer lifespan—what is the successful implementation of careers guidance from a young age and what will success over the lifetime career of an individual be?
Q106 Chair: Chris, I will ask you this directly, as you are from a technology and careers company. How can technology really make a difference? I am talking not just about your products, but about the fourth industrial revolution. I met somebody who was interviewed online by a robot for a job working in the City. That is just unthinkable from when I grew up and was looking for jobs. Things are changing in such a big way. How does technology help with careers advice and so on?
Chris Jeffries: Every generation evolves in terms of how they engage with technology. We see how engaged our children are and how immersed their lives are in technology nowadays. Using technology to create meaningful experiences and better actual realities for the rest of their lives is where we should be focused.
My dad was a mechanic; my uncle was a mechanic. I was from a very low-income area. When I left school and college, I was put straight into a mechanics course at a technical college. It was simply because I did not have visibility of what options were available. The use of things like virtual reality and digital platforms to give young people the visibility outside of the bubble they exist in is super inspirational and important to how we can get kids on the right track and participate in their development towards contributing more in future.
Q107 Chair: Finally, we often talk about embedding careers in the curriculum so that when children are learning they do not just learn about arithmetic; they learn about how that gets them into engineering, accountancy or whatever it may be. How would you embed careers in the curriculum? All the evidence shows that work experience—Miriam touched on this—even in primary school, where kids are not working but visiting companies, makes a difference to careers later on in life, wage earnings and so on. How would you embed work experience right from primary school all the way through the system? I am going to ask you all to be as concise as possible.
Paul Warner: Everything is underpinned by work experience and tasting the real world, so that even primary school children can see why their lessons are important, what it can do for them and how we use it in this context. Many lessons are delivered in a vacuum and children do not really understand what the application of them is to the real world. Constant engagement like that and showing them why what they are learning is important begins to build the enthusiasm for it.
Katharine Horler: Building on that point, an interesting thing about schools is that they are measured on achievements, particularly exam achievements. Getting careers into the curriculum is about helping young people understand the why—why am I studying maths? Why am I studying geography? Some of it is about changing how we measure schools. If we can measure schools better on the impact they are making in getting children ready for the whole of their lives, it will embed that in the curriculum better.
Work experience is an area that has really suffered in recent years. There is hardly any going on compared to what happened in the past. That is really detrimental to young people, particularly the ones we have mentioned from more disadvantaged backgrounds. We really have to try to do something about work experience.
Q108 Chair: What would you do? What is the magic wand you would use?
Katharine Horler: If I had a magic wand I might not be sitting here. Again, it has to be multilayered. All the evidence shows that the more exposure young people have to different types of employment, the better it is. You have to multilayer it. You have to be quite inventive. That is what has been good about work experience in schools: because they have no money to do it, they are very inventive. They use their alumni; they use their parent networks; they bring in local employers. It is all of that kind of stuff.
It is about layering it. You cannot replace the physical experience of somebody going and spending time with a particular employer, and learning all that soft stuff that you cannot necessarily pick up any other way.
Chris Jeffries: In a nutshell, a successful careers guidance programme needs to be progressive. We need to be able to acknowledge young people as they progress through careers guidance, reward them and celebrate the fact that they are getting closer to being career ready and developing themselves as individuals. That will also have a great benchmark effect. We will be able to assess schools delivering these programmes more efficiently as well via the amount of people progressing through them in the right way.
Philip Le Feuvre: On curriculum, I have a slightly different take. We really need to focus on the essential skills that we embed through the curriculum—communication, critical thinking, teamwork, et cetera. We do not spend enough time thinking about how those are embedded through different subject areas.
Q109 Chair: How would you do it?
Philip Le Feuvre: We need explicit teaching of those subject areas. The Skills Builder Partnership is doing a lot of good work with schools by providing resources around that. It also needs to be threaded and embedded through other subject areas, so that, for example, teachers are specifically looking out for communication skills being applied within a geography lesson.
Chair: It could also be in history or whatever.
Philip Le Feuvre: Yes, exactly right.
On work placements, first of all, we think they are incredibly valuable and important, but there is a growing crisis emerging in work placements. By 2028 we are going to have 150,000 more young people in the education system. We are already having issues with providing meaningful work placements. On your point earlier, that is amplified by regional disadvantage. If you come from a small rural community, your access to your preferred work placement, if you want to work in a certain industry, is potentially very constrained. What do we do about that? We need to look at flexibilities, within reason. There are going to be some occupations where it is not as appropriate or possible to have a digital work experience, but in others it is very possible. There are digital industries.
We also need more creative approaches to this. Instead of having rigidity around a work placement over a defined period, how can we be creative in terms of perhaps taking students from one of those areas, getting them in college accommodation for a period over a summer holiday and having a work placement experience with an employer of choice?
We also need to work on busting the myths there are around work placements. Lots of people think about risk assessments. They are not necessarily required. How can we have a campaign to bust those myths? How do we accredit the learning that is done on work placements so there is value in that for the learner as well as for the employer? How do we recognise those employers that are stepping up and delivering on work placements?
Finally, from an accessibility perspective, we need things like travel allowance. Anecdotally, we hear about students and learners struggling and then not getting their work placement because they cannot pay the travel.
Q110 Ian Mearns: On that issue of work placements, part of the problem is that we have far too many employers, particularly in the SME sector, that do not engage with this at all. If you look at a region like mine in the north‑east—I use this stat a lot—according to the Federation of Small Businesses there are something like 110,000 businesses in the north-east of England but only about 1,000 of them have more than 50 employees. It is about the capacity in the workplace to take in youngsters from a work experience perspective. We have some real work to do. We need to engender a culture shift among businesses, showing that it is in their interest to be engaged in this process into the future as well.
Philip Le Feuvre: Yes, I completely agree. We see this. One of the industries we support is education in childcare. In that sector, it is well understood that providing people with work placements is the lifeblood of getting a workforce. That is partly to do with the challenges they have around getting a workforce, so needs must in that sense.
How do we engender that same culture and commitment? I know you are talking about SMEs, and I totally get that, Ian. Big business has a role and a responsibility to play to support small and medium-sized employers in developing the supply chain of the future—their future workforce. How do we get industries to come together and commit collectively to generate the workforce of the future that is going to support them? We have to ask more of businesses, and it is hard to ask more of SMEs, given their circumstances. What can big business do to support SMEs?
Chair: Thank you. That has been really, really helpful. I agree with so much of what you have all said today. I wish you very good luck in your work and your organisations. Thank you for travelling here today; I know some of you have come far.