19
Examination of witnesses
Katharine Horler, David Morgan, Sam Everard and Wayne Ingram.
Q95 The Chair: Welcome to this session of the Public Services Committee. We are taking evidence for our inquiry into the transition from education to employment for young disabled people. I will start by asking our panel members to introduce themselves.
Sam Everard: Good afternoon. I am the chief exec and founder of the SAMEE charity, and I chair the regional stakeholder network for the Cabinet Office disability unit.
Wayne Ingram: Good afternoon. I am the deputy CEO of the SAMEE charity but also a careers adviser of about 20 years’ standing. It would be quite nice for Sam and I to give you an idea of what it is actually like on the ground, so we will give you that perspective.
David Morgan: Good afternoon. I am the chief executive of the Career Development Institute, the professional body for career development across the UK.
Katharine Horler: Good afternoon. I am the executive director of Careers England, which represents careers companies across England. I am also a qualified careers adviser, probably for a bit longer than Wayne.
Q96 The Chair: Thank you all for coming to talk to us today. One of the things we have to remember as a committee is that, although our inquiry is into support for people with disabilities, unless you understand the basic structure it is very difficult to work out whether the support for people with disabilities is appropriate. Because of the complexity, we are still at the point of trying to be really clear what there is.
A useful question is what you think good careers education and advice would look like for a young person with disabilities. That might give us a good picture. What would be ideal? If you can, be clear when you are answering about whether you are talking about careers education in school or the guidance that comes from expertise outside school.
Katharine Horler: What does ‘good’ look like? Really great careers guidance inspires and motivates people. It is even more important to give young people with special educational needs an idea of the possible, to help them think about what they might be able to achieve with their futures and to break down barriers for them.
One of the challenges is that it needs to be differentiated and appropriate, and that takes time. One of my concerns is that the system is often set up in a generic way. There is a worry about whether pupils with special educational needs have differentiated encounters with employers, for example, or appropriate support through transitions. Their careers programme needs to be bespoke to their needs, so what ‘good’ looks like is a bespoke programme for each individual young person. I am sure you will have found through the evidence you have taken that every single young person with special educational needs is different; they have very different needs. It is often very easy to stick it all into one pot and think that one size fits all, and it absolutely does not—particularly not for this group of young people.
Another thing we might want to consider this afternoon is that we are talking about young people in special schools where the provision is probably a bit better because there is more specialist support available and it is possible to develop expertise. There are young people in mainstream schools, but increasingly there are also a lot of home-educated young people, particularly those with SEND, who are probably getting very little at all.
The Chair: We have not even thought of the home-educated ones, so thank you for bringing that to our attention. Is that a growing and significant number?
Katharine Horler: Yes, particularly neurodiverse young people with multiple issues.
David Morgan: Good careers guidance is definitely critical in transitions for young people with disabilities. On how we see it structured within the career development profession, we refer to it as CEIAG: careers education, information, advice and guidance. To break that down a little, careers education is the broader piece around careers, helping young people to widen their perspectives about the different careers there are, building in workplace experiences and embedding it into the curriculum so that they can relate learning to work. That is typically the domain of a careers leader.
Then you have personal career guidance, which is things like the one-to-one interview or meeting. That is about helping that young person to understand and define their career aspirations on an individual basis, and to understand their strengths and what they want to achieve from their career, what is right for them, what their learning style is and so on, so that they can go forward and say, ‘This is what I want to do’. Then the information and advice comes in on how they achieve that. What are the options and different pathways? What are the different aspects of work?
The education, information, advice and guidance really work together as a complete package. There are two key roles within that. The careers leader in the school looks after the careers education and the careers programme—what we offer overall—building relationships across the school and with employers. They are not qualified unless they have done a separate qualification to provide information, advice and guidance. It requires a level 6 or 7 careers development professional, who is generally a careers adviser in a school or college, to provide that information, advice and guidance.
On what ‘good’ looks like, to add to what Katharine said, it absolutely has to be person-centred. It has to be about the needs and aspirations of that individual. It needs a comprehensive careers education programme with a whole-school approach so that you are getting that broadest perspective. This is particularly important for young people with disabilities, who may have direct barriers because of their disability or because people may have assumed things or had preconceptions about their aspirations. It needs to focus not just on their next step, which can often happen, but on career management skills, so that they are leaving education with the skills to enable them to progress through their career and through life, to overcome barriers and to support themselves as much as possible.
The careers adviser needs to be qualified to give impartial and informed information, advice and guidance. They are the only person who can really do that, because they have been informed through all the support they get, but they are signed up to a code of ethics that says they have to be impartial and are not doing the school’s agenda or saying, ‘I want you to go into a particular subject’. They should be embedded into the careers programme. Personal careers guidance meetings should be a minimum of 45 minutes, but ideally as part of a broader package so that people are getting that wider support.
There are a couple of other pieces. It is about that seamless transition. We are talking about school and college, but how do you transition from education into employment? How do you continue having careers support through your early years, and having documentation that follows through with you, ideally the EHCP that records your careers conversations and discussions? I will leave it there.
Wayne Ingram: From a professional, practical point of view, I will tell you what poor practice looks like. That might help. Literally telling a young disabled person what they can and cannot do would be what we call directive. A good careers guidance counsellor, practitioner or careers adviser—there are different names—needs to be non-directive.
What we mean by that is working with that young person, who is hopefully developing some self-awareness, recognising what skills they have and what they enjoy using, and hopefully capturing their interests as well. It is then about helping them to explore different career roles. It may have an element of matching to their interests and skills, but what is important is that the young disabled person takes control and has ownership of their career decision-making. Ultimately, at the end of all this they need to be able to make an informed and balanced career decision. Our role as careers advisers is as facilitators. We facilitate that process. We do not tell someone what they can and cannot do.
I am on a huge mission here, because there is still a myth out there in the public domain. People think that you go to see a careers adviser when you do not know what you want to do, and we will tell you what you can do. That myth needs to be dispelled.
Sam Everard: For me, good career guidance is around the daily challenges that the young person faces. We are SEND advisers mainly, because of the work that we do within the disability community. Our advisers will go out and find out what the daily challenges are, so that we are overcoming holistic barriers as well as the skills and educational commitment.
It is also about being transparent. Our advisers do an action plan with the young person at the end of the careers meeting, which is about making sure that the parent and the school can see what we spoke about, and that we co-created that interview with that young person. We get them to do a mind map, drawing or collage while they are doing the interview with us, so that they have something to take away that explains what they are doing. People can see that we are not talking about just jobs; it is about encouraging that young person to build on their leadership skills and to look at what they would like to do, rather than being told what to do.
Q97 Lord Prentis of Leeds: This question links the others together. First, I want to say that the written evidence is excellent, so thank you. A lot of work has gone into it. I am looking at the Careers England written evidence and the general paragraph lists the barriers faced by young disabled people, which are substantial.
To get things rolling, can you give us a picture of the extent to which young disabled people are supported with their careers? What factors influence the quality of support and advice?
Sam Everard: The support is different depending on region and on whether they have an education, health and care plan. It is very much about making sure that they are supported by everyone who is involved in their story. The circle of support is very key for us, working alongside parents, teachers and any other organisations or charities that are working with that young person. They need to see that we are all singing off the same song sheet, so that we can support the young person.
The Gatsby benchmarks that support careers guidance in school are very important. I have a question around whether the mainstream schools that offer SEND support use SEND guidelines or mainstream guidelines. That is quite interesting for us, because they are very different. The SEND Gatsby benchmarks are split into three, which we will tell you about later.
Another concern is that we are brought into schools to do appointments, so we might not get a chance to build a rapport with some of our disabled young people. It is a case of, ‘Come in and do an appointment’. Our team especially is put into a school for at least a day before those appointments, so that we can have coffee or lunch with those young people to build at least a little trust, rather than going in as a new person. Again, I think 45 minutes is important to make sure that we get the time.
Wayne Ingram: I have one short thing to add to that. There is an inconsistency in the quality of support, which I believe comes down to whether the adviser has any lived experience of disability. If they have a disability themselves, or maybe a family member does, they will naturally have a deeper empathy and a greater understanding of the challenges that a young disabled person faces.
I do not believe that a careers adviser who has been working in a mainstream setting, who may not have any experience of the disabled world, would have that greater understanding. They will still do the best they can, but they might slightly flounder in being able to deliver the extra quality that the young disabled person is looking for. There is a link there.
It is to do with confidence as well. We did a little poll of CDI members, and there are some who feel just a slight lack of confidence if they have not had any experience of the disabled world at all.
David Morgan: There are a lot of foundations in place compared with a few years ago. The statutory guidance is really helpful. The CEC does an awful lot of work around careers education, with careers hubs and careers leader training. But, to reiterate, there is quite a lot of variability in the system.
There is definitely improvement going on. CEC data shows things such as the number of young people in special schools who are receiving interviews, which has gone up from 57% to 71% since 2019. The number of those who have experienced a workplace has gone from 50% to 73%, so there is clear improvement—but, clearly, more work to be done there.
On the differences between special and mainstream schools, the only significant one I can see is benchmark eight, where there is a 10-point difference. Special schools have been achieving benchmark eight at about 76%, whereas it is 86% for mainstream schools.
The Chair: What is benchmark eight?
David Morgan: Benchmark eight is the personal career guidance interviews.
There is other data from Sutton Trust, for example. It is not specific to those who have disabilities or SEND, but 21% of young people in deprived areas were not getting careers guidance delivered by a specialist, for example. This inconsistency is there.
We see three issues in the system at the moment, which are general but are also probably much more enhanced for young people with disabilities. There is fragmentation; the system is fragmented. You have careers services in schools, colleges, universities, NCS and other providers. There is no consistency or help for the young person across that. It would be ideal to have a careers adviser and support that goes across that.
There is variability, as Wayne and Sam said, when you go into a school or college. Some of them do exceptional work and some do very basic work. It is down to the commitment of the organisation and the people within it. We see examples, such as not just SAMEE but the Outcomes First Group. Its leader, Kelly Guthery, won the Careers Leader of the Year Award in 2022. It has 63 schools, all special schools, and about 3,000 pupils. It tailors the Gatsby benchmarks to each individual student and does exceptional work. But this is highly variable; some people are getting very little.
The third key aspect is funding. There is not enough funding in the system to support the level we need. Do you have a careers adviser? Yes, but how much time do they have? How much time does a careers leader have to build a fantastic programme and spend time with young people?
Katharine Horler: I agree with everything that my colleagues have said, so I am just going to add a little extra detail. First, I want to focus on that variability. We have a complete and utter postcode lottery for young disabled people, and it should not be that way. It is literally the luck of the draw as to whether the institution you are in will give you significant support or very little. That is a real concern, because there is no common entitlement for young people across the system. I think that young disabled people should have an entitlement to support and that it should be checked to see whether it is actually happening for those individuals.
It is also really important not to get too focused on the careers interview itself and whether it is 15 minutes—which is ridiculous, but some offer 15-minute interviews— or 45 minutes, or whatever. The support that a young disabled person needs is so much more than that. Some of the things that Sam and Wayne have said about needing to build rapport and trust with a young person also apply to parents. Parents are a very important factor in supporting young people with SEND, who need so much more than just the one-off interview. A one-off interview that ticks a box is not enough for these young people.
That goes back to my original point about differentiation. These young people need to know about the college provision that is appropriate for their needs, not the general college provision that might be publicised to them through the provider access legislation. They need to know about things such as work experience opportunities that might be available and suitable for them. It is so much more than just a one-off interview.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: Very quickly, because there is an issue of time, I want to return to a couple of things that have already been mentioned. You mentioned that special schools may be doing a better job than mainstream schools with their careers advice, so I will not go back to that.
Sam, you mentioned that young disabled people with a healthcare plan are more likely to be better treated, for want of a better phrase. We are looking at all young disabled children—those without a plan as well as those with a plan. Are those without a plan in a more difficult position than those with a plan?
Sam Everard: Yes, and that brings me nicely on to Covid. Education, health and care plans are for young disabled people who need extra support within schools. It is beneficial that careers are part of that because we have outcomes that we can put into education healthcare plans to support the next steps for those young people. It is more difficult for those who do not have an education, health and care plan to gain that extra support, because there are no outcomes that follow through with that young person. We are finding that education, health and care plans are a lottery based not only on funding but on the ability of schools and parents to complete the forms. If it is done on a behaviour, such as when the child is not complying with education because they are being naughty, they do not get an education, health and care plan; they will not get one unless it is worded around their educational attainment.
During Covid, due to things such as internet and tech poverty within some homes, there was a levelling of the playing field. We have young disabled people struggling with maths and English, but because of Covid, home-schooling and issues around tech and the internet, some more mainstream students fell behind, which has meant that they are now at the same level as SEND young people. Now some young people are being refused an education, health and care plan on the grounds that they are at the same level as the rest of their classmates. It will take a few years for that re-establishment of the importance of the education, health and care plan to go through.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: You mentioned the 15-minute interviews and the need for continuous support, which is not always there. Would that 15-minute interview be the same whether the pupil is able-bodied or disabled?
Katharine Horler: Schools will buy in days of careers advice and support. Some of the contracts would ask for 15-minute interviews and some for 45-minute interviews. A lot of Careers England members set a minimum. For example, they will do only six or eight interviews a day to try to get away from the 15-minute thing, so there is variability across the piece.
The other thing I want to say is about the difference between EHCP and not EHCP, because that is a really important distinction. There is a system for young people with EHCPs. It does not necessarily work perfectly, but there are regular reviews within the system and there is an overview of it. The young people who are not on EHCPs are much more vulnerable, and a lot of them often have multiple difficulties: they might have various neurodiverse issues or mental health problems. It is often a combination of issues, and evidence shows that those young people are less likely to make successful transitions. They are more likely to be not in employment, education or training and to have other difficult factors such as youth offending, homelessness and those sorts of things. You see that pattern, and those young people tend to toggle in and out of employment because they do not have the skills to help them get and retain a job.
Q98 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I have really appreciated all your comments so far because they have made me more depressed than I was when I arrived. When you talk about fragmentation, silos, postcode lotteries, lack of healthcare plans, a desperate need for less difference between different postcodes and people from different social backgrounds, trust, reports and 15-minute interviews, all I get is a series of silos that somehow need to be brought together.
The one thing that the committee wants to do is not simply emphasise the problems that exist but find out how we can move forward. One thing that none of you has mentioned—I will be blunt—is that the schools themselves have a fundamental role in the careers service, and it is not dependent on outside people coming in to deliver their specialisms in 15 or 30 minutes.
I would like each of you to tell me what we should recommend government to do for schools that would enable all children, irrespective of where they live or what their background is, to have a basis for then bringing in a specialist who can talk in a language that means something to those young people. What is the answer there?
David Morgan: In the picture you outlined, it is fair to say that this variability is key. There are bad examples, absolutely, but there are also very good examples and a lot of good people. There are areas where it is getting better, as measured by the Gatsby benchmarks and others, but there is clearly more to do and that is what we are all advocating. Schools need to make sure that careers are a priority, particularly where they have young people who have disabilities and may need more support. They need to have a qualified careers leader so that the Careers & Enterprise Companies—
Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I will stop you there, because at the moment they do not need that at all; there is no requirement. I was a head for many years, and careers were dealt with by people who had time to offer on their timetables. Nothing has changed. When I speak to some of my colleagues who are still working, they tell me that exactly the same thing happens. What is required to make sure that every school has somebody, or a group of people, who is appropriately qualified to deliver the basics? You would not do this when teaching children early numeracy or phonics, so why is it good enough to do it in careers?
David Morgan: I agree with you: it is not good enough. One of our issues with the statutory guidance is that, although it lays out a lot of detail, a lot of it is ‘should’ and is recommended. The 45-minute interview is CDI-recommended but is not listed as DfE-recommended. You should have a careers leader and someone qualified to level 6 or 7.
One of the things is to toughen up what is required and make sure it is required that you have a careers leader. You are supposed to have a named careers leader. The CEC listed only 3,000 trained careers leaders up to 2023. There are 4,500 secondary and special schools, so there is clearly a gap in the number of qualified people. Every school should have a qualified careers leader and should bring in a qualified careers adviser who can provide careers education, information, advice and guidance as part of a comprehensive package, not as stand-alone interviews, so that they are embedded in the school and can get to know the young people. That includes working with employers, but a lot of it is about time. If you employ a careers leader for two days a week, how much can they really do to build relationships with employers? If you bring a careers adviser in to do specific interviews, they are not going to build a relationship with those young people, so that school would not be delivering the standard we would like.
Katharine Horler: Schools need two things to help them do their role. The first is commitment, which has to come from the head—you see some schools with fantastic commitment and some where the commitment is elsewhere. The second is resources; this issue is often ignored, because careers have to come out of the school budget so there is no dedicated funding for careers work. That drives everything because, if schools are trying to balance budgets and squeeze out money for careers work, it is often not necessarily the highest priority. What schools need to do their role properly is funding and the adequate amount of time for people. You often find careers leaders doing their role in a couple of hours a week, or a careers adviser with a day a week, so they need time. You also need staff who are qualified and have some specialist knowledge that enables them to deliver the role properly. What they really need is resources: time, money and staff.
Q99 Lord Porter of Spalding: Either it needs more resources or it needs to be measured to make sure it gets done. If careers were treated as any other subject area, so that teachers and headmasters in schools were held accountable for the success or otherwise, surely that would make it as important to everybody as maths or English.
I find it difficult. I cannot shake off the experience that I had as a child, even though it was a long time ago. I did not like it then and I am not convinced it is very different for the children I speak to nowadays. I still think the guidance and advice are misplaced for the individual, never mind whether they have a disability. I do not think many are served well by the current regime.
It is kind of bizarre if heads are allowed to downgrade this as a priority. Surely the only real point to education, other than making you a much more rounded person, is to make sure that, when you leave whatever institution you are in, you can stand on your own two feet and look after yourself and any dependants you may or may not have at some point. If one of our recommendations were to treat it like maths or English, would that work? Schools would probably laugh us out of the court, but at least we could try saying that it should be on a parity with other subject areas.
David Morgan: It would certainly help.
Katharine Horler: It would help.
Sam Everard: Also, when we go into schools—this is us speaking as people who literally go in on the ground—we are told things such as, ‘We haven’t got a room for you today; we forgot you were coming. We have no classroom space. Would you mind just sitting at the back of the café?’
It is also about the timetable. If we go in and run a workshop to meet those young people, or if the careers lead wants an employer to come in and do a lecture on engineering, we need to get those young people off the timetable. There is so much pressure on teachers to deliver the curriculum that the teachers will fight over who does not lose their lesson. We end up with the children coming out of PE, because that is obviously least important. If you have ever worked with 30 children who have missed their PE lesson to do a careers session, you will understand that that is really not the right choice.
Q100 Lord Carter of Coles: On Lord Porter’s point, I suppose commitment is hard to measure, but resources should not be. Do you have any idea of the money in this, per capita, which one can measure? They can track these things. There is obviously a difference in cost between 15 and 45 minutes but, if you look at the totality of trying to get a young person who has learning disabilities into employment, compared with one who does not, do we have a sense of the differences?
Katharine Horler: We do. We have a report that the University of Derby published in July, which is about the investment made in careers. It highlights what we used to spend, what we currently spend and what we would need to spend to do a half-decent job. Basically, we currently spend around £68 per person per year. In 2009, that was £158. In the future, we would need to spend—I am trying to read it here.
Lord Carter of Coles: It is undoubtedly more.
Katharine Horler: Yes, it is more, but not a lot more.
The Chair: What does that cover? Does it cover careers advice time or careers education time as well?
Katharine Horler: It was costed based on something that the Career Development Policy Group produced. It produced something called the careers guidance guarantee, and this is what it would cost to deliver that—the best possible programme. But that is for all young people, not necessarily those with SEND, for whom you would need to spend a bit more. This report is available on the University of Derby’s website.
Q101 Lord Shipley: I would like to move us on a little on this theme. Careers England wrote to us and said that careers support ‘relies too heavily on individual goodwill and not enough on standardised and enforced processes’. Those are the words of Careers England in evidence. We have heard that we have a postcode lottery and no common entitlement for students. We have heard that we need a commitment from the top, without which things may not happen, because it may not be the highest priority for that school.
I am puzzled and want to know what proportion of schools provide specialised careers advice tailored for young disabled people. In other words, are there any further facts you can tell us? How many schools are not offering an adequate service and how many are offering a very good service? Do we know?
David Morgan: The short answer is no. There is no comprehensive measure of it. The CEC data looks particularly at the Gatsby benchmarks, not at who provides the careers guidance interview. It does not measure the level and amount of that. There is some baseline data from which you can build, but no specific nationwide data.
Lord Shipley: How does Ofsted do its job, then?
Katharine Horler: Ofsted has to look at careers when it goes in for its inspection, but it is fairly light touch and mixed in with a raft of other factors. Careers guidance is commented on in Ofsted reports, as is the role of governors in its delivery, but it is not given a huge focus.
One of the things you asked about was no entitlement, no commitment, the postcode lottery and how it is measured. There is something called the Compass tool. The CEC collects data from all schools and colleges that have to complete the Compass tool. That measures their progress against the Gatsby benchmarks, but it is self-reported and not differentiated for young people with SEND. Coming to the purpose of this committee, you would be very hard pushed to get information on the progress of SEND young people, particularly in mainstream, against the Compass benchmarks.
Lord Shipley: If it is self-audited, how do those outside that process know that it is accurate?
David Morgan: The Careers & Enterprise Company is currently working on the careers impact review system, which is starting to move this away from being self-audited by using peer or expert review of achievement against the Gatsby benchmarks.
As well as the Gatsby benchmarks and the reporting by Compass, another mechanism, which is optional, is the quality in careers standard. That is an independent evaluation of your full careers programme. It is aligned to the Gatsby benchmarks, but it is not just the Gatsby benchmarks; it considers whether your overall careers provision is good. That is one other mechanism, but it is not mandatory. I do not know how many there are, off the top of my head.
Katharine Horler: A number of special schools have done the quality in careers standard very effectively, and it is a very good benchmark for the quality of a programme.
Wayne Ingram: I just want to reassure you on the Ofsted inspection. My practice has been inspected twice, at two separate schools. I just happened to coincide with an Ofsted inspection, and the adviser sat in for the entire careers meeting, so we are inspected in some cases.
The Chair: Did you get feedback from that as part of the general report?
Wayne Ingram: Yes, I am pleased to say that I got an ‘outstanding’. Lord Porter, let me reassure you that careers guidance has changed. It has definitely moved on. If I had an appointment with you, you would find that things have moved on.
Q102 The Chair: I will come back to the question—I have forgotten who raised it—of the 3,000 schools that have careers teachers. You talked about qualifications, and I have two questions.
The qualification for careers teachers, not advisers, is not done as part of initial teacher training. What is it like? Are there a lot of them, who runs them and how long are they? Do you have to be seconded? Is it online? Within that, is there any special training or professional development on working with people with a disability? Of those 3,000, were you saying that all the teachers were trained? Can you have a rough guess at how many have SEND training within that?
David Morgan: The Government provide funding, via the Careers & Enterprise Company, of careers leaders, who are the people who do the careers education programmes and work within schools. At the beginning of 2023, the CEC reported that 3,002 have undergone training. With 4,500 schools, excluding churn, not every school will have a trained careers leader yet.
That is a level 6 qualification. The CDI is one of the largest providers of that for the CEC, but there are a number of providers. It is about developing a careers programme, a careers strategy and aspects of careers education. It does not include information, advice and guidance, and it is not specific—although there will be elements of this—to working with young people with SEND. The CEC offers some additional training on working with SEND.
When you move into the level 6 or 7 qualifications for careers advisers. These are the people who provide information, advice and personal guidance. The level 6 qualification is formally accredited by OCR, and there is a level 7 qualification, which can be done through universities, seven of which are awarded by the CDI to do a qualification in career development.
That qualification includes some appreciation of SEND, but it is not an in-depth element on SEND, because it is already quite a full qualification. The CDI and others offer a non-accredited professional certificate, for people who have already qualified, to work with SEND clients. That includes things such as disability regulations, working with networks, supporting them through guidance interviews and the impact of senses, emotions and so on within that.
As I describe it, the core training gives you key skills, such as listening skills and a client-centred approach, key theory and practice-based tools and techniques that will help you to support anyone. There is generic disability training, such as the professional certificate we offer, which gives you an appreciation of working with a range of SEND clients.
I do not know of any specific training on a disability that is accredited or is at that level, but we and many others do continuous development; we do webinars, articles and resources on, for example, working with people with neurodiversity or those who are visually or hearing impaired. We run a range of services, and I know that other organisations run their own, so you have those three layers but there is no systemic approach or requirement for SEND training, if you are working with young people with generic or specific disabilities.
The Chair: Do you think the direction of travel is for more careers teachers or co-ordinators/leaders to have a qualification? Do you see that and think it is achievable that we might have at least one in every school? I know it is not a lot, but we have never had that, so it would be progress in that sense.
David Morgan: The whole set-up of the Gatsby benchmarks, careers leaders and careers hubs fills the gap that there was around careers education when it started. Schools did not have their own careers education departments, so we have made huge progress training 3,000. It will probably be nearer 3,500 or 4,000 by the end of the year, but there is churn and a need to make sure that all schools have access to a trained careers leader.
Equally, there is a requirement to make sure that everyone has access to a qualified careers adviser. I know that there are further questions about the workforce, but the challenge is getting access to someone who is qualified and available. Some of this comes down to low pay and funding. If you are a qualified careers adviser, your pay from schools and colleges is low: we estimate £26,000 to £28,000 a year if you are full-time. Many are term-time only and some are part-time only.
If you want to do the extra training in SEND, either you have to pay or your employer does and it does not typically lead to an increase in salary. There is no additional reward to become specialised. Although we and others put on these programmes, we have a reasonable amount of demand but we do not have high demand. Who is funding them and are they being released to have the time to do it?
Lord Carter of Coles: Forgive my ignorance, but is the careers budget ring-fenced within the school?
Katharine Horler: No, it is not.
Lord Carter of Coles: Is it all ‘should’, not ‘must’?
Katharine Horler: Yes, it is all ‘should’.
Q103 Baroness Stedman-Scott: The very nature of the work of this committee is to look at public services and the problems facing them, although we do get bits of joy when it is working very well. Do you have any comments on the careers service workforce? Are they motivated and are there enough of them? Are they able to do the job that they want to do? How could they be better supported, if you feel they need to be?
David Morgan: We run an annual survey of careers advisers. It is a small sample, but we ask them what motivates them. Some 84% of them feel proud of the work they do and only 45% feel valued. Only 8% feel that there is sufficient investment in either young people or adult careers services by government. So you have a workforce that is immensely proud of what it does but feeling significantly undervalued for that.
We asked what motivates them and, unsurprisingly, they are not motivated by salary, but they would like to be fairly paid. They are motivated by helping people to overcome barriers and by working with people. Some 58% said that.
We worked with Careers England on the survey it did to delve into this for its members. One of the anecdotes we heard from talking to providers was that, if you work on a National Careers Service or other contract, you will often see churn within your organisation of people on those contracts looking to move off, because it is driven more by results and you have limited time and scope to work with people. They are driven by wanting to work with people.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: You talked about churn. Is there a lot of churn in the system?
David Morgan: The best measure we have is that survey we run, which was followed by a Careers England one that said the same thing. Some 23% of people said that they were likely to leave the profession within two years. That was driven primarily by retirement—we have an ageing workforce—and secondly by pay and reward. We have this double whammy where the pay is not high so it is hard to attract people—or, if people are attracted in, it is because they want to make a difference—and a significant proportion of the workforce heading towards retirement.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: On the report that Katharine mentioned, if investment has gone down from £158 to £68, has the workforce halved?
Katharine Horler: Yes, a lot of people have left the workforce.
Lord Prentis of Leeds: That is a strong indicator of morale within the careers service.
Katharine Horler: Careers generally has been quite difficult since about 2010. We had Connexions, which was quite well funded, but then that went. The legislation went into schools and things disappeared, so people did not have an employer in the way that they did in the past. A lot of people left the workforce. A very good infrastructure has been put in place now. A good umbrella is in place, but we need to rebuild as a lot of people have left.
The Careers England survey showed a recruitment and retention crisis for careers advisers. There are some specialist careers advisers focusing on SEND left from the Connexions days, when there was specialist training for SEND, but a lot of our members tell us that those people are approaching retirement. They are quite concerned about how they will fill those gaps when people leave, because there are no people coming through. So there is a really significant issue with the workforce.
Q104 Lord Laming: Is the position closer to 2010 or are we a long way from getting back to 2010?
Katharine Horler: The higher figure I quoted earlier was from 2010. With a bit of scrabbling, I have managed to find what you would need to spend to have a good careers service now: it would be £115 per person.
Lord Laming: In terms of the numbers, can you give us an idea of how many there were in this field in 2010 and how far we are from that now? Is there a great staff shortage?
Katharine Horler: There is a huge staff shortage. Nobody has any figures for the numbers employed then and now, partly because of what we said about the fragmentation of the service. There are bits all over the place—bits in the National Careers Service, bits in schools and a number employed by the Careers & Enterprise Company—so there is no one measure any more. Our members tell us that they struggle to recruit and retain staff, because of all the reasons that David mentioned.
Lord Laming: We cannot create a picture of the situation, because there is this system and that system, this arrangement and that arrangement. For innocents like us, it is very difficult to get hold of a picture of the total situation.
David Morgan: The Gatsby foundation carried out some work in 2019, trying to estimate the size of the workforce. We are keen to support any replication of that, but there is no overall measure of how many people work within the career development profession within England, within individual schools and so on.
There are two elements to this—how many people and how much support. One person could be supporting two, three or four schools. Organisations could be supporting multiple organisations a bit. How many people have access to a careers adviser or leader, and how much time are they spending on that?
Q105 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: I am particularly interested in who we are trying to recruit into the profession. Are they recruited from business or from education? Where do they come from?
Sam Everard: We have just recruited two graduates from university, who did work experience with us over the last few years, understood what we were trying to achieve in working with disabled young adults and therefore wanted to join. One is a graduate in business and one is a graduate from the police force.
So we are finding that having those young people come into us and do their level 6 qualification has been beneficial, because young people in schools can speak to them more easily than they can to us, because we are quite old now. That is where we need to be heading; we need to be looking at graduate level and above—they have the skills and qualifications. Although the level 6 qualification is vocational, some of the units on the history of careers, and the different methods, theories and standards that go alongside that, involve quite a lot of learning.
The level 6 qualification is very intense, and it took me two and half years because I really needed to get my head into it. It is not a case of just saying, ‘I want to be a careers adviser tomorrow’, and get that level 6 qualification, because it is important that it is recognised as a profession, not just as a job. Speaking completely out of turn—because I am good at that—a lot of level 6 advisers see Department of Work and Pensions job coaches offering a very similar service to the National Careers Service, and to what we offer in schools, without any qualifications whatever, because they are civil servants. They can offer career information and guidance although they do not have a single qualification, which almost makes me wonder why we make the effort to get that level 6 and then go into schools.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: And they are paid a lot more.
Katharine Horler: Frequently we will lose staff to those roles because they do not need to be qualified and they are paid a lot more.
Q106 Lord Carter of Coles: Can you point to any correlation between resources and outcomes? Some areas of the country are probably spending more in some schools and institutions. Is there evidence to support that, because it would help us? Everybody makes the argument for resources but obviously the Treasure always ask for outcomes.
Katharine Horler: There is no statistical evidence, so it would be anecdotal, but there is a clear correlation between more investment in resources and better outcomes.
Lord Carter of Coles: Is there a correlation but no evidence?
Katharine Horler: There is no statistical evidence, so we could not tell you that, if you spend X, you will get Y. But you can see that where time, effort and energy have been invested in careers programme, young people achieve better outcomes.
David Morgan: The report that Katharine referred to, Investing in Careers, does a return-on-investment analysis. It is not specific, but it looks at the range of surveys and analysis that have been done and shows there is a payback for young people and adults.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: What is the payback?
David Morgan: For schools, the majority of studies say between £1.20 and £4.10 for every pound spent.
Baroness Stedman-Scott: So, for every £1 put in, it is £1.20 to £4.10?
David Morgan: The average is around £2.50. For adults, the average is £3.20. There are a number of studies, or partial studies, that look at different aspects of it.
One thing that was referred to in the Education Committee review into information, advice and guidance was the fact that—this was quoted by Chris Percy—Wales spends twice as much per head, and Scotland spends about five times as much. What there has not been is an analysis of what everyone gets for the spend—not necessarily that one is better, but where is the learning and what can we do. Wales has carried out analysis into things like well-being from carrying out careers interventions, so there are elements of research on all the services that show that there is benefit from investment in careers.
The Chair: This has often struck me as a sensible thing to do. Does anyone know whether any of the big multi-academy trusts employed their own careers guidance full-time among their trusts? If so, there would be a much greater presence and more chance of them bedding in with the careers education programme. Do you know of anyone who has done that?
David Morgan: The example I gave earlier, the Outcomes First Group, did that. Kelly Guthery won the award because she was the central leader—
The Chair: So that was a school? I thought that was a company working with many schools.
David Morgan: I think it is a multi-academy trust.
The Chair: It is a multi-academy trust that has employed someone full-time.
David Morgan: They have someone at trust level. I do not think any of the schools had a careers leader, and Kelly came in. By the time we got to the award, all the schools had, or were working towards, individual careers leaders who all had a careers programme that was down to the level of an individual programme for each child.
The Chair: And that is direct employment by the multi-academy trust.
Q107 Lord Willis of Knaresborough: In every committee I say it is pointless having this if we do not recommend to the Government what people working on the ground say that we should propose. Could each of you give us one or two things that, if they became statutory requirements, you could definitely say would make a significant difference to the actual delivery of good careers guidance to all, but specifically to those with special needs?
Sam Everard: Having done some research into this, I think we need to be able to offer young people the opportunities that we want to. We have had one or two cases, and I have reached out to other CDI members to see they if they do too, where any offers we have suggested, such as alternative provisions or specialist training, have been denied because the education healthcare plan cannot afford them. If we are looking at options for our young people who are not able to go on to college but who should still have a careers guidance interview and an opportunity to go on somewhere, we need to be able to offer, or at least talk about, the right opportunities, which would be funded.
Wayne Ingram: My suggestion is more left field. It is to think about how we can have more value, or feel more valued. How about a government marketing campaign so the public can understand what good careers guidance is and what it can do for people? That would be really good. If there was more value in the service itself, more people would come to it and want to be careers advisers.
The Chair: That would raise the profile of it as well.
David Morgan: And it would raise expectations. We should think how the system can have a more joined-up approach, ideally through something like a careers adviser following a young person through education and into work—we have not talked much about work—so they build up trust. Also, at minimum the EHCP should record careers discussions, aspirations and outcomes so there can be more of a handover across it.
Secondly, it would be great if there was a requirement for SEND training for careers professionals working with people in special schools particularly, but ideally also with SEND young people in mainstream schools.
The third point is to recognise the value of the careers adviser who is providing information, advice and guidance, and the need for qualifications and ongoing training, and taking all that into the world of work, which I appreciate we have not covered a huge amount. We need to make sure that government programmes require that. Supported internships do not require you to have sessions with a career guidance professional. In things like the DWP employment programmes, you do not typically have any engagement with them. Someone I spoke to in Wales said that you can access some of the employment programmes only by going through a careers adviser.
Katharine Horler: Mine would be to establish an entitlement for all SEND young people, because then you could measure against it and make sure that they were getting the support they need.
We have not touched on how, at the moment, part of the fragmentation is when the young people move from the support in school. That is the danger zone. The support needs to go with them, and it needs to be the same person supporting them. They should not start again when they get to the next transition point.
I have mentioned resources, so I will not bang on about that. We need to address the recruitment issues, and the training and support for careers advisers, so that we have more specialist support for SEND young people.
Finally, the support they get needs to be differentiated. A lot of the requirements in the statutory guidance talk about how, for example, young people must have seven encounters with employers between the ages of 11 and 18. But that could be any employer; it needs to be differentiated for people with SEND so that it is useful. There is no labour market information that is differentiated for SEND young people. There is no point in them looking on a website at very generic information that will not help them to make decisions moving forward, so their support needs to be differentiated.
The Chair: That was excellent. It was a first-class session, so thank you very much. You have given us more answers than further confusion. You have also given us a lot of issues to think about. For example, we have not touched on the transfer of information when young people leave school, but we can mark that down for further investigation. We are very grateful for your time. If there is anything that you feel you could have added but not been able to do, please contact the team, because it will count as evidence that we can take into consideration for our report.
