AEIAG0058

Written evidence submitted by Social Market Foundation

March 2022

About the Social Market Foundation

The Social Market Foundation (SMF) is Britain’s leading cross-party think-tank, standing proudly in the centre-ground of politics since 1989. The Foundation’s main activity is to publish original papers on key topics in the economic and social fields, with a view to stimulating public discussion on the performance of markets and the social framework within which they operate. The SMF is a registered charity (1000971) and a company limited by guarantee. It is independent of any political party or group and is funded predominantly through sponsorship of research and public policy debates. The SMF is overseen by a Board of Trustees and Chair.

This evidence includes focus group insights from an unpublished Social Market Foundation report. We therefore consider this information confidential until our report has been published, likely in the next few weeks.

Contact

• Dr Aveek Bhattacharya, Chief Economist – aveek@smf.co.uk
• Niamh O Regan, Researcher – niamh@smf.co.uk

Q 1. Whether the current system of careers education, information, advice and guidance (CEIAG) is serving young people

• The current system of CEIAG is much improved on the system of previous generations, in general being more professional and personalised. For the most part, the young people we have spoken to value and appreciate it. However, there is substantial room for improvement, in terms of the quantity, quality, and equity of provision. Research from the CEC indicates that compliance with the Gatsby benchmarks of good practice has increased but remains low.
• From our research, those in their final year of secondary school or first year of further study had very mixed experiences of CEAIG. While some received extensive and diverse forms of support, involving one-on-one guidance, interactions with employers and work experience, others had much less e.g. a group session or one-off consultation. Concerningly, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and those following vocational rather than academic pathways tend to receive worse CEIAG. The Sutton Trust recently found that schools in deprived areas are less likely to have specialist careers advisers. A range of studies, including ours, found that there is better support for students seeking to go to university than to go to FE college or start an apprenticeship.

Q 2. Whether and how the Government should bring responsibility for CEIAG under one body, for example a National Skills Service, to take overall responsibility for CEIAG for all ages, and how this might help young people navigate the CEIAG system.

         It is welcome that the committee is thinking about coordination and overall responsibility for CEIAG, recognising the difficulties some experience navigating the system.

         However, there are risks to centralising at too high a level – services should be responsive to local conditions and needs. Any new institutions should instead function as an additional layer, responsible for advising on careers policy, coordinating the variety of services to ensure consistency between school and post school facilities, as well as strengthening awareness among educational institutions and the public of the information advice and guidance services available to them.

         The National Careers Service is in particular need of strengthening. There is strong demand for consistent, reliable one-on-one guidance. The dedicated telephone support for 13-18 year olds that the NCS offers can provide this service, but the NCS brand is very weak – few people we spoke to in our research were aware of it. Any new organisation needs to be well-branded and publicised.

         From our focus groups, there are differences between what school students and adult learners require from their CEIAG services. School students tend to look for guidance on choosing between particular subjects and pathways; adults more often need support with practical issues such as funding and flexible study arrangements.

Q 3.  Whether such a National Skills Service is best placed in the Department for Education or the Department of Work and Pensions to avoid duplication of work.

• The Department for Education is responsible for the NCS and is the funding provider of the CEC, the two leading bodies in the CEIAG landscape

• If a National Skills Service were to act as an overarching and coordinating body of careers and skills services, it would be best placed within the Department for Education. This could allow greater consistency in delivery and policy throughout all stages of primary and secondary education.
• At the same time, it would be critical for such a service to work collaboratively with the Department of Work and Pensions in order to obtain up-to-date labour market information, and to ensure that careers support for learners and jobseekers is well-coordinated.

Q 4. Whether organisations like the Careers Enterprise Company and National Careers Service provide value for money to the taxpayer.

• At the moment the annual budget of the CEC is in the region of £30 million, a relatively small portion of the overall budget of the Department for Education.
• There is encouraging evidence to suggest that CEC has helped to drive improvements in guidance provision. Schools and colleges that are in part of the CEC achieve more Gatsby benchmarks than those that are not, with schools in Career Hubs achieving more still.
• The CEC’s demonstrable commitment to evidence-based practice and self-evaluation of its programmes should also give us greater confidence in its ability to spend public money well.
• Careers Leaders we spoke to who were a part of the CEC network found the training and networking which the CEC provided invaluable to improving the CEIAG provision in their schools. The NCS is well received by its users, however its reach does not extend far enough. It needs to be better publicised, both among potential adult learners and younger people in order to maximise its potential.

Q 5. How careers and skills guidance could be better embedded in the curriculum across primary, secondary, further, higher and adult education, to ensure all learners are properly prepared for the world of work

• Students should be actively encouraged to relate their learning to the world of work. Subject and module curriculums should contain specific career and skills development goals as part of the overall learning aims. Students should be encouraged to identify the “hard” and “soft” skills developed as part of completing assessments. In order to facilitate this, explicit guidance should be provided to institutions at every stage on how to include material appropriate to the learning stage.
• The careers leader in secondary schools and colleges should be involved in the curriculum design to ensure careers are embedded into  subject curriculums; teachers should receive proper training in how to incorporate careers and skills into their curriculum, and curriculum plans should be assessed with this in mind.
• The involvement of the careers team and training of educators on bringing careers into their curriculum should also be in place at further, higher, and adult education institutions.
• The National Student Survey should create a new category of “Careers in the Curriculum”, and this category should be part of the core questionnaire, rather than added to the current careers section within the optional questionnaire. An equivalent survey should also be developed for further and adult education institutions.

Q 6. How schools could be supported to better fulfil their duties to provide careers advice and inform students of technical, as well as academic, pathways.

         From our focus groups, and indeed other research, there appears to be a great deal of patchiness and inconsistency in guidance provision between and within schools. This variation runs from the form of guidance received, to who is delivering the guidance, and the structure of guidance sessions. While it is understandable (and indeed positive) that guidance in each school is not identical, the disparities go beyond an appropriate response to difference in context, and instead seem to produce significant disparities in outcomes. More should be done to ensure minimum standards are met across the board.

         In particular, there is a need to support smaller schools and colleges that may be at a disadvantage in providing high-quality careers support because of a lack of scale. Schools and colleges should also be assisted to reach beyond their immediate networks of local businesses and other educational providers, as overreliance on an individual institution’s connections risks limiting the variety of people and roles students are exposed to, potentially creating/perpetuating cycles of inequality.

         Schools and colleges can be better supported through expansion of the CEC. While they themselves do not provide guidance, CEC expansion would help ameliorate issues of inconsistency and patchiness, through their organisational coordinating role and by offering standardised training. They are also well placed to connect smaller individual institutions with a wider set of contacts, and in particular with vocational training providers and local employers. Schools in the career hubs established as part of the CEC network are shown to perform better than schools which are not part of them. Whilst, every school is required to have a careers leader, it is not always the case that leaders have the time for developing and implementing an effective careers programme. Schools may need to be supported to employ separate careers leaders, rather than leaving the role to teaching staff with competing responsibilities.

         The disparateness of information on apprenticeships and other vocational information was a big issue for school and college students we spoke to. Schools need to be provided with consistent information sources of equal quality for vocational and academic routes, which they can pass on to their pupils. UCAS provides this function for universities at the moment, but an equivalent for vocational programmes is not currently available, and needs to be developed.

         In an ideal world, all apprenticeships would be listed on the UCAS platform, and that should be our ultimate ambition. In the meantime, The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMACS) and the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (Be More) both demonstrate the potential to produce consolidated information on vocational options at a local level, with their own bespoke platforms. Other mayoralties and local authorities should follow their lead, and these local platforms should be ‘plugged in’ to the UCAS website if UCAS is unable to consolidate nationally.

         Greater use of self-evaluation and peer evaluation could help schools identify areas for improvement in their CEIAG provision. As part of the Ofsted inspection process, schools and colleges could be asked to provide evidence of the effectiveness of their CEIAG services, which Ofsted would then independently validate. For example, this could be done through the CEC Compass tool, or the Quality in Careers Standard.

Q 6.1 How the Baker Clause could be more effectively enforced

         From our interactions with students, the implementation of the Baker clause is as patchy as the rest of the CEIAG landscape; many students reported receiving little to no information on vocational pathways, whereas others received a large amount of information on it. It varied greatly across different contexts, and our suspicion (though we are unable to demonstrate this conclusively) is that students from disadvantaged areas are more likely to be guided towards vocational options.

         While most students reported receiving some information on vocational options, the amount of information and guidance received was less than for those pursuing academic routes.

         Interviewees report that consistent and reliable information on vocational education and training programmes can be hard to find, with many resorting to using search engines to determine what types of programmes are available to them, not always finding the most reliable information and not always being able to apply for a programme through these routes.

         Ensuring that information on local vocational and training opportunities is readily available, easily accessible and updated regularly would support the implementation of the Baker Clause. As indicated in response to Q 6, the ideal outcome is for all apprenticeships to be listed on the UCAS platform. As an interim step, this may involve developing more local-level sources on the Manchester or Liverpool platform and integrating them into UCAS.

         At the moment, CEIAG in schools is assessed by Ofsted as part of Personal Development. If school is found not to be meeting the requirements of the Baker clause, it is noted in the inspection report and inspectors "will consider what impact this has on the quality of CIEAG and the subsequent judgement for personal development." That is, there is no set outcome for non-compliance.  Ofsted could be used in a stronger way to enforce the Baker clause, for instance by making CEIAG assessment a separate category for Ofsted inspections, with a grading system of its own, and a grade limit in this category if a school is found to not be meeting the requirements of the Baker clause. CEAIG should be a core part of curriculum and teaching, and as such ought to be a central aspect of school performance evaluation. This would impress upon all schools the importance of effective CEIAG and could motivated schools to better perform in this area.

         We note an amendment to the Skills Bill tabled by Robert Halfon MP in relation to the implementation of the Baker Clause. Setting a minimum standard of interactions with a representative range of education and training providers could be a positive way to help to fulfill the Baker Clause requirement. However, it would need to be carefully implemented to ensure that the interactions occur at an appropriate time for the students. The Halfon amendment proposed that students should interact with colleges and vocational training providers as early as year 8. Yet our focus groups indicate such early guidance does not always feel relevant to the student at that point in their life/education.

Q 7. Whether the proposals for CEIAG in the Government’s Skills for Jobs White Paper will effectively address current challenges in the CEIAG system

         Based on our research, some challenges in the CEIAG system are: patchiness and inconsistency in delivery and information provision, poor Baker clause implementation, limited adult engagement with CEIAG services. Some of these have been addressed in our responses to previous questions so we will focus on the areas that we feel we have not yet addressed.

         Proposals for improving CEIAG in the White Paper do not address how to better reach adults (including young adults) more broadly. This is a particularly significant oversight, given that adult education and reskilling is such a central part of the vision sketched out in the White Paper, embodied in the Lifelong Loan Entitlement. Of adult learners we spoke to across our focus groups, only one had used the National Careers Service. Among adult learners there were also fundamental misconceptions regarding the nature of CEIAG. Many felt that career services for adults were not designed for those looking to advance in their current career, change to a different field or for those looking to learn for the sake of learning, and that services were more for those who were unsure of themselves and their career trajectory. In particular, we found that careers services carry a certain stigma because of poor previous experiences and because they are associated with children and the unemployed.

         Our focus groups showed adult learners can have different needs of CEIAG services than those in school or college. Adult learners said they felt particularly vulnerable to scams, as they are more reliant on independent providers with weaker reputations. Adult learners were also particularly concerned about programme costs and eligibility for funding. None mentioned accessing funding or knowledge of funding pots available to them for retraining, reskilling or upskilling, with only HE student loans mentioned.

         Services such as NCS can help with the above areas but are only valuable to users if they are aware such a service exists, and the existence of such a service needs to be promoted not just to those who are NEET, but also to adults (including young adults) who are currently in work.

         We have found that there is no single source of government-backed information, and as a result young people often rely on personal networks for their information and said they struggled to find information that they trust.

         Proposals in the White Paper for improving information include updating the NCS website to become a one-stop-shop for careers, education, and training information and for its use to be encouraged by the CEC. That may mark an improvement, but we found limited engagement with official government information sources (in particular Discover Uni), which are not well promoted (e.g. doing poorly on Google search). Rather than trying to build and establish a new brand, it may be better to partner with existing trusted independent sources such as Unifrog.

         Our research also found that rather than statistics and hard data, both school and college students and adults greatly favoured ‘experiential’ information gleaned first-hand from visits and conversations. Friends and family tended to be consulted on matters of long-term goals and career trajectory. Course providers, recent graduates and those currently studying/training were also used to help determine what to study or train in, and where to do it. This information was viewed as more trustworthy, more reliable, and more recent. Any improvement of an official information source (such as the NCS website) should consider how best to incorporate access to ‘hot’ information sources. This could be done through incorporating current or previous student/trainee testimony into information pages. Another way could be through listing and regularly updating information such as open days or events, as well as recruitment contact details.

Q 7.1 Whether greater investment to create a robust system of CEIAG is needed, and how could this be targeted, to create a stronger CEIAG

         For CEIAG to fulfil its potential, it would require substantially more of the Education budget. This ought to be the subject of greater discussion and deliberation – one expert we spoke to suggested that to achieve all the ambitions we expect of CEIAG would require up to 10% of school time. Is this the level of priority we want to give it?

         Either way, it seems apparent that CEIAG is not at present adequately funded. We recommend targeting resources at personalised one-to-one sessions, given that this is the type of support young people told us was most useful. We have suggested there should be an entitlement to three one-to-one sessions for every pupil in their final two years of school, of at least 30 minutes in length, each with the same careers adviser.

         Multiple sessions with the same advisor was something highly valued by participants in our research, but rarely achieved.

         Schools should not have to depend on economies of scale to secure good guidance counsellors. Appropriate number of counsellors-to-student ratio would be valued by students to ensure they can access support during school hours etc.

March 2022