AEIAG0092
Written evidence submitted by Suffolk County Council
Suffolk County Council has a number of duties relating to supporting the CEIAG provision for young people in their area. Some are statutory duties – such as the tracking and reporting on destinations, ensuring compliance with RPA and supporting vulnerable and SEND young people to progress. Others are good practice – for example supporting schools and colleges to offer high quality careers provision, working with the many other partners such as the Careers Hub, Enterprise Adviser Network, NCOP, National Citizenship Service, offering CPD and training to Careers Leaders and Careers advisers and ensuring partners and young people are aware of the local labour market. For this element of work, the team also work across the East of England so have experience across a wider range of schools and colleges. This response has come from The Skills Team that co-ordinates much of this work.
The system of careers education, information, advice and guidance needs to serve ALL young people regardless of their background or other challenges in their life and needs to be enhanced for those with additional barriers. We do not believe it works effectively for many young people.
For young people in a school or college, despite the increased responsibilities and attention from Ofsted, CEIAG is still largely dependent on the individual organisation’s approach and the value they place on it. This has seen signs of improvement There has been progress in the last 3-5 years but there is still room for improvement. Despite many examples of good practice, most schools and colleges do not have sufficient time and resource devoted to this area – largely because of time in the crowded curriculum and funding to employ enough suitably qualified staff. In a large secondary school, a careers leader is likely to have other duties as well as the careers role and a careers adviser may have a caseload of perhaps 1000 students – 300 of those in Year 11 needing specific support for their Post 16 destination. In addition, careers leaders are expected to implement Gatsby Benchmarks for all students in their setting as well as network with external organisations and keep up to date with trends in the career and labour market. There are many organisations working in this field and keeping in touch with the many initiatives on offer is a fulltime task.
For the disadvantaged groups mentioned in the inquiry, these groups usually have multiple barriers to overcome and need more time and experienced staff to help them work through these issues for a successful outcome. It also requires an understanding of the challenges faced by both the particular group and then that individual. For some of these young people, they may have many professionals working with them and often the careers element is either overlooked or an afterthought or is believed that anyone can fulfil this role. For young people whose school attendance is patchy, home schooled, or in alternative provision, there is often little clarity as to whose role this is. Focus is purely on GCSE/examination results or getting a Post 16 place rather than working to ensure that place is going to be successful. In addition, parental support maybe lacking or unreliable, so more assistance is required from the external organisations in order to adequately support the young person’s development of their cultural capital, networks and role modelling.
For students with a disability, “careers” support is often not even considered relevant by parent/carer or the setting as the understanding of a “career” is not fully understood. Some schools are now starting to understand how the wider notion of careers work applies to SEND young people and have started to engage professional careers advisers. However, the system of supporting transition for SEND is organised by many different people in the school or organisation and external departments in the Post 16 provider or local authority. Despite local efforts to co-ordinate the supporting of transitions for SEND, the system is overly complex, with many different people across lots of organisation (e.g. schools, providers and local authorities) involved and this can risk the young person not always being at the centre of decisions.
For these groups, there are a number of positive alternative routes often provided by organisations offering inspirational activity and supportive staff. However, there are so many that the young person/parent/carer/ or school find it difficult to keep track of the offer/s available. In addition, many of these organisations are often funded for a fixed periods of time, and by the time they can start to be effective and make suitable networks, their funding is either due to end or eligibility changes. There is often no quality assurance for the organisations (unless they come under Ofsted framework which does offer some Quality Assurance), they are not effectively resourced so staff fluctuate making it hard to build partnerships and connections with other organisations. This can leave young people and their parents without access to the full range of provision.
Suffolk County Council resources to support disadvantaged young people has been substantially reduced over the last ten years due to national government decisions, so the threshold for supporting young people has become higher and staff have large caseloads of complex young people to support.
CEIAG could benefit by being brought under one body as an all-age system. However, being in the DWP gives out the wrong message it may be perceived as only being a service for people claiming benefits. Being in Department of Education could leave out others who are not engaged in education – for example unemployed, NEET. As the 2017 Department of Education Careers Strategy demonstrated, it was mostly focused on young people in schools. The idea of a National Skills Service also poses problems with the name as people still consider skills to be a working-class idea – e.g., carpenter, hairdresser – and may exclude some people from considering this service to be of benefit to them. National Careers Service does fulfil this brief, but it currently does not support young people until they are 18 and then support is limited unless they are working with DWP. A revamp and additional funding and purpose could fulfil this ambition.
The White Paper suggests, asking Sir John Holman to undertake a review and consider greater alignment of The Careers & Enterprise Company and the National Careers Service as part of an all-age careers system. This would seem a good move, but the CEC is mainly focused on young people in education rather than the more vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Whichever structure is developed, the role of the Local Authorities needs to be considered as they still have a statutory and good practice role to play. Although this varies from LA to LA, they are in a position to bring together some of the specialist and statutory services supporting young people – particularly those considered vulnerable or disadvantaged, work with local and regional partners in the DWP and Local Enterprise Partnership, spread good practice throughout schools and colleges as well as helping the careers and education sectors to be informed and aware of developments in the local labour market as well as linking with strategic employers in the area. This could be something considered as part of the new discussion around a County Deal.
It is helpful that guidance for schools and colleges has become clearer and they have a number of statutory duties to fulfil – e.g., publishing their careers programme, having a named careers leader, complying with the Baker clause. However, these duties alone do not guarantee that the programme is of any quality or has any impact. The Baker Clause is useful, but even if this is rigorously applied, this alone does not constitute careers guidance. As per the definition used by The Department of Education, careers guidance covers a range of interventions – including information, education, work experience, employer engagement and personal guidance by a qualified adviser. There is no method of measuring if The Baker Clause is enforced. It is considered as part of an Ofsted inspection, but it may be several years before a school is inspected and therefore several years of a school not being willing to allow organisations access to their students. Access to a personal guidance adviser is rarely inspected as part of an Ofsted visit.
There is no dedicated time in the curriculum for careers work, so it is left to each school to decide how much time to devote to this. Generally, this is limited to work in Year 10 and Year 11 with little work done in the lower years. There is an extensive and thorough Career Development framework developed by the Careers Development Institute that covers ambitious learning outcomes from primary to post 16 that could be effective if given time to cover the elements. It is important that young people are aware of the present and future labour market opportunities in both their area and nationally, so that they can start to think about, find out about, and be inspired by some of the new prospects for them. As a department in the Local Authority (Skills Team) that has a strong focus on this work, it is vitally important to start preparing young people to fulfil potential future skills gaps. Some of this work needs to start in Primary schools. There is little organised support for teachers working with this age group available.
Ideally teachers from other subject areas should contribute to this agenda (Gatsby Benchmark 4) but with time in the curriculum so stretched – even more so at the current time due to schooling lost in the pandemic - only the very basic elements are often covered. Upon Ofsted inspection, careers education should be covered as a subject in its own right rather than just the limited inspection of Baker Clause and Post 16 destinations. The proposal to increase the focus on career development in teachers’ training and professional development is welcome, but time is needed in the curriculum along with time for regular CPD for this to be effective.
In terms of training providers, the amount of careers learning and access to professional careers guidance is low. Although this is a positive destination for many young people, not all make a successful transition to an Apprenticeship or Traineeship and may need further support to prevent them dropping out of the course or transferring to another option.
Anecdotal evidence confirms many national reports that young people perceive that the information given to them about apprenticeships whilst in school is low. This is despite most schools in Suffolk having access to, and are actively using, the services of a variety of apprenticeship support organisations – both national and local. There is also high awareness and knowledge of these routes by careers adviser and leaders. This possibly reflects the lack of time that schools can devote to careers education and learning and the high caseloads of careers advisers – many of whom may not individually see those Post 16 students considered to be destined for an A level route – for example. Subject teachers may also have an incorrect or incomplete view of these pathways and so not able to discuss these fully with their students or may not be impartial in their discussions. Due to their recent introduction and the current small number and breadth of courses available, student and general subject teacher knowledge of T-levels is low.
The Lifetime Skills Guarantee is a welcome initiative but there are many young people who are studying below Level 3 and the landscape for Level 1 and Entry qualifications is very confusing for young people and parents/carers and the professionals that may support them. There is still a lack of availability for Apprenticeship below Level 2 – and whilst there are some initiatives to provide more inclusive Apprenticeships and traineeships, these are still under resourced. Supported Internships are a popular idea but getting employers and training providers and colleges to offer them is a challenge.
The Careers and Enterprise Company has played a valuable role in giving more support for schools and colleges to implement and improve careers work, but their focus is limited to implementing and auditing the Gatsby benchmarks. The local enterprise adviser network does not get involved with supporting specific young people who are either NEET or not in a school or college - this would include young people with training providers and those educated outside of a school setting. They are able to apply a broad brushstroke to supporting careers work and should not support specific disadvantaged young people as this support should be left to the experts in these fields e.g., Virtual School, Youth Offending, Early Help teams. They could offer added value in terms of employer engagement, skills development etc. The CEC have produced useful resources for supporting the curriculum and managed the Careers Leader training effectively. The role of the Enterprise Co-ordinator is particularly helpful as an extra resource to schools and colleges. However, based on our previous experience of delivering the Enterprise Adviser role, it is not always an effective way of supporting strategic change in a school or college. Employers often find the role too broad and are not comfortable with the aims of the role. Time spent sourcing Enterprise Advisers. keeping them on board and connected with schools and colleges could be better spent co-ordinating a bigger range of employer engagement or careers inspiration interventions.
Regarding the National Careers Service, they offer little support for young people up to 18. The proposed changes to the website mentioned in 2017 Strategy do not appear to have been undertaken, so the website is not attractive for young people and not accessible for many.
In terms of the proposals in the White paper, much is a continuation of the 2017 Careers Strategy. Updating the statutory guidance for careers is a positive, but the impact will depend on the detail, the nature of the statutory duties, the resources to schools and the ways in which this can be supported, measured and enforced. A thematic review of career guidance from Ofsted is welcome, but the impact will depend on the ways the government put in place to support its findings. The Gatsby Benchmarks have been a strong driver and focus for most schools and colleges. However, it is now time the Benchmarks were made mandatory – not good practice – and perhaps reviewed to include area such as evaluation and impact, along with the importance of interacting with parents/carers.
It is helpful to see the continued funding of Careers Leader training and the research has shown that this has been effective in developing the Careers Leader skills and knowledge. However, many get frustrated by the difficulties of putting this into practice with the resource constraints mentioned above. In addition, there is no reference to, or funding for, the careers adviser role. Without this role, meeting Gatsby benchmarks cannot be achieved.
In terms of funding, there is definitely a strong case for increased funding, but it also depends on how that funding is channelled so that its impact is not diluted.
The approach to career guidance from the government lacks ambition and awareness of what good careers guidance can achieve. It also provides little recognition of the potential benefits of a stronger focus on tailoring careers guidance to local areas, helping to motivate individuals by examples and opportunities local to them. If we only ever aim for an average offer, or one that ticks a box, then people will never understand what high quality looks like and what outcomes can be achieved. It always be considered as an afterthought or sideline. At this current time, young people and adults need this more than ever before.
March 2022