Gatsby Benchmarks Champions

Last month, I reached out to this brilliant community on LinkedIn, asking for help to enable our Year 10’s to get some work experience with hyper-local employers. I was blown away by the number of interactions to my post and we got a few new local employers engaging with us, which is fantastic for our students.

I wanted to explain why work experience is crucial for our young people.
A meaningful work experience can be life-changing for young people, especially those from deprived backgrounds. It opens their eyes up to worlds they might never have known about and gives them a chance to dig deeper into areas that they are interested in.

But making this happen can be challenging for a school like Northampton International Academy, where some of our students have additional needs e.g. new to the country with English as an additional language, not having their own links to help them get work experience and being restricted by their family’s financial circumstances.

The updated Gatsby Benchmarks (the framework schools must use to structure their careers guidance activity), have recently been updated and lots of the updates are geared towards ensuring careers guidance as a whole – and work experience as part of this – is tailored to the needs and circumstances of each young person.

Recognising how transformative high-quality encounters can be, the changes include:

• more clarity on what ‘meaningful’ means when it comes to work experience
• more focus on flexible delivery of work experience
• more emphasis on giving young people time to prepare and reflect on encounters with workplaces

Thinking like this has helped us design a work experience programme for our Year 10s that addresses barriers and ensures that it’s meaningful for them over the whole year.

In a nutshell:

• we establish what industry they’re interested in, group them together, find a local employer to partner the group with
• throughout the year, they have about eight interactions with the employer to find out about:
  • the wider industry
  • the local labour market picture
  • the different roles that exist within that industry
  • what skills and further qualifications are needed
• they then work on a real-life issue the organisation is dealing with, to bring all this to life.

We’ve found this model works effectively for students of our demographic, where sometimes their circumstances prevent them from attending work experience in the traditional sense.

So if you’re a Head, a teacher or a careers leader, I hope this shows that different models can work to deliver meaningful experiences of workplaces and if you’re a local employer who would like to get involved, do get in touch.

For full details see: https://lnkd.in/en6RV4fb. Gatsby Charitable Foundation
#EMATters

Having taken time to reflect on yesterday’s inspiring launch of Good Career Guidance: The Next Ten Years here’s a few early takeaways from my perspective as a Career Adviser…

1. the whole team at Gatsby deserve all the praise for The Report. As a participant on the Expert Practioners and the Early Adopters groups I can testify for the thoughtfulness and rigour of this review. Quite an undertaking and achievement Gatsby Charitable Foundation
2. the recorded introduction by The Rt Hon Baroness Smith of Malvern was significant in that the role of Career Adviser was regularly mentioned alongside that of the Careers Leader. I know many career adviser colleagues who have felt somewhat isolated from the benchmarks previously and therefore this is most welcomed.
3. backing up the minister’s comments above is the repeated inclusion throughout The Report of the need for Careers Leaders and Career Advisers to work closely together. For example, it is emphasised how “Career Advisers can provide invaluable feedback” which is essential to the achievement of a stable careers programme. Indeed throughout, our role is much more established in the framework and this is undoubtedly a very good thing.
4. Our bread and butter, Benchmark 8, is, in my opinion, much stronger and supportive of the profession. However, as a framework it is understandably short on examples of best guidance practice so there is a need to capture the many creative techniques and approaches of the existing Career Adviser workforce. As the revised benchmarks are adopted, it is essential for the voice of our profession to be heard and seen in future best practice guides accompanying the framework. There’s already loads of examples of brilliant guidance practice on social media and in the many products developed by very talented and innovative career people.

On BM8, a few further random observations:

I support the change from ‘interview’ to ‘meeting’.

There’s an interesting statistic that “for every £1 invested in Personal Guidance, the government can expect to recoup £3”- surely evidence that ring fenced funding for Personal Guidance provision is in the offing (as if 😂)?

Good to see the inclusion of the CDI’s recommendation that meetings should take at least 45 minutes, however I’d have preferred this to have been more explicitly supported.

There should be more work for us with the shift to every young person having a further personal guidance meeting by the age of 18 (rather than an opportunity for one). To deliver more there’s definitely an immediate need for training more advisers- the promised funding of 1000 new Career Advisers is a start, but only a start as a significant proportion of this number is likely to be replacement jobs.

So there we have it. Bit of a ramble whilst travelling back from London by train to the north-east where it all started. #gatsbybenchmarks#goodcareerguidance#socialmobility#SEND#careers