Gatsby Benchmarks Champions

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