Recommendation 34

HM Government Deferred

Our ambition is to have a high-quality careers offer that works for everybody. We agree that it is important to make sure that all disadvantaged pupils have access to the full range of opportunities available to their peers, and we provide additional support for those who are disadvantaged. Schools and colleges should recognise the opportunity to improve social mobility by identifying any barriers to participation the pupils may have and identify the support needed to maximise their life chances. Schools and colleges should tailor careers activities and educational goals to the needs of each student. They should take account of their prior knowledge and skills, the choices and transitions they face and any additional support that may be needed to overcome barriers to progression. This will help to ensure that students from all backgrounds consider the widest possible range of careers. We agree with the Committee that it is important to learn from best practice and build these lessons learned into our evolving delivery model. Our primary approach to funding the roll out of careers infrastructure across the country, is to improve the quality of careers programmes that will have a significant impact on all disadvantaged young people. As explained earlier, there is evidence of a link between Gatsby Benchmark achievement and the likelihood of a young person becoming NEET that is twice as strong in disadvantaged schools. As set out in the introduction, the CEC provides careers support to those from wider disadvantaged backgrounds through a Community of Improvement focused on inclusion. The Community of Improvement works with Careers Hubs and SEND specific Enterprise Coordinators to enable them to better support schools, colleges and training providers through sharing good practice and developing resources. Our work to target further support to tackle disadvantage at a local level is an important element of the Careers Hub offer. Careers Hubs have a degree of flexibility to address the specific needs of individuals where hubs identify a local need. Through continued investment in this area, we have asked CEC to ensure that all Careers Hubs deliver activity to support disadvantaged young people in their local area, via the ‘Hub Delivery Fund’ by August 2024. By building this into our national approach, this will help to improve consistency of this targeted delivery. As set out in the introduction, we expanded the development school sub-programme of the ASK programme to deliver activities throughout the 2022/23 academic year to support pupils from 60 schools to tackle the barriers they face and prepare them for post-16 education and training. We are learning from the success of this programme to inform future practice. The CEC evaluate all pilot projects so that we have clear evidence of impact to inform decisions about future developments. For example, Risk of NEET projects have proven to be effective and they are due to be further scaled and rolled out across the country in the 2023/24 academic year to test their effectiveness at a larger scale.5 The evaluation of the CEC’s £1.7m investment into interventions for disadvantaged young people, identified a range of effective measures to support positive outcomes, that differed by target group, including Gypsy Roma and Traveller communities, looked after children and young people with SEND. It is important that we continue to learn from the evaluations of these targeted programmes, and build up a robust evidence base of what careers interventions work to improve a young person’s confidence and empower them to make informed decisions about their post-16 options. CEC will continue to share and embed best practice so that all schools and colleges benefit from the research and programmes developed through investment funds. This will help to inform how we scale up future provision. We will set out further detail in the Strategic Action Plan for Careers, including clear, measurable outcomes and dates by which these will be achieved.