A blog by Ed Whitefield, Investor in Careers Lead Consultant, a Licensed Awarding Body for the Quality in Careers Standard.
It’s almost impossible to read about careers education without the Gatsby Benchmarks, Compass and increasingly the Quality in Careers Standard cropping up.
In this blog I want to look at what’s behind this push, not because the statements below say you should, but because there are benefits to you, your students, colleagues and partners from following a framework.
You may well have read the October 2018 Statutory Guidance which states The Department for Education (DfE) ‘expects’ all schools & colleges to work towards the Gatsby Benchmarks now, and to meet them by the end of 2020 and ‘strongly recommends’ that all schools should aim to achieve accreditation under the Quality in Careers Standard. (para.22, p.16)
You may also have spotted the recent State of the Nation Report’s finding that “Institutions that have achieved the Quality in Careers Standard achieve 13.1 percentage points better on the Overall Benchmark Score than those schools and colleges that do not.
You may well now be nodding off or….
You may well already be beavering away on the Benchmarks but thinking why should we do the Standard if we are doing the Benchmarks?
Firstly, I encourage you to see it from a developmental perspective. The Quality in Careers Standard is not only about externally assessed accreditation demonstrating you are meeting the Gatsby Benchmarks, although that’s a damn good result!
Investor in Careers, as a Licensed Awarding Body for the Quality in Careers Standard, structures this on the CODE approach. It’s about demonstrating Commitment to Quality, it’s about how careers at your institution is Organised, It’s about how it’s Delivered, it’s about staff development and Evaluating your programme so you know what’s working, what’s not , why and have evidence of demonstrable impact.
This approach isn’t new. Investor in Careers has based its model to helping learning providers develop and then accredit their careers provision around this CODE approach since the 1990s. There is now a single national Quality in Careers Standard which learning providers can achieve. It’s based around embedding the principles of continuous quality improvement and this wraps around and enhances the 8 Benchmarks.
Let’s look at some examples of this in action:
Benchmark 2 – Learning from Career and Labour Market Information – yes there should be accurate and up to date information accessed by students and parents/ carers but they should also be supported in using the information to make it meaningful.
Who is going to do that and do they feel confident and competent to help them to really use the information and help it become meaningful intelligence to support career decision making?
Link that to
Benchmark 4 – Linking Curriculum Learning to Careers – all subject staff should link curriculum learning with careers. This really is requiring a collective approach and again, do all colleagues feel confident in doing this and using LMI effectively?
Link that back to
Benchmark 1 – A Stable Carers Programme – the programme should be structured and have an appropriately trained person responsible for it, stand up the Careers Leaders! But you can’t do it all.
The Benchmarks don’t put emphasis on staff training needs and development but the Standard does and we believe that understanding development needs and developing the capacity of all will benefit everyone.
Benchmark 1 says the programme should be regularly evaluated. The Standard takes this and really looks at how a recognised framework (CDI Framework) helps achieve clear career learning outcomes. It really looks at how you approach engaging all stakeholders in feedback, review leading to evidence based evaluation that feeds into improvement and development planning.
This often is the challenging part but ultimately it’s also the rewarding part. You are delivering a quality careers programme and people say you are and you know why and can identify real positive impact.
So I encourage you to see this not as do the Benchmarks and only do the Standard if you are sure you are ready.
See it as a framework and structure to help you continue to develop your careers provision, demonstrate positive impact and learning outcomes and receive external validation on meeting not only the Gatsby Benchmarks but also achieving the Quality in Careers Standard.
https://investorincareers.org.uk/
investorincareers@cswgroup.co.uk
0800 97 55 111 (Freephone)