Anger at cut in careers advice for young people
Under proposed reforms to careers guidance, a new national service is due to launch next April, which would see teenagers no longer entitled to any face-to-face careers guidance. Instead they will be pointed to a website or told to call a helpline. The duty to provide face-to-face advice will be transferred to schools, though they are to get none of the £203m central funding that pays for the existing service.
The government had appointed an advisory group on what was then called the All-Age Careers Service, but on 20 July, abruptly and without consultation, it was reconstituted as the National Careers Service Advisory Group with a reduced remit. The group is so angry about the unilateral decision that all 20 considered resigning en masse.
"It will not be an all-age careers service," says Steve Higginbotham, president of the Institute of Career Guidance. "It is a rebranded Next Step service for adults plus an all-age telephone advice line and website. The group's expertise was not used in any meaningful way and officials did their best to avoid answering difficult questions when they clearly knew almost from the outset that the government's intentions were not what had originally been stated."
Vulnerable young people will suffer most from the withdrawal of the service, says Dame Ruth Silver, chair of the Careers Profession Task Force, who also sits on the advisory group. "It will further deepen deprivation, because some people come from families who have never worked; the ones who need it most are those who don't have successful adults in their lives."
Schools will not be put under any statutory obligation to ensure the professionalism or impartiality of whatever careers advice they manage to scrabble together the money to buy in, says Paul Chubb, director of Careers England.
"Schools buying in careers services has not worked in the two countries that have tried it – the Netherlands and New Zealand – and they had access to funding which heads here won't have," Chubb says.
Higginbotham agrees. "We are particularly concerned that access to professional careers advice will be a postcode lottery dependent on the resources and priorities placed on it by schools," he says. "The duty on schools to enable access to independent, impartial career guidance has been undermined by the DfE, which has stated that this could be discharged by schools enabling access for their pupils to the national telephone advice line and website."
Even if some heads do find the cash, anyone who leaves school at 16 will have no opportunity for a face-to-face conversation about their career or training needs until the age of 19, when they become eligible to access the adult service.
Kieran Gordon, chief executive of Greater Merseyside Connexions Partnership, says this means that young people won't be able to develop a trusting relationship with a skilled professional who can guide them while understanding their family circumstances and any personal barriers. They risk "drifting … or trying something that's not suitable, getting frustrated, and having their confidence knocked, so they drop out. It's wasteful, and a tremendous disinvestment in young people's lives."
"It is just wrong to deny young people access to this type of guidance," Chubb says. "I am very seriously concerned that this is being overlooked and underplanned."
A spokesman for the DfE says: "We make no apologies for giving schools responsibility for providing independent, impartial careers advice. They know their students best, so it's right they should decide what provision is right and have complete control over their budgets to buy in the face-to-face support pupils need."
• This article was amended on 23 August 2011. The orginal attributed the quote in the penultimate paragraph to Kieran Gordon. This has been corrected.
source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/
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