Without funding, the all-age careers service is an empty promise

Hive-Worcester
It's all very well announcing an all-age careers service, but where's the funding to go with it, ask Tony Watts
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 May 2011

Professor Watts is urging the government to make a credible funding announcement for the new career guidance service.

The coalition government's early policy statements on career guidance were widely welcomed. It declared its commitment to establish an all-age careers service, and to revitalise the professional status of career guidance practitioners. For young people, it indicated that it would safeguard the partnership model between schools and external career guidance providers.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has retained its commitment. Its contribution to the new all-age national careers service is to be £84.4m. But an all-age service requires two departments to tango, and it is clear that the Department for Education is refusing to dance. Not only that, but it appears to be removing, by stealth, almost all funding from existing career guidance services for young people.

The assumption had been that BIS's contribution would be complemented by the existing funding for the career guidance component of Connexions services, estimated at £203m. But a parallel funding announcement from DfE has been conspicuous by its absence. Fears are growing that its contribution will be confined largely or wholly to the £7m currently given to the telephone/web-based services of Connexions Direct.

A convenient smokescreen for this has been provided by school autonomy. For the crucial face-to-face services, the DfE has indicated that in future it expects schools to purchase such services. Yet there has been no discernible transfer of funding for such services to schools. And the overall budgets of many schools are being cut. Meanwhile, without a clear policy steer from the DfE, many local authorities have announced big reductions and even closures of their Connexions services, including massive staff redundancies.

The preoccupation with school autonomy is also weakening careers provision in other respects. The essence of the partnership model is that schools provide careers education, while external providers offer impartial guidance. But in the new education bill, the statutory duty for schools to provide careers education is being withdrawn.

It is being replaced by a new statutory duty for schools to "secure" independent career guidance for their pupils, either from the all-age service or from other providers. This converts the partnership model into a contractor-supplier relationship. The model is undermined further by a recent announcement that schools can appoint their own careers adviser if they wish, and that access to external guidance can be confined, at a minimum, to access to web-based or telephone services.

Whatever the evidence may be for school autonomy in terms of pupil attainment, there is no indication that it applies to effective career guidance.

Indeed, the evidence is to the contrary. International studies demonstrate that school-based guidance systems tend to have weak links with the labour market, to view educational choices as ends in themselves rather than as career choices (which they are), to lack impartiality, and to be patchy in extent and quality. In two countries that abandoned the partnership model in favour of school commissioning (the Netherlands and New Zealand), the outcome was significant reductions in career guidance provision.

This now seems highly likely in England, too. Unless an overt and credible announcement on initial DfE funding for the all-age service is made soon, with stronger policy levers on schools than those indicated to date, DfE will be open to charges of collective deceit and hypocrisy.

• Professor Tony Watts is an international policy consultant on career guidance and career development