Yorkshire Post columnist Jayne Dowle on the new Sutton Trust careers advice report.

I WAS having a chat with some friends the other night about school days. The conversation turned to careers advice. One or two of us were old enough to remember being presented with the stark choice: “It’s either the pit or the steelworks for you lad.”

I recall nursing or teaching being as far as we girls were expected to go, and even then there wasn’t much information about how we expected to get there. Someone recounted a toe-curling story of her sports teacher seconded to give unwilling “advice” in his sweaty tracksuit. Another friend recalled actually crying when he realised he had left school with no idea of what to do next.

I’d like to say that the situation has been transformed in the intervening 30 years and that every child in every school in our region can benefit from an array of options presented before them. Sadly, the opposite appears to be the case.

New research from the educational charity, the Sutton Trust, finds that careers advice has become entirely unfit for purpose since the Government made changes to provision two years ago.

The responsibility was placed in the hands of schools and colleges, backed up by a new National Careers Service to offer telephone and website advice. Clearly, this plan has failed. The charity warns of the startling emergence of a “postcode lottery” in which some youngsters have access to better guidance than others.

Even more worrying is that good careers advice affects a school across the board. The researchers found that schools with a “quality award” for careers guidance produce more students with five good GCSEs, including English and maths. And attendance is better. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that a school which is good all-round will produce students who are good all-round.

However, this careers issue cannot be brushed aside as yet another target to meet. If we want social mobility to accelerate, we have to raise aspirations…..

Read the full column here

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