Government Advisory Group Voices Concerns on Widespread Destruction of Careers Services for Young People
Posted: 10 August 2011
NAEGA is a member of the National Careers Service Advisory Group. The Group is convened by BIS and DFE and has recently replaced the Nextstep Advisory Group which NAEGA attended on a regular basis.
Since its inception, discussion at the NCS Advisory Group has been dominated by concerns about careers guidance services for young people. NAEGA shares these concerns and supports the press release from the Group. The press release makes mention of the Group's support for BIS and its maintainance of funding for adult guidance. NAEGA will continue to champion the provision of high quality, adequately resourced and universal careers guidance for adults, including a face to face service.
Press Release, 8 August 2011
The Advisory Group on the All-Age Careers Service established by the Government has been reconstituted as the National Careers Service Advisory Group. After some discussion at a pre-meeting of the Group where resignation was considered, the lay members present agreed to continue to support this work. But they wish to place their concern in the public domain about the significant reduction in the Group’s remit and in the scope of the new service.
The new National Careers Service will include face-to-face services for adults, but not for young people. Instead, its service for young people will be confined to telephone- and web-based services. Responsibility for providing the face-to-face services is being transferred to schools, without any transfer of funding: the previous provision of around £200 million per annum for the service for young people has been allowed to disappear. There are widespread concerns about the destruction of careers services across the country, with heavy staff redundancies. At a time when young people are facing massive changes in further and higher education, and new apprenticeships — as well as high youth unemployment — stripping out the professional help available to them is not only foolhardy: it is potentially damaging to young people’s lives and ultimately to the economy.
Further, there are worries about the weakness of the measures being developed to ensure that the schools’s agreement to provide well-researched papers to enable the Group to play a truer advisory role.
But they wish their deep concerns about the services for young people to be publicly known.