Today’s Guarantee is only the beginning of the battle for active and ambitious mentoring in schools

By Jess Cordingly

Today, the Government has released its Information, Advice and Guidance Guarantee. Following the recent criticisms meted out to existing careers advisory services in schools by Alan Milburn’s Commission on social mobility, the DCSF is setting out how it will improve Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) for young people across the UK.

Future First has been recommended in this Guarantee, as the exemplar for careers support in state schools. This is a significant step toward our goal of providing world class employment and education advice in the UK, for all young people who need it, irrelevant of their background. There is work to be done, but are the three areas I believe need to be tackled first.

Firstly, we need a careers support system which is designed around young people. In 2005, the Youth Matters green paper committed the careers advice providers to delivering IAG the way that young people actually wanted to receive it. But there is little evidence of this taking place.

Last year, Future First did exactly this; we asked young people in state schools how they would like to receive their careers advice. They told us they wanted to hear it from people in real jobs, and that they wanted good online support so they could find information in their own time. Most importantly, they wanted to get their information and advice from ‘people like me’: people they could relate to from backgrounds like their own.

From these responses, we built the Future First model. We work with schools to build networks of students from a range of careers and backgrounds. Using this framework, we run in-school careers events, introducing pupils to people who can entirely relate to their school and community, and can give ‘on the ground’ advice about the working world. We build a website tailored to each school so pupils can access careers content when they want. And then we use this network to open up work shadowing opportunities, giving pupils a chance to experience different jobs first-hand, rather than just hearing about them.

Secondly, we believe in personal advice for everyone. The recent 14-19 reforms in education have diversified the routes available for young people. But this step forward has not been reflected in IAG, where too many pupils are still pushed down the traditional route of A Levels and University.

Future First promotes higher education, but we also celebrate a wider array of skills. The alumni networks we build are made up by former pupils from diverse careers, from football coaches to costume makers, choreographers to city lawyers. The advice we provide is designed to illuminate all the possibilities, and encourage each individual to identify their talents in order to pursue careers that fulfil and maximise their potential.

Thirdly, you cannot dole out information without inspiration. Whilst the current IAG set-up in schools may give young people information about different careers, there’s no excitement about the world of work. Too many young people grow up without a role model who truly enjoys their job, and we believe this perpetuates a debilitating cycle of low aspiration.

At Future First we feel inspiration comes best from those you can relate to, which is why we provide our careers advice through a community model. A great deal of the knowledge about different careers already exists in school communities but is not being harnessed by existing IAG models. Future First places former students at the heart of our work in schools, helping them become effective role models to current pupils as well as informative advisors.

Today’s Guarantee is only the beginning of the battle for active and ambitious mentoring within all UK schools. Future First is running a successful series of programmes in North London already, and we plan to roll out in the new year. With social mobility in the UK still unjustifiably low and the recession hitting the young hard, it’s time that we inspire young people to better futures.

Jess Cordingly is Managing Director of Future First. For more information, visit futurefirst.org.uk or email [email protected].

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