Leaders play a crucial role in ensuring that their schools and colleges provide good careers guidance says Beth Jones from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. Here, she highlights the recent changes made to the Gatsby Benchmarks.

You hold the power

A decade since they were introduced, the Gatsby Benchmarks for good careers guidance have been updated. Strong leadership will be crucial to making these updates a success. The updated benchmarks emphasise how important it is for education leaders to embed good careers guidance at the heart of their institutions and actively support and champion their careers leaders to develop and direct effective, impactful careers programmes.

Good careers guidance doesn’t just bridge the worlds of education and work; it is vital for economic prosperity and growth and contributes to social justice – it is young people who do not have strong family or social connections to different careers who have the most to gain from careers guidance. When young people make supported and informed choices about their future study, training and work options, they are better able to maximise their talents and realise their ambitions.

Since the Gatsby Benchmarks were introduced – thanks to the commitment and hard work of schools, colleges, businesses and the wider careers community – we’ve seen a huge amount of progress, with lots to celebrate, including:

• near-universal adoption: more than 90% of schools and colleges now measure their careers provision using the eight Gatsby Benchmarks
• widespread implementation: benchmark achievement has almost tripled since 2018
• measurable impact: students in institutions achieving all eight benchmarks are 8% less likely to be NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) compared to peers in schools with low or no benchmark activity; for institutions with the most disadvantaged young people, we see as much as a 20% reduction in NEET rates

Future-proofing the Gatsby Benchmarks

Ahead of the benchmark’s tenth anniversary, we spent almost two years reviewing the latest research and best practice to future-proof the framework, ensuring the benchmarks would continue to define world-class careers guidance for the decade to come. We worked closely with expert organisations like ASCL and learned from the invaluable insights of education leaders across England.

The core of the Gatsby Benchmarks remains the same, but the changes we have made are really important. A consistent message across this review was that stability is important.

Much is staying the same – all eight benchmarks have been retained:

The Gatsby Benchmarks

1. a stable careers programme
2. learning from careers and labour market information
3. addressing the needs of each young person
4. linking curriculum learning to careers
5. encounters with employers and employees
6. experiences of workplaces
7. encounters with further and higher education
8. personal guidance

But where the evidence made a clear case that updates would further benefit young people, we have clarified, refined and strengthened the Gatsby Benchmarks, updating the summary statements and measurable criteria for each. The resulting report, Good Career Guidance: The next ten years (www.gatsbybenchmarks.org.uk), outlines these updates.

The crucial role of leaders in the updated benchmarks

Our report shows how careers guidance is most effective when it is a whole-institution, whole-staff endeavour, written into institutions’ wider strategies and embedded into the practice of all staff, with heads and principals leading the charge. Amendments to the benchmarks emphasise the unique roles of different staff, specifying the responsibilities of education leaders, along with governors, careers leaders and careers advisers.

Also specified is the need for the careers programme to have the explicit backing of headteachers and leaders, and the requirement for them to support their teams, so every subject teacher embeds careers in their curriculum.

What’s next?

At the launch of the updated framework, the government reaffirmed its commitment to the benchmarks as the bedrock of its strategy to provide high-quality careers guidance to young people. The new framework will be part of government guidance for schools and colleges, with updates to guidance being published in the spring.

The collective effort to implement the benchmarks over the past decade has been inspirational. Thank you for continuing to work towards making world-class careers guidance a reality for millions of young people.

As a leader, you play an essential role in realising the ambitions of the updated Gatsby Benchmarks. Gatsby will work with ASCL to support you to do this. For now, I encourage you to read the report, share it with your networks and think strategically about what needs to happen so your school or college can adopt the updated benchmarks in time for the 2025/26 academic year.

Beth Jones
Head of Career Programmes at the Gatsby Charitable Foundation
(www.gatsby.org.uk)

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