Careers Hubs: pilot of a place-based school improvement network in England

ABSTRACT

The Careers Hubs pilot (2018–2020) tested a place-based network model designed to facilitate English schools and colleges delivering career guidance, measured primarily by adherence to eight benchmarks of good practice. Using a standardised measurement tool, career guidance in hub schools was observed to improve faster than a matched comparison group (estimated at +1.0 benchmarks for Wave 1 hubs, effect size 0.4, n = 1,948, p < 0.001). Results are robust to a range of modelling techniques, control variables and adjustments for possible selection effects, suggesting that the networks did support self-assessed school improvement. A qualitative evaluation identified collaboration between Careers Leaders, leadership support, employer engagement, and regional strategy alignment as key drivers of progress.

KEYWORDS:

• Career guidance
• place-based networks
• social mobility
• Gatsby Benchmarks
• secondary education

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to colleagues for their feedback on earlier drafts and to SQW for their evaluation of Careers Hubs carried out on behalf of The Careers & Enterprise Company.

Disclosure statement

The authors are contracted by The Careers & Enterprise Company to conduct research related to the organisation’s activities, including the research in this paper. The Careers & Enterprise Company manages the Careers Hub programme for the Department for Education in England.

Data availability statement

This paper draws on data jointly held by individual education institutions and The Careers & Enterprise Company for which data policies and permissions prohibit public sharing. Other data used in the paper are publicly available from the UK Government websites. Interested parties are invited to contact the authors to discuss analyses that might be completed on the data as described in this paper.

Notes

1 In the context of English secondary education, colleges refer to state-funded further education providers, serving young people and adults aged over 16. They are typically larger organisations, providing more diverse and/or more vocationally oriented courses than upper secondary education in schools, and have different governance and funding arrangements. See www.aoc.co.uk for details.

2 LEPs are voluntary partnerships between local authorities and businesses, set up in 2011 by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to help determine local economic priorities and promote economic growth and job creation within the local area (The Careers & Enterprise Company & SQW, 2020).

3 A General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) is an academic qualification in a particular subject, widely used by state-funded schools for students aged 16 at the end of Key Stage 4, which spans the 14–16 age range. The exams are high-stakes and were nationally administered exams for the years in question in this study. The vast majority of students in England take at least some GCSE exams at age 16 and many will use their GCSE results in applications for continued education or employment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Percy

Chris Percy is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Derby, UK. His research interests focus on using data and financial modelling to better understand career pathways and school-to-work transitions.

Emily Tanner

Emily Tanner is Head of Research at the Careers & Enterprise Company, UK. Prior to this, she was Head of Children, Families & Work at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) and held research posts at Yale University, USA, and, alongside DPhil study, at Oxford University, UK.